The drones. Remember the drones? Perhaps they are still in the news, but now they are buried way down the page; perhaps they are on your homepage slideshow but only because the algorithm remembers that you were interested in the subject. Maybe there is a story on BBC “The Ocho” about the subject; but as headline news, no longer. It was once a huge story. So huge that we even wrote an article about it that laid out the possibilities of what the lights in the sky could be and what they are probably not.
This article will not do that. Instead, I want to use the drone story to illustrate what we, as skeptics, ought to do when confronted with a situation like this (and what, I believe, most of us did).
If you are thinking to yourself, “I didn’t do anything” then this is exactly what I mean. Most of us heard the story and said, “Ok, that’s weird.” Then we waited for more information. This is what my former and current president, the governor of New York and New Jersey, and several other prominent politicians did not do. Reddit filled up with theories, and of course Alex Jones had to speculate that at least 1% of the lights in the sky were not of human origin. No response to these lights in the sky was based on anything other than fear.
One of the lessons that Max Brooks writes for the protagonist of his Minecraft Book trilogy is, “Panic drowns thought.” Even though we do not live in a cube-based world where zombies, skeleton archers, and green walking sticks of dynamite appear in the darkness, the lesson is still important. Panic prevents rational thinking. It spreads like a virus and the more people panic, the less likely it is that the panic will stop. Rational thought gets smothered under the sheer weight of the masses of people afraid of lights in the sky. People who, we should note, are only expressing this panic because the people around them are also expressing that fear.
For those new to this story, I’ll provide the briefest of recaps. Since November, in the skies above the East Coast of the United States – primarily in the state of New Jersey – there have been some strange lights in the sky. Unlike the past where such a thing would have been considered a “UFO”, these were labelled as drones. Right then was the beginning of the panic. Someone saw a light in the sky, believed it to be a drone and, instead of just shrugging, reported this as something to worry about. From this first report, things multiplied as more and more people began to see lights in the sky and participate in the panic. The peak event was when Steward International Airport, a small airport about 100km North of New York City, temporarily shut down operations when lights thought to be a drone (or several) were seen in the area. The most important feature of this entire phenomenon is that all of the unidentified lights were unidentified.
If we assume that they are drones, the appearance of drones in the sky should not be anything to be concerned about. According to current prices, I can get a pretty decent drone (with a 5-star rating on Amazon) for about $75 US. Anyone can fly a drone. If you are a private person and the drone is being used for purely recreational purposes, there is no license or registration required. You can fill the sky with them as long as they abide by FAA regulations concerning altitude and airspace. In the above-mentioned incident at Steward Airport, the lights did not cross into the traffic lanes of the facility and the temporary shut down was cautionary rather than necessary. Despite that information, the Governors of New York and New Jersey asked for federal assistance in dealing with the “drone problem.”
This panic reminds me of two events: the “clown panic” of 2016 and an incredibly odd car accident in 2023. The former was certainly a phenomenon fueled by the internet. In the US, UK, and Australia, there were reports of clowns in places where clowns should not be. These weren’t normal clowns either, they were scary “It” style clowns. There was one sighting, then another, then the clowns were everywhere. The internet seemed to shovel fuel this coulrophobic panic, but there were never any armies of clowns.
Halloween and costume stores pulled clown outfits from the shelves, even McDonald’s issued a statement saying that their mascot was going to have a lower profile. To be clear, there were some actual clown sightings, but we must understand their context. The very first was in 2013 and the “scary” clown was a character in a movie being filmed then. Most of the reported sightings amounted to nothing and, for those in which the police did find a clown, there was no crime involved. Reports of clowns luring children into the woods or the sewers (which is the actual first murder in Stephen King’s book “It”) were judged to be fictional. Then, it just stopped.
The second event took place a little more than a year ago. Car accidents are an unfortunately common occurrence. It is even more unfortunate that many are fatal. Rarely do such accidents go beyond the local news, much less hit national or international news. But, in 2023, a car went flying through the air and crashed in a fiery explosion. This crash and explosion happened on the US side of the US/Canada border. Footage of the crash was taken from the security camera at the actual border checkpoint. At first, nothing was known, and most news reports were hesitant to say anything.
Fox News, however, had no hesitance in blaming terrorists and calling the crash an attack, even citing “high-level sources” who confirmed the presence of explosives. I bring this situation up not to drag on Fox News (well, not just that) but because, with their reporting on the matter, we at least knew what they wanted.
With the panic over the drones, I want to know what people who are panicking think is going on. Rather than telling people there’s nothing to worry about, I’ve been asking people this question. My point is to make them spell out their position. Unlike Fox anchors salivating at the opportunity to claim that the Biden administration was weak on the border (this time literally), most people fearing the drones do not have a concrete fear.
The only thing causing the panic was the reporting of it. In this case, the lights in the sky were just lights in the sky. They were not doing anything other than being in the sky.
Perhaps I am being unfair. The world has murder drones. In active war zones, a drone in the sky is more than just lights. The resistance in Ukraine has been using drones to attack targets deep in Russian territory while the Russian have been using them to strike back. The US has a long, troubling history of attack drones circling the Middle East like Nazgûl, ready to launch AGM-114 Hellfire missiles at targets. The conception that lights in the sky could be a dangerous thing is not a fairy tale.
The problem is that no one in the Eastern US lives in an active war zone. If they were foreign attack drones, they would require logistical support. Even the very latest model of military attack drone has a range of 1770km (1100 miles). Even if we liken this new situation to the balloon scare of last year, it isn’t the same. While initial reports did panic a bit, the balloons were determined to be Chinese in origin, and such devices can float across the Pacific. The Imperial Japanese used them to attack targets deep in the continental US.
These lights have not been judged to be anything other than a strange anomaly. To claim that “this has gone too far”, as the NY governor did, just makes the “this” out to be petrol for the fire. My position is not to hope that everything is fine until it’s too late, but to not rush to judgments and statements that add to the fear.
On 1 January 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a temporary ban on drone flights within 1 nautical mile of various infrastructure and air traffic locations. The ban, according to them, is being issued “out of an abundance of caution.” Which makes sense from the perspective of the government. The FAA has reaffirmed the stance of the FBI (among many other US federal agencies), which has stated that there is no evidence of any threat. However, when it comes to statements from the FBI on events of this kind, the public is usually mistrusting unless it comes from two impossibly good-looking special agents. Nevertheless, the stance of any agency with jurisdiction over the matter is the same: it might be odd, but it’s not nefarious. With an added, “don’t point lasers at them,” in case they are piloted airplanes.
Maybe these lights are drones and, if so, they could become a problem to air traffic in the event of a collision. An event so rare that the Wikipedia page on this subject has four confirmed occurrences (not counting the military ones). The panic went beyond that. The atmosphere was one of fear that there was a malicious hand in all of this. A fear that was utterly unsubstantiated and requires skeptics like us to attempt to push rational thinking through.
