The Great Drone Panic of 2024
Even New Jersey may have its moment in the sun. The state has become the epicenter of a global story since residents began noticing bright lights above their heads in mid-November, suspecting them to be drones. Even Senator Andy Kim has gone out to look at them, and federal authorities have launched an investigation. The public’s imagination has run wild, with some speculating the “orbs” are alien spacecraft or the first wave of some foreign invasion.
A few people have made fools of themselves in spectacular fashion. Maybe Doug Mastriano hasn’t seen Star Wars, because how else could the Pennsylvania state senator and former Republican gubernatorial candidate mistake the replica of a TIE fighter for a drone? (Mastriano now claims his post was a joke.)
It is inconceivable that the federal government has no answers nor has taken any action to get to the bottom of the unidentified drones. The fecklessness of this administration was on display last year when a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to fly over the entire… pic.twitter.com/qWqyH3dnkI
— Senator Doug Mastriano (@SenMastriano) December 16, 2024
Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, must not look up at the night sky very often, as he thought the constellation Orion was evidence of suspicious drone activity.
Last night, beginning at around 9:45 pm, I personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland (25 miles from our nation’s capital). I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes.
— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) December 13, 2024
Like… pic.twitter.com/Ipx8ctLmhs
Alas, the likeliest explanation is the dullest possibility. Most of the sightings appear to be commercial aircraft or “legal commercial drones, hobbyist drones and law enforcement drones,” as the Associated Press helpfully pointed out on Tuesday. That probably won’t convince the internet’s UFO enthusiasts or anyone else who believes the lights portend something ominous. “I don’t buy it,” one New Jersey mayor told the BBC, and Donald Trump recently said, “Something strange is going on. For some reason they don’t want to tell the people and they should because the people are really — they happen to be over Bedminster,” his New Jersey residence and golf course. Kim, meanwhile, has concluded that the lights in the sky are probably airplanes.
If the lights have (likely) always been there, why the panic now? Public hysterias have always surfaced from time to time, in the U.S. and everywhere else that humans happen to be. And the drones were fun, at first. On Reddit, r/UFOs is buzzing with activity as users concoct government conspiracies and dream of alien incursions from outer space. But there’s always an underbelly to contagions of this sort. Consider the great drone panic of 2024 alongside other trends, and it looks like a sign of deeper social dysfunction. America is fearful, even paranoid; it has just reelected Trump, a vengeful figure who admires dictators and strongmen and seeks retribution against liberals and the broader world order they represent. Conspiratorial thinking is not a new phenomenon in the U.S., but it is a hallmark of the MAGA movement, and Trump’s rise empowers a class of grifters who prey on ignorance and fear.
Take Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy once said “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” and proceeded to question the efficacy of the polio vaccine, saying that it contained something called Simian Virus 40 and had led to soft-tissue cancers in his generation “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” If Kennedy has an opinion on the drone sightings, he has yet to offer it, but his very ascendance encourages the sense that anything is possible — as if the entire country is now on the wavelength of Coast to Coast AM, the conspiratorial radio show started by the late Art Bell in 1988.
That doesn’t bode well for the U.S. or its democratic processes, already corroded by the rise of misinformation and structural disparities. People have always experienced the same reality in vastly different ways because of their beliefs, or their wealth, or their identity. Now the gaps that separate us appear to be widening, and it hardly seems as though we’re living the same reality at all. Conspiracies flourish in such an environment, and if the government looks more like the enemy than a source of aid in troubling times, it partly has itself to blame. The drone panic will fade, as all panics do, but the root causes and consequences could be with us for years to come.