Panic! The Kind That Came From New Jersey

Photo by Elia Kazan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Not content to just wreck not one but two New York branded NFL football teams, New Jersey seems hell bent on dominating the news cycle with a good, old-fashioned panic.

Welcome to the great Garden State Drone Freakout of 2024.

Now, depending on what version of the story you want to believe, either an Iranian and/or Chinese mothership is launching drones all along the eastern seaboard. Or, for a more domestic conspiracy, our own government is doing something untoward yet highly visible in the night sky. Perhaps, as cooler heads try to prevail, too many folks are staring up at some of the busiest airspace in the world and seeing aircraft doing aircraft things that the uninitiated ground dwellers don’t recognize.

Not enough people in social and news media are blaming aliens. Not that it is aliens, because there is no such thing as aliens, but at least that would weed out most of the political and news media coverage that has become a force multiplier of public panic.

Drones, technology, and the security threats thereof is a real thing. Ukraine has shown the lethality of drones, as have conflicts in Yemen, Africa, and elsewhere. Stateside, drones have already been litigated and in some cases criminally used for surveillance in everything from cheating at sports to a new spin on peeping toms. Serious matters that require serious consideration.

Which is not what we are doing in New Jersey. Politicians are preenings, posing, and demanding the power to “do something” because something must be done to quell the panic about…something. Social media and news media see the rampant speculation as a content milk cow that needs to be milked with both hands and relentless vigor. Some public menaces that have drones move to make sure their drones are part of the problem, not the solution. Poor Venus — the planet — has joined airlines, private aircraft, and various other lights in the night skies as misidentified malicious drones sent to…well, the panicked folks aren’t sure what they are going to do but it’s bad and let us panic none the less.

Madness, of the self-feeding, viral kind. There are most likely a few drones, thousands of false reports and now millions folks caught up in a story that shouldn’t be a story at all.

Over on Substack, Michael Shermer yields the floor to Dr. Robert Bartholomew:

Mysterious lights—seemingly under intelligent control—are spotted hovering in the skies over New Jersey and across the northeastern United States, sparking fear and anxiety. Sometimes they are reported above military installations, prompting concern that they may be the work of a hostile foreign government engaged in spying or worse.

The current drone scare?

No, this is a description of the great drone panic over eastern seaboard of the United States over a century ago. A series of similar scares back then coincided with the fear of Germans and the began shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914.[1] Based on an analysis of the reported times and sky locations of the sightings, most corresponded with the appearance of celestial objects such as Venus.[2] Others were later determined to have been prompted by tissue balloons which resembled modern-day Chinese lanterns.[3] They were powered by candles attached to the base and made buoyant by the generation of heat.

One of the more far-fetched explanations for the current scare is that a Chinese or Iranian vessel is stationed off the east coast and is launching the drones to spy on our military bases, or even launch a terrorist attack with explosives. A knowledge of history and psychology can help to illuminate this affair.

First, some witnesses report that the drones are the size of a small car or even an SUV. While this is theoretically possible, based on an analysis of online footage, Department of Homeland Security officials believe that some “drones” are actually small aircraft (some images show a cylindrical tube with two large wings up front and two small wings in the back and lights blinking in a pattern resembling that of planes).[4] Other reports could be of small drones because as psychologists, police, and trial lawyers know all too well, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. (Many people have been convicted of crimes and either executed or sent to prison for decades using visual evidence alone, only to be later exonerated by DNA.) Size estimates are also notorious for their unreliability, and likely account for modern day sightings of Thunderbirds with alleged 20-foot wing-spans across north America.

Social panics are triggered by fear and uncertainty. It is the job of the researcher to examine the background and identify the anxieties that are driving it. In this instance, current geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia, China, and Iran, appear to have contributed to a sense of distrust and vulnerability. Another factor may be a distrust of our own government, levels of which are at all time highs. Humans also tend to project their beliefs and fears onto ambiguous stimuli. As a result, the sky becomes a Rorschach Ink Blot Test where people often see what they expect to see.

The problem with this particular public panic is, not only the sky has become a Rorschach Ink Blot test, the news media and the social media that increasingly feeds, overlaps, and dictates the news cycle has become a 24/7 Rorschach test of how folks turn every viral thing into a Rorschach test. Frank Herbert’s Dune said “fear is the mind-killer” but he was just selling books, not trying to ride the wave of modern media content creation to fame, fortune, and glory. Fear sells, panic is the great audience capture, and some blinking lights in the New Jersey sky is just what the engagement farmers, power-hungry pols, tech salespeople, and fund-seeking government agencies ordered.

Don’t follow the lights of viral panic, those of you wanting to discern what is happening and not just reacting to the Jersey jitters of jumbled jingoism. The path of enlightenment does not blink in the night sky as a conspiracy theory. That’s just a 757 heading to Newark, not your ticket to internet stardom for seeing something no one else sees even though your in-group of social media folks all saw the same thing, really, honestly, they swear.

Settle down.