something over New Jersey

There were thousands of reports: strange aircraft, floating through the sky. A retrospective sum of press accounts finds that some 100,000 people were reported to have witnessed aerial intruders. Despite the scant details associated with most reports, an eager press repeated the claims with fervor. The claims became more fantastical. Prominent people claimed secret knowledge of the origins of the crafts. This was 1896. The airship had just barely been invented, and already the public was seeing them everywhere they looked.

John Keel was a writer and prominent UFOlogist, although he's probably remembered most of all for his cryptozoological book, The Mothman Prophecies. Like most UFOlogists of his era, Keel was sort of a mixed bag to those readers who are at least attempting to keep a rational perspective. In some ways he was more critical than average, turning against the extraterrestrial hypothesis as impractical and always calling for a shift away from "investigating" based on lone contactee accounts. On the other hand, he was as prone as anyone to fancy and it now seems that his books took some liberties with the information he'd been given. Still, his popular newspaper articles during the 1960s shaped much of our modern parlance around UFOs. Among the terms he seems to have introduced, or at the least popularized, is the "flap."

A flap is a concentrated set of UFO reports in a specific place and time. The 1896-1897 airship flap, which started in California and eventually spread across the nation to New York City, might be called the first. Of course, there is a straightforward argument that the airship flap was the first only in that it was the first flap during which aviation was on the public mind; by this token other paranormal episodes like dancing plagues and witch trials could be considered flaps. Still, "flap" is usually reserved for those times during which the general public is seeing things in the sky: something up there.

Flaps are a well-known phenomenon in UFOlogical circles (although not always by that name) since 1947. Widespread reports of flying saucers that year kicked off our modern UFO culture. Almost every decade had some sort of major flap until the 1990s, the decade during which UFOlogy could be said to have died. This is a more complex topic than I can explain here as preamble, and my opinion is somewhat controversial, but UFOlogy enjoyed a golden age during the '60s and '70s and by the time I came onto the scene had largely collapsed. The end of the Cold War, improving digital media, and sidelining (and often outright suppression) of serious investigations into UFOs were all factors. There was also a certain qualitative change in the UFO community: the most prominent names in UFOs were increasingly untrustworthy, forced by desperation or, more cynically, encouraged by money to become less and less careful about the ideas they endorsed.

It cannot be ignored that there are complexities, UFOlogical mysteries, to some of this decline as well. The single hardest blow to UFOlogy came in 1989, when Bill Moore stood before a MUFON conference to admit that the UFO materials he had distributed throughout the community, including the Majestic 12 papers, were fakes. This confession triggered a dramatic unraveling of the established canon of paranormal knowledge. By the early '90s, it seemed that nearly all of the major UFO news of the decade before had originated with a small number of people, often in collusion, who ranged from extremely unreliable (Bob Lazar) to admitted fabricators (Richard Doty). The fact that some of these people had connections to military intelligence, and that there remains some reason to believe they were intentionally spreading disinformation on behalf of those agencies, leaves plenty of intrigue but does nothing to resolve the basic fact that the UFOlogy of the '80s and '90s turned out to be mostly bullshit---not even of the vague cultural kind, but with specific, known authors [1].

It was this climate that lead us to the 21st century, which for nearly two decades was surprisingly devoid of UFO discourse. Around 2017, though, a motley crew including such personalities as a famous rock musician, a powerful US senator, and an eccentric hotel-aerospace billionaire thrust UFOs back into the popular media. I have written before with my analysis that the late-2010s UFO "revelations" (and, moreover, the lack thereof) were most likely the result of Bigelow taking advantage of the DoD's lax contract supervision and Sen. Harry Reid's personal interest in order to fund his hobby projects. Still, the whole unfortunate affair seems to have had the upside of renewing public and political attention to the topic.

The DoD was forced to at least try to get its act together, creating a new organization (the AARO) with tighter reins and more credibility. NASA formed its own review. The government seems to now be involved in its most serious efforts to understand the UFO phenomenon since the 1960s, which we can dream will be a departure from the conflicted, shambolic, and dismissive way that it addressed strange objects in the sky for fifty years. Or, like every other such effort to date, it will collapse into a hasty effort to close the whole topic and avoid admitting the failure of the intelligence community to make any real progress on a matter of obvious military and public interest. Only time will tell.

