In recent days, the sightings have led to the temporary closures of a Stewart International Airport in New York and of Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Government agencies previously said they had “not identified anything anomalous”. They agreed with Biden that many drones that had been sighted were lawfully flown by hobbyists and law enforcement - adding that people were also spotting “manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones”.
But questions from the public remain. Earlier in the week, New Jersey man Noel Thomas described to the BBC his experience of spotting a mystery object in the sky. He said it was the size of a school bus, rectangular with blinking lights, and “definitely something I’ve never seen”.
Also, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (Republican - NJ) is the “New Jersey lawmaker that the possible drones came specifically from an Iranian ‘mothership’”
It’s just a classic mass hysteria. It’s the same exact psychosocial dynamic that led to witch trials in previous eras.
Someone sees something strange in the sky, or one person flies an actual drone and someone sees it. Suddenly people start looking at the sky. People who have no experience in astronomy or sky watching, people who have no idea how cameras or lenses work, they all start looking up. They don’t know how their own tools work, so they try to take pictures of things their equipment isn’t capable of, and they produce weird-looking blurry images that appear otherworldly. A blurry light of a plane’s navigation lights now becomes an “interdimensional plasma vortex” or some other bullshit. They post these, and even more people start looking up. People don’t understand that astronomers have struggled for centuries with the problem of judging the size and distance of distant points of light. Even pilots naively think their training helps them magically overcome a core problem of observational astronomy. Soon you have people thinking there are UFOs flying around at Mach 100 and turning with an acceleration of thousands of g’s, all because they don’t realize how hard it is to judge the distance to pinpricks of light against a uniform background.
It’s literally witch hunt thinking. In past times, something weird would happen. A animal would get a rare disease and die. A child of an influential figure in town would get sick. Someone would suggest a witch might have done it. Suddenly people start thinking about witches, and they see signs of witchcraft everywhere. This grows until women are getting burned at the stake.
Thankfully at least our present version of this witch hunt mentality is being directed in a way that is unlikely to directly harm anyone. The recent panic is wasting government resources and the time of government officials, but thankfully it’s unlikely to end up with anyone being burned at the stake. Still, it is really depressing as an illustration of the state of our culture and communications systems. We’re literally falling for the exact same mental failings that our peasant ancestors centuries ago did. We think we’re smarter than them. But all our increased literacy rates and advanced technology have done is made it easier to spread these panics on a grand scale.
This is just this generation crop circles. Nothing more.
Some agency is testing something new and didn’t expect it to get this much coverage…
This just feels like someone gearing up for more drone regulation to me. We’ve had them for years, they’re not expensive or hard to use, and suddenly there’s a whole bunch of them near an airport and the media loses their mind?
It feels contrived
This to me is the most interesting story to come out of the past few weeks, but it’s all the way on the west coast.
