What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: New Jersey’s Drone Invasion
Nobody wants it to be aliens more than I do. Even if they plan to force us to work in diamond mines in space, I will still welcome the alien overlords. But these are non-aliens . The “drones” that everyone sees are not aliens. They’re not foreign invaders or part of a secret government project or anything cool. No one can say with 100% certainty, but I’m willing to bet my collection of solid gold scratchers that the recent spate of reports of unidentified flying objects is because people are very bad at identifying objects.
Here’s a quick recap in case you’ve been under a rock: In mid-November, dozens of people in 10 New Jersey counties reported seeing drones (or something similar) in the night sky. According to New Jersey authorities , drones have been spotted in the skies over critical infrastructure such as reservoirs, power lines, train stations, police departments and military installations. Following the initial media coverage, more sightings were reported. People posted photos and videos of lights and spots in the sky. Congressmen called for transparency and vigilance . The Department of Defense did not reassure anyone, saying that they do not know what these objects are, but they are not from a foreign source and are not dangerous. Gullible internet users have been sharing theories, blurry photographic evidence and their feelings about an alien visit/foreign invasion/secret project/massive psy-op to distract us from the real threat: vampires. And that’s where we are now: sifting through a growing collection of over 5,000 citizen reports of UFOs or UAPS, building theories and waiting for official explanations or a visit from the mothership.
I could imagine how someone might think that the drone craze is the start of an alien invasion – for example, this briefing at the Pentagon would fit perfectly into the first act of a Michael Bay film – but we don’t actually know what an alien or a high-ranking human is . An invasion of the United States by a technological enemy will look like this because it has never happened before. We know what mass hysteria (or mass sociogenic technophobia ) looks like, and it turns out that this is exactly what it looks like. And I’m not the only one who thinks so; The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA and the Department of Defense also say, “There is nothing here.”
Some of the many, many objects in the sky that people may mistake for UFOs or mysterious drones
As reports of drone sightings spread over New Jersey and the rest of the country, presumably more people are looking at the skies, and it turns out there are a lot of things up there that are hard to immediately identify. Like:
Airplanes and helicopters
Many reported drone sightings occur along known routes of manned aircraft or helicopters and are almost certainly aircraft or helicopters. As drone expert Dr. Will Austin explains , “Having analyzed numerous videos shared by concerned citizens, I am inclined to believe that many of the reported ‘big drones’ were actually manned aircraft misidentified as drones.”
Signs of an airplane or helicopter are red and green lights. The FAA requires passengers on airplanes flying at night, so be highly suspicious of drone photos in these colors. If you can find out the time and location of the sighting, you can also check if it is a commercial aircraft .
Moving objects in the sky can appear stationary depending on your movement relative to them, so a moving plane can easily be mistaken for a hovering drone. Watch this video to see what I mean:
Venus, Jupiter and other celestial bodies.
People constantly mistake earthly celestial bodies for UFOs. For example, Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, seems to believe that the Orion constellation is made up of “dozens of large drones.”
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Regular American drones
You have to understand that anyone with a drone on the East Coast is trying to get a better look at what should be there at night, and every new drone could potentially be mistaken for something mysterious. Along with hobbyist drones, there are commercial and government drones used for everything from firefighting to photography. Unlike airplanes, you can’t check their flight path.
Flare, bokeh and other camera artifacts
Check out this strange “alien ball” filmed by ABC news:
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It is actually an enlarged and defocused point of light. Probably a star. Here they are:
Balloons, plastic bags, etc.
As a frequent visitor to r/UFO on Reddit, I’m amazed at the number of people who can’t tell the difference between a mylar balloon and a flying saucer. Indeed, anything can look like a UFO: from a strange cloud to a kite to a bug approaching the camera lens .
Deliberate hoaxes
Anyone interested in deceiving people must be having a great time. It’s not that hard to do even if we’re not caught up in the UFO craze, you know?
Satellites and space debris
The International Space Station, Elon Musk’s StarLink satellites, and thousands of other objects we’ve launched into space orbit the Earth. Many of them are visible from Earth and might make you think, “foreign drone!” Or “UFO!”
Secret plane
Now we move on to a more interesting area of UFO sightings: experimental aircraft. The US government has a history of flying planes that no one knows about, and many people saw the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and Northrop Grumman B-2 and mistook them for UFOs before they were even announced. A stealth plane even crashed in Bakersfield, resulting in a scene straight out of E.T. So it’s possible that people are seeing secret drones, but it seems unlikely: testing an unknown drone in a densely populated area seems like a bad way to keep it secret, especially if it has lights on it. But it’s possible.
…Something unknown, such as a flying object
Known flying objects probably account for almost all reported sightings, and given enough time and energy, I’m sure someone could figure out what each of them actually was. But this does not apply to all UFOs and/or UAPs. There are several examples of UFO sightings where multiple credible witnesses report seeing something mysterious in the sky, often backed up by hard evidence. For example, the USS Nimitz Tic-Tac was spotted by several experienced military pilots, whose observations were confirmed by recordings from infrared cameras and radars.
While these cases cannot be dismissed as nothing, they cannot be confirmed as anything. Right now, sightings like this are in the “we don’t know what it is” folder. Perhaps they will be explained in the future, but for now they are annoying riddles. During the last wave there were no sightings that even approached the level of evidence needed to suggest that there might be something “real” there, at least not that I know of.
That time the aliens broke everyone’s windshields
If you want a prediction for how this will all end, a possible outcome might be a ” Seattle windshield ulcer epidemic .” This incident began in April 1954, when several residents of Bellingham, Washington, reported mysterious dents, chips and pits in the windows of their cars, which they said were fine the day before.
Newspapers reported the secret. Police initially suspected that a local gang of juvenile delinquents (I’m guessing wearing leather jackets and carrying switchblades) were committing vandalism, but that possibility was ruled out when reports came in from across the Pacific Northwest. Some people said they watched bubbles form in glass in real time, and it was said that car parks were particularly hard hit.
No one had any idea what was behind the phenomenon, but theories ranged from sand fleas burrowing into glass, to fallout from seaborne hydrogen bomb tests, to damage caused by radio waves. Police were soon inundated with thousands of reports of windshield damage from as far away as Vancouver and Ontario. Seattle Mayor Allan Pomeroy asked the governor and President Eisenhower for help, and police examined more than 14,000 windshields. But the Seattle Police Crime Lab solved the case. A few weeks after the panic began, they published a report and concluded that literally no one was the culprit. Potholes in windshields are a common byproduct of driving, and newspaper articles caused people to look at their windshields instead of through them for the first time. Did you know, there were holes there.
It was a classic case of mass delusion, which I strongly suspect is happening in New Jersey, but instead of mistaking a dimpled windshield for radiation damage, people are mistaking airplanes for mysterious drones.
Just as the windshield dimple theories were fueled by anxiety about the then-new hydrogen bomb, I suspect our current mass delusion is rooted in anxiety about everything new in the skies—there are over a million drones registered with the FAA. For example. Back in the 1950s, people seemed to either accept the scientific and logical explanation, or at least stop talking about it, and the windshield dimple epidemic became history.
I’d like to think something similar will happen with drones, but these are different times, where experience and science are not as respected, and people seem eager to find their own explanations. I bet we’ll be talking about fake UFOs and mysterious drones for a long time.