Anyway, that is all setting the stage for what has been going on for the last month in New Jersey: people are seeing drones.

The New Jersey Drones have all of the makings of a classic UFO flap. Unmanned aircraft are a topic of widespread public attention, tied up in everything from global conflict (Ukrainian combat drones) to intelligence intrigue (Chinese spy balloons) to domestic politics (DJI import bans). The real prevalence of drones flying around is increasing as they continue to come down in price and the FAA adopts a more permissive regulatory scheme. The airship flap happened a few years after airships started to make headlines (manned flight was barely achievable at the time, but there had been promising experiments and they inspired a great deal of speculation). Similarly, the drone flap happens a few years after foreign unmanned aircraft gained widespread media attention.

And this is the simplest explanation of what is happening in New Jersey: when people look up at the sky, they see things there.

The universe is full of more than humans can comprehend, but we make our peace with that by engaging with it through the sky. There is so much that we do not know about stars, galaxies, and the myriad of objects that surround us constantly, but we do know that they exist and we can see them. Even that can quickly become hazy when you really look up, though. Perceptual psychology offers a variety of explanations. For example: when the visual field is lacking in reliable, easily distinguishable features, our eyes can lose their ability to maintain a fixed target. The stars themselves begin to wander, moving erratically, as if under the control of some unknown intelligence. They are, in a sense, but that unknown intelligence is our own visual system performing poorly in a challenging environment. When a camera aimlessly hunts for focus we understand that it is a technical problem with the observation, but when our own eyes have similar trouble we have a hard time being so objective.

And then there are those phenomenon that are less common but still well known: meteorites, for example, which incidentally reached their peak frequency of the year, in the northern hemisphere, during the New Jersey flap. There are satellites, some of which can reflect light from the sun beyond the horizon in odd flashing patterns, and which are becoming far more numerous as Starlink continues its bulk launches. In the good seeing conditions of the rural Southwest you can hardly look at the sky and not find a satellite, or two, or three, or four, lazily wandering between the stars. Failing to find a moving light is more unusual than looking up and having one catch your eye.

But, most of all, there are airplanes. The FAA reports that their Air Traffic Organization provides services to about 45,000 flights per day, an underestimate of the total number of aircraft operations. There are some 800,000 certificated pilots in the US. During the peak aviation hours of the mid-day to evening, there are about 5,000 IFR flights over the US at any given moment---and that's excluding the many VFR operations. The nation's busiest airports, several of which are located in the New Jersey region, handle more than one arriving or departing flight per minute.

The sky is increasingly a busy place.

When the drone flap reached its apex a few weeks ago, news stations and websites posted video montages of the "drone sightings" sent in by their viewers or, well, found on Twitter by their staff. The vast majority of the objects in these videos were recognizably commercial aircraft. Green light, left wingtip. Red light, right wingtip. White light, tail. Flashing light, location varies, usually somewhere in the middle. During approach and departure, airliners are likely to have landing lights (forward-facing) and inspection lights (pointed back at the engines and wings) turned on. If you live near an airport, you probably see this familiar constellation every day, but you aren't calling it in to the news.

And this is where the UFO phenomenon is unavoidably psychosocial.

For as long as UFOs have been observed, skeptics (and psychosocial theorists) have noted that those observations tend to follow a fashion. In the late nineteenth century, the only thing anyone had made to fly were airships, and so everyone saw airships. By the mid-20th century, the flying saucer had been introduced. The exact origin of the flying saucer is actually surprisingly complicated (having precedents going back decades in fiction), but the 1947 UFO flap solidified it as the "classic" form of UFO. For most of the golden age of UFOlogy, flying saucers were a norm punctuated only by the occasional cigar.

During the 1970s, the development of computer modeling for the radar return of flat surfaces (ironically by a Soviet physicist who seemed largely unaware of the military applications and so published his work openly) enabled the development of "stealth" aircraft. Practical matters involving the limitations of the modeling methods (the fewer vertices the better) and the low-RF-reflectivity materials known at the time meant that these aircraft were black and triangular. During the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of "black triangle" UFO sightings spanned the country, almost displacing the flying saucer as the archetypal UFO. Some of these were probably genuine sightings of the secret F-117, but far more were confirmation bias. The popular media and especially UFO newsletters promulgated this new kind of craft. People were told to look for black triangles, so they looked, and they saw black triangles.

