Fascinating video from the UK

It's a drone. Looks a lot like a Mavic Pro at the end, and has DJI light sequences at the start (DJI make the Mavic). Mavic Pro's are the new consumer choice here in the UK.

Looks legit.

As someone who owns and flies a 3DR Solo a lot I am going to say that is definitely a quadcopter/drone.

No doubt will see a lot more of videos like these. Quite popular in my particular drones community is modding, and flavour of the month is adding strobe lights.

Also while larger drones like mine are extremely noisy. Like a swarm of angry bees amplified by 10x, once you're about 50m away you cannot hear the thing. So never rely on silence as proof it's not a quad.
Speed wise it can get to about 88 kmph in calm skies. (55mph)

But yeah, seriously looks like how my drone would appear if I filmed it on a potato at distance, especially since I added a small extremely bright spotlight to the bottom of it.

A lot of people seem convinced this is a drone.

I've flown Phantoms, micro drones, and full size F.P.V. and this doesn't strike me as drone footage unless it has been edited.

If it has been edited, they did a good job getting the acceleration/deceleration sequences spot on.

I think the object is further away and higher than the film perspective shows, if true this means its speed was quite something and perhaps beyond a simple drone.

a reply to: OrbitalDecay

I don't think it's edited, I think its that it is filmed on a potato (aren't they always though?) that gives the appearance of weird happenings.

For me it looks and handles exactly like a drone would.
Without having clear undistorted footage, with a bunch of digital noise swallowing the 'thing' whole every few seconds we'll never know I guess.

Might have to get the missus to use my phone to film my drone in low light like this (which tends to always massively increase noise on most digital potatoes) and see if I can recreate it.

But more likely I will probably forget to do it lol.

a reply to: FireMoon

Drone or not, that was cool. Thanks for posting it.

a reply to: AtomicKangaroo

Or, more to the point - don't waste your time. You don't owe it to anyone to try and prove it to them, specially not here, where everyone has their own unmovable opinion anyway. Most can't analyse a video effectively to save their life. To those who can't give it a good analysis it's anything but a drone, but I agree with you, cos for those of us who can, it's clearly a drone. Like this:

I've flown Phantoms, micro drones, and full size F.P.V. and this doesn't strike me as drone footage unless it has been edited.

The more pertinent thing would be to have experience filming drones. Or to talk about videos where you have or have not been able to identify drones in them. That's what you're being asked to do here, review video footage of a filmed (object) drone. Not really pull on experience of ownership, though I don't disagree, ownership should help, but it's coming across as a bit odd in this thread that numerous drone owners can't identify their own hobby on film.

a reply to: markymint

thanks for your reply. Yeah, just as someone who is a skeptic and wants to believe, just tired of clearly plastic bags, drones, Mylar balloons, and LED toys. If we can educate even one person to be more critical and to actually think before "OMFG ALIENS!!!" then isn't it worth doing so?

I dunno, maybe we need a series of tutorial videos on how to spot fakes, and how digital video and photography work so people can cut through the junk and bring us real stuff.

I mean look at that sphere with the helicopter flying around it that was clearly an advertising baloon and easily debunked that was doing the rounds recently.....

I swear the way ATS is these days I could drop my pants, put a pair of sunglasses on my backside take a picture and post it here as "OMFG ALIEN SELFIE!!!" and It'd be S&F'd to hell and have hundreds of pages of comments within minutes.