What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The New Jersey Drone Invasion

No one wants it to be aliens more than me. Even if they’re planning to force us to work in outer space diamond mines, I’d still welcome alien overlords. But it’s never aliens. The “drones” everyone is seeing are not aliens. They aren’t foreign invaders, or part of a secret government project, or anything else cool either. No one can say with 100% certainty, but I’d bet my collection of solid gold backscratchers that the recent wave of reports of unidentified flying objects is because people are very bad at identifying objects. 

Here’s a brief recap if you’ve been under a rock: in mid-November, dozens of people across 10 counties in New Jersey reported seeing drones (or something) in the nighttime sky. According to authorities in New Jersey, drones were seen in the sky above critical infrastructure like water reservoirs, electric transmission lines, rail stations, police departments and military installations. After the initial media coverage, more reported sightings came in. People posted pictures and videos or lights and blobs in the sky. Congressmen called for transparency and vigilance. The Department of Defense reassured no one by saying that they don’t know what the objects are, but they aren’t from a foreign source and they aren’t dangerous. Credulous online types shared theories, blurry photographic evidence, and their feelings about the alien visitation/foreign invasion/secret project/mass psyop to distract us from the real threat: vampires. And that’s where we are now: sifting through a growing trove of over 5,000 citizen reports of UFOs or UAPS, theorizing, and waiting for an official explanation or a visitation from the mothership. 

I could see how someone might think drone-mania seems like the beginning of an alien invasion—this Pentagon briefing would fit in perfectly in act one of a Michael Bay movie, for instance—but we don’t really know what an alien or high tech enemy invasion of the U.S. would look like because it hasn’t happened before. We do know what mass hysteria (or Mass Sociogenic Technophobia) looks like, and it turns out it looks exactly like this. And it’s not just me who thinks so; the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, FAA, and Department of Defense are also like, “there’s nothing here.”

A few of the many, many things in the sky that people may be mistaking for UFOs or mystery drones

As reports of drone sightings over New Jersey and the rest of the country have spread, presumably more people are looking up into the sky, and it turns out there are a ton of things up there that can be difficult to immediately identify. Like:

Airplanes and helicopters

Many reported drone sightings are along the known paths of manned airplanes or helicopters and are almost definitely planes or helicopters. As drone expert Dr. Will Austin explains, “After analyzing numerous videos shared by concerned citizens, I’m inclined to believe that many of the reported ‘large drones’ were actually manned aircraft mistakenly identified as drones.” 

A giveaway of a plane or helicopter are the red and green lights. The FAA requires those on aircrafts flying at night, so be highly suspicious of drone photos in those colors. If you can find out the time and location of a sighting, you can check whether it’s a commercial aircraft too. 

Moving objects in the sky can appear stationary, depending on your movement relative to them, so it would be easy to mistake a moving airplane as a hovering drone. Check out this video to see what I mean: 

Venus, Jupiter, and other celestial bodies

People mistake mundane celestial bodies for UFOs all the time. For instance, Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland seems to think the constellation Orion is “dozens of large drones.”

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Mundane American drones

You gotta figure that anyone with a drone on the East coast is trying to get a better look at whatever is supposed to be up there at night, and each new drone could potentially be mistaken for something mysterious. Along with hobby drones, there are commercial and governments drones used for everything from firefighting to photography. Unlike airplanes, you can’t check the flightpaths for these. 

Lens flares, bokeh, and other camera artifacts

Check out this trippy “alien orb” filmed by ABC news:

It’s actually a zoomed in, out-of-focus point of light. Probably a star. Like these:

Balloons, plastic bags, etc.

As a frequent lurker on Reddit’s r/UFO, I’m amazed at the number of people who can’t tell a mylar balloon from a flying saucer. Really anything can look like a UFO, from a weird cloud to a kite to a bug that gets close to the camera lens. 

Intentional hoaxes

Anyone interested in hoaxing people must be having a field day. It’s not terribly difficult to do, even when we’re not in the middle of a UFO craze, see?

Satellites and space junk

The International space station, Elon Musk’s StarLink satellites, and thousands of other things we shot into space are orbiting Earth. A lot of them are visible from Earth and could make you think “foreign drone!” Or “UFO!”

Secret aircraft

Now we’re getting into the more fun area of UFOs sighting: experimental aircraft. The U.S. government has a history of flying airplanes no one knows about, and many people catching sight of the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and Northrop Grumman B-2 mistook them for UFOs before they were announced. A stealth plane even crashed in Bakersfield resulting in a scene straight out of E.T. So it’s possible people are seeing secret drones, but it seems unlikely: testing an unknown drone in a heavily populated area seems like a bad way to keep it secret, especially if there are lights on it. But it’s possible. 

…Something unknown, like an object that’s flying

Known flying objects likely account for almost all sightings reported, and if they had enough time and energy, I’m confident someone could figure out what each one actually was. But that doesn’t accounts for all UFOs and/or UAPs. There are a handful of examples of UFO sightings where multiple credible witnesses report seeing something mysterious in the sky, often backed up with hard evidence. For instance, the USS Nimitz Tic Tac was seen by multiple experienced military pilots whose accounts were backed up with footage from infrared cameras and RADAR. 

While these cases can’t be dismissed as nothing, they can’t be confirmed as something either. Right now, these kinds of sightings are in the “we don’t know what that is” file. They may be explained in the future, but for now, they’re annoying mysteries. There haven’t been any sightings in the recent wave that come close to the level of evidence needed to think there might be something “real” there, at least none I’m aware of.

That time aliens broke everyone’s windshields

If you want a prediction for how this all ends, the “Seattle windshield pitting epidemic” provides a possible outcome. This incident began in April 1954, when a handful of residents of Bellingham, WA, reported mysterious dings, chips, and pitting in their car windows that they said had been fine the previous day.

Newspapers reported on the mystery. The police at first suspected that a local gang of juvenile delinquents (I assume dressed in leather jackets and wielding switchblades) were committing vandalism, but that theory was ruled out when reports came in from all over the Pacific Northwest. Some people said they’d watched bubbles forming in the glass in real time, and it was said that car lots were hit particularly hard.

No one had any idea what was behind the phenomenon, but theories ranged from sand fleas burrowing in the glass to fallout from offshore H-Bomb tests to damage caused by radio waves. Before long, police were deluged with thousands of reports of windshield damage from as far away as Vancouver and Ontario. Seattle mayor Allan Pomeroy asked for help from the governor and from President Eisenhower, the police examined over 14,000 windshields. But Seattle’s police crime laboratory cracked the case. They issued a report a few weeks into the panic and concluded the culprit was literally nothing. Pits in windshields are a normal byproduct of driving, and the newspaper stories caused people to look at their windshields—instead of through their windshields—for the first time. Wouldn’t you know it, there were pits there.

It was a classic case of mass delusion, which is what I strongly suspect is happening in New Jersey, but instead of mistaken a pitted windshield for radiation damage, people are mistaking airplanes for mystery drones. 

Just as the theories about windshield pitting were caused by uneasiness over the then new hydrogen bomb, I suspect our current mass delusion has its roots in an uneasiness about all the new things in the sky—there are over a million drones registered with the FAA, for instance.  Back in the 1950s, people seemed to have either accepted the scientific and logical explanation, or at least stopped talking about it, and the windshield pitting epidemic faded into history.

I’d like to think something like that will happen with the drones, but these are different times, when expertise and science are not as respected, and people seem eager to find their own explanations. I’d bet a solid gold back-scratcher we’ll be talking about fake UFOs and mystery drones for a long time.