This phenomenon is often termed "mass hysteria," but I try to avoid that language. "Hysteria" can invoke memories of "female hysteria" and a long history of dismissive and unhelpful treatment of disempowered individuals. To the extent that mass hysteria has a formal definition, it tends to refer to symptoms of such severity as to be considered illness. A flap has a different character: I am not sure that it is fair to say that someone is "hysterical" when they look in an unfamiliar place and see what they have been told everyone else is seeing.

While rather less punchy, I think that "mass confirmation bias" is a better term. "Mass susceptibility to suggestion," perhaps. "Mass priming effects." "Mass misunderstanding." "Mass surprise at the facets of our world that are always there but you seldom care to notice."

There are a surprising number of balloons in the air. Researchers launch them, weather agencies launch them, hobbyists launch them. They can drift around for days, or longer if carefully engineered. They are also just about as innocuous as an aerial object can be, rarely doing anything more nefarious than transmitting their location and some environmental measurements. And yet, when a rare sophisticated spy balloon drifts across the country, everyone starts noticing balloons for the first time. The Air Force shoots a few down. Then, cooler heads prevail, and we all end up feeling a bit silly.

There are some lessons we can learn from the Chinese spy balloon incident. First, there are strange things up there: spy balloons have a long history, having been used by the United States to observe the Soviet Union in the 1950s. That balloon program, short-lived for diplomatic reasons, laid the groundwork for a surprising number of following military and scientific developments on the part of both countries (and, in true American fashion, General Mills). From this perspective it is no surprise that the Chinese have a spy balloon program, they are treading down a proven path and once again finding that the political problems are more difficult than the technical ones (In the 1950s, the United States took the position that countries did not have a claim to control of their upper airspace, an argument that the Chinese would have a hard time making today).

Second, there are a lot of routine things up there. In the great menagerie of aerial balloons, spy balloons are probably the rarest type. Any wispy, high-altitude drifter you might see is vastly more likely to be a scientific or hobby project. Far from unusual, they are in this field the definition of "usual." Normal denizens of the sky, like airliners and satellites and stars.

Third, it is difficult to tell the difference. Even the military struggles to tell one from the other, since balloons operate at high altitudes, are small in size, and even smaller in radar cross section due to the radio transparency of the envelope. The general public has little hope. So, they interpret things as they have been primed.

Normally, people do not see balloons, because they do not look. On the occasion they happen to notice one, they dismiss it as, well, probably a weather balloon. Then, a Chinese spy balloon makes the news. Suddenly people look: they notice more balloons, and when they do, their first thought is of Chinese intelligence. They interpret things as they have just been told to.

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If I seem to be belaboring the point, appreciate that I am trying to thread a needle. It is ridiculous, unreasonable, and frankly embarrassing for the media to disseminate "evidence" of a "drone incursion" that are plainly just blurry videos of Southwest flights on final. I am fast to fault the media. At the same time, I am much slower to blame the people who take these videos. They are, in a sense, just doing what they were told. They started looking for the drones, and now they are seeing drones.

The media has never been a friend to serious inquiry into UFOs. For much of the 20th century, "yellow journalism," intentional sensationalism, was the main vector by which UFO reports spread. These newspaper accounts held up to no scrutiny, and the journalists that filed them were often fully aware of that fact. The papers would print pretty much anything. There was a certain wink-and-nod aspect to most UFO reporting, which both spread UFOs as a popular phenomenon and hopelessly undermined the credibility of any actual sightings.

Today, yellow journalism is mostly a thing of the past, but it has been replaced by a new practice with similar outcomes. I think it has a lot to do with the fundamental collapse of journalism as an industry: the average city newsroom seems to consist of about three half-time reporters whose main source is their Twitter feed and primary interest is keeping their jobs by producing content fast enough to stay "fresh." They hardly have time to find out what happened at the City Council meeting, much less to critically evaluate twenty different UFO tips. The papers will print just about anything.

