December 18, 2024
Doug Hood/Asbury Park Press/USA TODAY NETWORK
The Dec. 8 photo above from Toms River, New Jersey, shows one of many aircraft that have been observed amid an investigation into unusual drone activity. Five years ago, similar sightings were reported in Colorado. In both cases, federal officials have said the sightings appear to be routine aircraft.
Sightings of suspected drones flying over New Jersey and other parts of the United States have led to a torrent of speculation about the seemingly mysterious aircraft appearing in the sky at night.
With federal investigators providing vague answers, the void of information has been filled with conspiracy theories in a panic that's reminiscent of what unfolded in Colorado five years ago.
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In a Wednesday episode of the 404 Media podcast, journalist Jason Koebler talked about his past coverage of drones that people claimed to have seen flying above several counties in northwestern Colorado in December 2019 and January 2020. Local reports about the sightings snowballed into a brief national obsession, fueling suspicions about secret government programs and foreign spy incursions.
"No one is ever normal about these things," Koebler said on the podcast. "They're never, ever, ever normal about them."
Much like the current investigation in New Jersey, the sightings in Colorado prompted the military and federal agencies to look into the aircraft. They concluded that people were largely mistaking drones for things like SpaceX's Starlink satellites, regular passenger planes and hobbyist drones. Even when police sent up their own drones to investigate the sightings, it led to further tips about nefarious activity.
The Colorado sightings underscored the reality that most people lack the knowledge and visual ability to decipher what they see in the sky.
"People don't usually look at the sky. There's been studies about this," Koebler said. "People are quite oblivious about this until there's a situation like this, and then everyone is looking at the sky and looking for some sort of explanation for what is going on."
Few lessons have been learned from what happened in Colorado, Koebler lamented, and the collective amnesia has enabled the sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere to be exploited.
"All of this has become a no-win clusterf--- for everyone except the attention-seeking grifters within the government who are themselves railing against the government to focus attention on themselves," he said.
The U.S. Department of Defense said Tuesday that of the 5,000-plus reports of drone sightings it has received over the last month, none of them appear "anomalous" when held up to the scrutiny of trained experts. Federal officials maintain that the aircraft — whatever they may be — do not pose a threat to the public.
"Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones," the Department of Defense said.
Despite these assurances, social media sites have been overrun with a frenzy of posts searching for answers to amateur photos and videos.
"It is entirely possible that some of the things in New Jersey are — I don't know, like Pentagon projects or not easily explained," Koebler said. "But the vast majority of things that people are freaking out about have been explained — can be explained. Many of them have been debunked by random people on Twitter or Bluesky, where you'll have a politician or someone tweet a video and it goes viral."
Drexel University professor Hilde Van den Bulck, who studies the ways media policies impact public trust, said conspiracies about drones reflect skepticism about the "deep state" that are often pushed by right-leaning politicians.
"If you think about knowledge and information, there is always a level of healthy suspicion," she said. "I want to make sure that what I know is factual. As such, there's nothing wrong with thinking, 'What's going on here? Is this OK?' I think what is problematic is that we've seen a systematic undermining in the last 20 years — certainly the last 10 — of trusting institutions."
Van den Bulck compared the drone hysteria to Orson Welles' famed "The War of the Worlds" radio play in 1938, when reports claimed that many listeners mistook the broadcast for a real alien invasion. Ironically, stories of panic at the time were greatly overblown by the national press and sparked a broad discussion about media literacy.
Social media is the modern-day equivalent that latches onto fear, misinformation and the allure of conspiracies.
"Fifty years ago, every town may have had its flat earther. It would be the weird person — and kind of isolated," she said. "One of the things that social media does is that you can all find each other and build these communities. For those who are already suspicious of the state for reasons of personal disappointment in their life or in their environment, this is something that is easy to fall into. QAnon was partly a community-building of people who came together thinking that they found a solution, no matter how crazy it may sound."
Koebler acknowledged on his podcast that there are reasons for the public to be worried about drones.
"It's like cops doing persistent surveillance, (Department of Homeland Security) flying predator drones over the border — which they do," he said. "You know, things like this are concerning. People using them to spy on others. People flying unsafely."
The podcast also noted that there's a broad community of researchers — professional and amateur — who follow the military's research into cutting-edge aviation and the scientific study of UFOs.
"There are definitely classified U.S. military projects where they're flying things in the sky and they're not telling you what they are," Koebler said. "Other governments have similar programs. There's no evidence that anything that's happening in New Jersey is that. ... The Pentagon has the latitude to lie about classified programs in particular, and some of them have been declassified."
One of the most concerning facets of the investigation into the drones in New Jersey is the way the situation has led to fear-mongering and political posturing, Koebler said.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-New Jersey) retracted a claim that an "Iranian mothership" released a fleet of drones — just one of the many conspiracies that have been debunked by the Pentagon and other sources in recent weeks. When former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) posted video on social media purporting to show a cluster of drones, astronomers quickly pointed out that he had actually filmed a constellation of stars.
This week, Belleville Mayor Michael Melham boosted another conspiracy claiming that the drones were sent by the U.S. government to locate missing radioactive material. The New Jersey Department of Environment Protection and other agencies debunked that theory, but not before it was widely picked up by conservative news outlets.
"To these people, government inaction is unacceptable, and government actions and explanations cannot be trusted," Koebler said. "So it's like the Pentagon not shooting these drones down is unacceptable to them. The Pentagon saying, there's nothing to worry about means that the Pentagon is gaslighting and lying to you.”
A few years ago, Van den Bulck and a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania published an analysis of InfoWars.com founder Alex Jones and his role as a "populist celebrity" on the fringe of the independent media landscape. Jones pioneered the conspiracy-driven business of disinformation, influencing a wide audience to view the world through a prism of lies. Jones' notorious claims that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged led to a bevy of lawsuits that precipitated his bankruptcy.
Van den Bulck said the ideology Jones popularized is now woven into the fabric of social media as part of its public appeal and profitability. In a largely unregulated online space, voices of mis- and disinformation have become commonplace. They're even echoed by mainstream politicians who court the public's taste for messages of distrust.
"Some of them have really got that as a second nature to create doubt in the population," Van den Bulck said.
