The public has already been given the government’s best answers to the latest panic over mysterious lights in the sky over New Jersey. Many Americans simply don’t like a mundane answer — fixed-wing piloted aircraft, smaller planes, hobbyist drones — that implies they are rubes at best and paranoid at worst.
Even assurances from New Jersey officials in particular have done little to quiet the current public clamor. Perhaps that’s unsurprising for a state where, like so many other parts of the country, people were duped by Orson Welles’ radio play “War of the Worlds” 86 years ago this fall. Perhaps that’s a cheap shot at the Garden State on my part: A YouGov poll this year found that some 18 percent of Americans nationwide report having seen a U.F.O.
The Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. issued a joint statement last week assuring the public that they “take seriously the threat that can be posed by unmanned aircraft systems.” And this week the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones from flying over nearly two dozen communities in the state.
In some cases, people in New Jersey have been sending their own commercially available drones aloft to investigate reports of … all the flying drones. I suspect what’s going on in some of the cases is that people are seeing real drones aloft for the first time. Not only that: The government only recently allowed drones to be flown at night late last year. No doubt the public’s unfamiliarity will decrease as these devices become more and more widespread and visible in all of our daily lives.
But the slew of photos and videos splashed across the internet in the past month claiming to document the presence of drones — friendly or otherwise — despite repeated insistence from the government and law enforcement that the lights are not malicious acts, dangerous objects or alien craft suggests something else is at work.
U.S. officials have suggested that many of the objects might in fact be manned aircraft, such as airplanes or helicopters. Indeed, the tristate area is probably among the most congested air spaces in the country, crowded with large and light aircraft, satellites visible from earth and, yes, a fast-growing number of actual drones.
The lights in the sky are not North Korean or Iranian drones. Nor are nefarious drones being sent illegally en masse over secure military facilities — though the federal government did restrict airspace over one of Donald Trump’s golf courses in New Jersey and a military facility nearby. In truth, many of the sightings are airplanes, helicopters, stars, satellites or just regular drones being flown for ordinary reasons. Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, posted videos of suspicious lights in the sky above his house, only for a New York Post journalist to note that those lights looked just like the constellation Orion.
The zeal to get to the bottom of a lit-up night sky seems to know no bounds and suggests that on some level U.F.O.s have left an indelible mark on the American psyche.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon released an exhaustive and detailed report assessing all official government probes of reported U.F.O. encounters since 1945 and found that “all investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification.” The report did little to quell the belief that there was something nefarious afoot. Indeed, after the report was released, a poll found that 63 percent of the country still thinks that the U.S. government knows more than it is telling the public about U.F.O.s.
While reports of alien abductions appear to be on the wane, a societal panic over drones suggests that they might be linked. Not only is the omnipresence of misinformation and disinformation spread online fueling the looming drone panic, the ability to alter or fabricate photos and videos will also make supposed evidence more convincing to your average, unwitting hokum consumer.
The reality in the skies today may be changing faster than at any period since Kitty Hawk. Drones are slowly becoming ubiquitous, with insufficient oversight or tracking. Operators of drones weighing more than half a pound are supposed to register the devices with the F.A.A., which counts over one million official registrations as of December. But that tally doesn’t include the vast number of commercially available drones that come in under that limit. Another squadron could take flight for the first time after Christmas.
I received my own drone about a year ago, a fun little toy that weighs less than the F.A.A. limit and isn’t much bigger than my shoe. It can fly for about a mile and a half about 500 yards above the ground and shoot 4K video. Since I’ve been flying it, I’ve also started to notice how omnipresent aerial footage has become in television productions and on the screens we live with. And why not? Examining events on the earth from the heavens has always captivated human imagination. Having the technology to do so is going to be wildly popular as the price of such craft plummets in the next few years.
Leaving aside their current ubiquity in armed conflicts, the Drone Age is already upon us and the skies are going to get a lot more crowded. May it bring us more of the fascination without so much of the fear.
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