Attack of the Drones

For the “I don’t want to finish the damn article” crowd, there is no drone crisis. It’s bear-high-on-cocaine-at-a-Waffle House freaking nonsense. Jesus, that I have to actually write that shows that any fragment of collective national sanity we once had has been shredded by the high-speed meat grinder of 24/7 social media paranoia.

Yes, our nation has gone completely Hunter S. Thompson-level bonkers.

[EDIT: But not quite as bonkers as I originally thought. Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano posted a picture of a Star Wars TIE fighter being hauled along by a truck, implying it was a drone. I thought he was serious and pasted it in this essay with some snide commentary, but he said he was being sarcastic, and I believe him. I really should not have fallen for that. Sorry, Senator Mastriano, you were funny, I was gullible. My bad!] To replace him, I’ll give you a Facebook post by U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.]

From the Wall Street Journal:

Officials across the East Coast are pushing the federal government for more answers about the wave of mysterious drone sightings, with some seeking local authority to shoot down the unauthorized aircraft.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, said over the weekend that state agencies were monitoring the drone sightings in his state but that he was unhappy with the flow of information coming from federal officials. Connecticut state Sen. Tony Hwang, a Republican who represents Fairfield County where numerous drone sightings have been reported, said there has been a breakdown in communication with the federal government.

Former and future President Donald Trump:

"The government knows what is happening. Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it's a garage they can go right inside. They know where it came from and where it went. For some reason, they don't want to comment, and I think they'd be better off saying what it is. Our military knows. Our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense. I can't imagine it's the enemy, because if it was the enemy they'd blast it."

Nonsense.

What happened? At some point in November, regular salt-of-the-earth Americans¹ started reporting seeing bright lights attached to what they thought were drones. The sightings began in New Jersey but spread to New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The government received over 5000 tips. At this point, there have probably been far more. A Facebook group was created to discuss the sightings and has more than 75,000 members. People have been sharing videos of themselves pointing at bright lights and claiming they were looking at drones. On December 13, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland and newly elected Senator Kim of New Jersey both joined the chorus of scary drone spotters by tweeting their own supposed drone videos.²

Obviously, these sightings are a mass hysteria. “A phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population and society as a result of rumors and fear.” In no rational universe is there a widespread and coordinated assault on our skies across that many different states by mysterious, nefarious drones. The mind boggles at coming up with a James Bond-style conspiracy that would suddenly unleash thousands of VERY VISIBLE drones on America just to have them weave around like drunken fireflies.

There have been hundreds of similar hysterias in history. Remember the great Clown Panic of 2016? People claimed evil clowns were trying to attack children. Clown sightings spread nationwide, terrorizing parents and kids, but no actual evil clowns were ever found (despite a mob of Penn State students launching a surreal clown hunt).³

More grim was the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, where teachers across the country were accused of engaging in Satanic rituals involving preschoolers. A number spent years in jail because of testimony from 4-year-olds whose strange stories were prompted by leading questions from gullible police and prosecutors.

We’ll never track down the exact chain of events that triggered the Drone Panic of 2024, but we can guess the rough outlines. A few people started shouting (on social media, of course) that they saw something funny in the sky. Others looked at the sky and shouted the same thing. Then more shouting, more people looking at the sky, many seeing funny business.

None of this is surprising. Most people are clueless about the sky.⁴ There are weird blinking lights speeding by all the time, and mostly, we just ignore them. Untrained people don’t know whether they’re drones, helicopters, Boeing 767s, or Xglrnak-7 coming in to kidnap and probe some midwesterners.

But when you tell people to look for strange stuff, goldarnit they’re going to look, and many of them will see stuff. We’re susceptible that way!

And there’s a lot of stuff up there! Most of the lights people are seeing are airplanes (it’s so helpful for nefarious flying objects to display FAA-compliant running lights). Some of the other UFOs people are seeing are actually drones. The FAA says more than 1 million drones have been registered. And I guarantee a lot more drone owners have been sending their expensive babies up in the sky, either to look for the “strange” drones or to help prank America.

I’ve read complaints that the federal government hasn’t done a good enough job of quieting peoples’ fears, including many from state and local officials, but I don’t know what else they could have done. It’s hard to say, “Those things you are seeing are just airplanes and stuff, and you’re too credulous,” because government officials don’t know what each person is seeing. They have to laboriously track down reports and verify that, yes, indeed, this was just a plane. That was a star. And over there Grandma Bessie just forgot to put her contacts in again.

John Kirby, a spokes for the National Security Council, said on Monday:

We have not identified anything anomalous or any national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the Northeast.

I mean, what else can they say? Go back and inside and stop yammering at us?

Or maybe we should be worried

And then there are the ‘other’ drones.

Adrienne Tong/WSJ Graphics

In December 2023, Virginia military bases started spotting bunches of real drones invading their airspace. The Wall Street Journal published a long piece on the incursions.

U.S. officials didn’t believe hobbyists were flying the drones, given the complexity of the operation. The drones flew in a pattern: one or two fixed-wing drones positioned more than 100 feet in the air and smaller quadcopters, the size of 20-pound commercial drones, often below and flying slower. Occasionally, they hovered.

The U.S. military is not authorized to shoot down drones over American soil unless they pose an immediate threat, and they were unable, even after much effort, to track down where the drones were coming from. Finally, in early January, they found one Chinese student who had used a drone to take pictures of navy ships. No connection to the Chinese government could be found—he claimed photography was a hobby⁵—but he was still sentenced to six months in prison.

And drone swarms around military bases haven’t stopped. More recently, they’ve been seen around Edwards Air Force Base in California.

This is more serious than the New Jersey panic. Many of the incursions are probably irresponsible civilians, but some could be foreign actors.

There’s even a chance that a few real spy drones triggered the New Jersey panic, as the state has its own military bases. (Although I remain skeptical.)

And there’s our drone future to worry about. We already see drones being used extensively in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Drones are getting smaller, more sophisticated, and cheaper. Small suicide drones with explosive charges are chasing down individual soldiers. It’s easy to imagine a world where thousands or tens of thousands of armed drones swarm a battlefield. Or a city. That would be cause for a real panic.

I saw this video back in 2020, and it still scares me.

1. People of the land.

2. To be fair to Senator Kim, in a December 14 tweet, he said he’d gone out again and clarified that most of the lights he’d seen were actually planes.

3. Clowns are still evil, of course. Everyone knows that.

4. I don’t look up on principle. Need to keep my eyes peeled for dog poop.

5. He’d bought his drone at Costco.