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One final, massive thanks for David Botti's wonderful editing skills. Thatβs all for now πππ
Here's another link to the full story: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/w...
Slide with bullet points and a map of proposed plans for LSA Jenkins
Slide with bullet points and a map of proposed plans for LSA Jenkins
If even a fraction of these plans come to fruition, this will be quite the sizable facility:
Also worth mentioning that this is not the final state for LSA Jenkins. A slide deck I found online contains planning documents that suggest the base may get bigger β a lot bigger. Take a look: www.same.org/wp-content/u...
3. Gives troops and air defense systems more time to respond, take shelter, etc. from a missile attack.
All of which would ultimately make US supply lines in the event of a full-blown war with Iran a bit more robust.
So moving farther away: 1. Forces Iran to use longer-range missiles, which are less accurate and fail more often (there are also fewer of them). 2. Forces Iran to have to pick and choose from a greater number of targets to strike. (cont...)
(Iran has historically made not-so-subtle threats to US and Israeli bases/assets in the region in public statements and videos of military exercises, e.g.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlXE...
Iran, on Monday, made good on their longstanding threats to target US bases in the Gulf and fired a salvo of missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. ππ www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/w...
Map of Iranian ballistic missile ranges
LSA Jenkins is on the western side of Saudi Arabia, near the Red Sea. Part of the reason it's there, experts like
@dexeve.bsky.social and Brian Carter told me, is because it is out of the range of Iranian short range ballistic missiles.
Bonus Easter egg: a contractor posted a video of the food at the facility on their website.
Speaking of contracting docs, there are a whole bunch that describe the expansion and sustainment of the facility. e.g. www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_A...
The base, known as Logistical Support Area Jenkins, is βnearβ the city of Yanbu, where imagery and government contracting docs show US naval vessels fighting the Houthis reloaded and resupplied multiple times over the last year or so. (Photo credit Airbus/Google Earth)
New: The US military has quietly been building a big logistics base in the Saudi desert, 20 miles from the Red Sea.
Itβs got living quarters, munitions storage, an entrance checkpoint and quite a bit of ongoing construction. Gift link and 𧡠below: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/w...
Trump claims that a video shows the βburial sitesβ of βover 1,000β white farmers in South Africa. It doesn't.
From @rileymellen.bsky.social and me
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/u...
For about a year, I worked with a retired British academic named Alasdair Spark to solve a mystery: where did the original photo from the end of The Shining come from, and where/when was it captured?
Last week, we finally found the answer.
www.instagram.com/p/DID43LBNPD...
We used radio traffic, flight data and leaked footage of an air traffic control radar screen to build a timeline of the moments before an American Airlines flight and a US Army helicopter collided over DC.
With Robin Stein, Dmitriy Khavin, and @ajcardia.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...
Many thanks to the dream team of
@ajcardia.bsky.social, Arijeta Lajka, Alyce McFadden, Courtney Brooks, @lazarogamio.bsky.social and so many more for making this happen. πΎ www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/v...
But that doesn't mean they're not out there! If you have one you're positive about, send it our way. I'd be really curious to see it. π½π½π½
Indeed, we reviewed hundreds of videos with the help of experts and flight tracking apps. We were not able to confidently identify a single drone.
And sometimes you can get extra lucky and match up the light pattern on the "drones" to actual aircraft, like this Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
Or, my personal favorite because it's so eerie, this colossal C-17 that did a pretty low and slow flyby of Brick Township.
Like this X-files-esque video of an apparent drone which is, in fact, a small passenger jet heading to Newark.
Well, when all else fails, there are the good old flight-tracking apps like @flightradar24.com. While these are not infallible, the vast, vast majority of the UFOs we reviewed were airplanes that appeared on these apps.
But what if you think you see a drone and you can't remember all those lighting rules and optical illusions?
Drones flying at night, by contrast, are only required to have a single strobe light (though DJI, a very popular drone manufacturer, builds their drones with two red lights on the front and two green lights on the back of their drones). PC: Tombo Jones/Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership
Drones and planes also have different lighting rules. The FAA requires planes flying at night to have a ton of lights, including a red, flashing anti-collision light, red and green navigation lights on the left and right wingtips, and bright white landing lights.
Your eyes also have a much harder time judging reference points, like the ground and trees, at night. This makes comparing objects in the sky to those reference points hard enough, let alone deriving the speed and direction of those objects relative to the reference points.
We spoke to Greg Pratt, an expert who trains police officers to identify drones. He said he runs an experiment with his students where, at night, he flies a big drone to 1,000 ft away and a small drone to 500 ft away. From the ground, they look like they're in the same spot.
Statistically, there are an enormous number of airplanes in the skies where the alleged drones are being spotted.
Compounding the Busytown-like nature of the airspace is that your eyes play tricks on you at night. For one, your depth perception is totally unreliable in the dark.
First things first. The skies over northern NJ comprise some of the most crowded airspace in the country. @lazarogamio.bsky.social's analysis shows that over three nights in December, some 2,500 flights crossed over just Morris County -- the epicenter of these sightings.
