As you may have almost certainly heard, New Jersey has recently become the epicenter of aerial-object obsession, some might say panic. Mysterious drones, or planes, or maybe extraterrestrial spycraft depending on your view, seem to have been lighting up the night sky for the past month, and theories about their purposes and origins abound.
“I think it’s like — they’re, like, trying to see what’s going on with the public,” one woman speculated on television. “It’s almost like a census. I don’t know, is that a weird conspiracy theory?”
It was no weirder than competing theories. Last week Representative Jefferson Van Drew, a Republican congressman whose district includes the Jersey Shore, maintained that the drones were being sent from an “Iranian mother ship” operating off the East Coast. In a four-minute address to his constituents posted on YouTube, he described drones “the size of minivans” that were clearly “not the work of a backyard hobbyist.” The Pentagon finally weighed in; there was no Iranian mother ship parked in the vicinity of Cape May (or anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard).
In an interview with the local Fox station in Philadelphia, Maj. Gen. James Poss, who retired from the Air Force and is now a consultant and intelligence expert, offered his own take. “I would bet you that it is probably what we call — and I apologize for a long, clunky name — electronic vertical takeoff and landing aircraft,” he said. “The popular name for them is flying cars.”
The initial response from federal officials has had a “nothing to see here” quality, which served only to frustrate politicians from both parties, who have been demanding answers. The F.B.I. cautiously acknowledged “without a doubt” that unmanned aircraft had been flying over New Jersey and that this was “irresponsible,” but that explanation seemed insufficient.
On Tuesday, a briefing with a Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, began with a discussion of a defense partnership between the United States and Qatar, the importance of a cease-fire in Gaza and the presidential transition, but the attention of the reporters in the room was clearly focused elsewhere. Inevitably, after a question about Syria came another fanciful one: “I know you’re hoping for a drone question,” the reporter said, after several had already been posed, “so let me oblige you.”
General Ryder continued the national effort to calm nerves, pointing out that there are a million drones registered in the United States and that on any given day approximately 8,500 were in flight. A vast majority of them were recreational, but architects, engineers and so on relied on them as well. He offered that a close relative of his was a professional drone operator. While the government was taking these new reports “seriously,” he said, “sometimes when you focus on something, suddenly you notice more.”
Even the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, suggested that the Department of Homeland Security should deploy better drone-detection technology. Citizens with questions about these drones, he argued, “should not have to shake an 8 Ball to get an answer.”
For some, the 8 Ball has consistently come up with a single reply: aliens. On his Instagram page, with its 1.5 million followers Tom DeLonge, guitarist for Blink-182 and well known in certain circles for his U.F.O. enthusiasm, acknowledged that “while we don’t have all the facts yet,” what people are seeing might be alien spacecraft “mimicking” the earth kind. “We do know that U.F.O.s play with ‘mimicry,’ and that has been known for quite some time,” he wrote. “Why? To get us to notice them without a major freak out? Who knows. … ”
Freakouts over large suspiciously lit objects high up in the atmosphere have been with us for decades. In the summer of 1947, an experienced pilot in the Pacific Northwest named Kenneth Arnold reported that he had seen a series of bright, shiny objects flying over Mount Rainier. Hundreds of other sightings followed that summer, and it was at that point that the term “flying saucer” entered the vernacular.
All of this was taking place against the backdrop of the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. Then as now, technology was ascendant and suspicions ran high. This kind of frenzy, in some way, is only to be expected at the dawn of the age of A.I., when the richest man in the world, intent on colonizing Mars, is an important adviser to the incoming president, and the distrust of government, media and corporate interests is exceedingly high.
Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State, has studied the cultural conditions around these kinds of sightings and writes about them in his book, “After the Flying Saucers Came.” The genesis for some of the paranoia stemmed from the secret government programs producing new kinds of technology with catastrophic implications.
“The war brings about this idea that ‘My God, the government is making things that we could not have conceived,” he said. He pointed to other “flaps” and “waves” — what U.F.O. aficionados call these periodic surges in seemingly strange aircraft activity, usually observed over a limited geographic area. They occurred in the 1950s and again in 1973 as Watergate was unfolding, gas prices were soaring and Skylab, the country’s first space station, lifted off that May.
The pattern is virtually always the same. “You get vague, puzzling sightings that have the potential to make people nervous,” Mr. Eghigian said. “You get authorities who chime in who are then unconvincing in their explanations. And you get politicians demanding answers.” Many explanations are “up for grabs,” as he put it, “and that is how it has always played out.”
Early in 1953, the C.I.A. enlisted a professor at Caltech to analyze reports of U.F.O. sightings. He and an assembled team concluded that there were generally explanations for each phenomenon: sunlight, for example, reflecting off a jet. The real problem was not alternative life-forms. No, it was the public and its reflex for mass hysteria.
