If they're switching off their lights then how are the pilots navigating them?
Lights aren’t required to fly, as the telemetry and map are sufficient.
If they don't need lights then why ever fly with them to make them so visible?
Very good question. Part or all of their task may require visibility from the ground. We can only guess. But many sightings are well documented (not all, certainly), and
something is definitely flying strange flights.
Assuming we're talking about some quadcopter or similar design they can't have a very large range and getting 20 drones landed and packed up is going to be a sizeable process.
We don’t actually know enough to assume “electric powered drones” here. Estimating the size, speed, and/or altitude of an unknown aircraft at night is prone to enormous error. That they’re evidently totally inaudible suggests a much higher altitude than the reported 200-300 feet (<100m).
According to the first post a large number of people have seen these drones so from that alone they should be able to work out what flight paths these drones are operating and significantly narrow down where they are taking off and landing.
I think you underestimate the scales here. Documented sightings now cover something like 3500 square miles of real estate, much of it with a population of under 2 per sq. mi., despite a fairly dense network of rural roads. Needle meets haystack, to a large degree.
As with other similar drone news stories, the reported information doesn't make any sense and paints drones as near mythical devices.
I agree (except that I know of no other stories of large formations of mystery drones). That’s why I think the reports don’t accurately state the true altitude of these flights. The described behavior is not possible with “conventional” drones, even large commercial ones.
We can agree these are not the sort of aircraft we’re familiar with, but what they are are, their purposes, pilots, and owners, remain unknown. Nevertheless, they are there.