To the workaday New Jersey reporter, the drone flap must be a bit of a godsend. News is falling right into their laps. Video---the most important form of online content, the best engagement driver, the promised beachhead of the media conglomerate into the TikTokified culture of youths, is just showing up in their inboxes. This person says they saw a drone! Just like everyone's talking about! They have video! Of course you publish it. You'd be stupid not to.

It is, of course, an airplane. Maybe the reporter knows that, I think they often do. The text somewhere around the video player, for anyone that reads it, usually has an appropriate number of weasel words cushioned in vague language. They're not saying that this person caught a drone on video, they're just saying that this person says they caught a drone on video. Please watch the video. Share it with your friends, on one of the platforms where that's still worth something.

Okay, I'll knock it off, I'm trying not to just be a doomer about the decline of the media to such an extent that no one knows what's going on anywhere except for Twitter and ivy league universities for some reason. I have to skim the City Council meeting videos myself because there are sometimes literally zero journalists who are paid to sit through them. I once gave an impassioned speech about some homelessness project at a city meeting, and when some guy walked up to me after the meeting and introduced himself as a reporter from the Journal, I actually said "the Journal has reporters?" to his face. I thought they just syndicated from the five remaining AP writers and select Facebook pages. And I guess whatever Doug Peterson is on about, but seriously, now that 've gotten onto local issues I really need to stop before I get into Larry Barker Investigates memes.

So let's talk about the drones. Drones are in the news, in a military context, in a regulatory context, in popular media. Tensions with China continue to heighten, and it's clear that China doesn't have too many compunctions about US airspace sovereignty. I mean, I think I actually believe them that the balloon incursion into US airspace was unintentional (better to stay off the coasts, right? that's where a lot of the good military exercises are anyway, and we can imagine that the balloon's maneuvering capabilities are probably quite limited and flight planning depends a lot on wind forecasting which is not exact). But if they were really that broken up about it, they probably would have apologized via diplomatic channels before it became a major event. Clearly they were hoping it would go unnoticed.

First some items hit the news about mysterious drones. I'd love to identify a Patient Zero, but I don't think it's quite that simple, there was a confluence of a few things. Another congressional UAP hearing, reporting of drone incursions over Ramstein air base and Picatinny arsenal, and then a few random public reports of odd lights in the sky, as have always happened from time to time. But these separate incidents come together in the minds of the American public. A few people who are already inclined towards seeing strange things in the sky start looking for drones, and they see drones, or at least things that they are willing to conform to that expectation, even if only tentatively. They post on the internet. A cycle starts; it feeds on itself; more people looking, more sightings, more people looking, more sightings.

Somewhere along the way, US politics being what they are, Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey reports that he heard from "high sources" that the "drones" were coming from an "Iranian" "mothership" off the coast in the "Atlantic."

"These are from high sources. I don't say this lightly."

He added that the drones should be "shot down". [2]

Where the hell did that come from?! The thing is, it doesn't matter. Congresspeople going off on wild tangents repeating completely unconfirmed information that probably came via email from someone claiming to work for the CIA or whatever is just par for the course. I suppose it's always been true that if you want to find the truth you have to ignore the politicians, but it sure feels extra true right now. I don't think they're even exactly lying, they're just repeating whatever they hear that might serve an aim. It's almost an involuntary reflex. The entire series of congressional UAP hearings have been like this, basically devoid of any meaningful new information, but completely full of bizarre claims from unnamed sources that will never be seriously evaluated because no one thinks there's really anything to seriously evaluate.

The New Jersey Drone Flap is definitely that, a flap. Virtually everything you have heard is probably meaningless, just routine misperceptions that are both induced and amplified by the media. Politicians making solemn statements about needing to get on top of this, demanding a serious investigation, the DoD not doing enough, how we should shoot them down, are just doing what politicians do: they are Taking It Seriously, whatever It is. In a few weeks they will be Taking Something Else Seriously and American political discourse will move on without ever following up on any of it.

There's something curious about this flap, though, that I think does actually make it fundamentally different from the UFO flaps of yesteryear. It's the degree of strangeness involved. UFO enthusiasts sometimes use the phrase "high strangeness" to describe the more outlandish, the more inexplicable parts of UFO encounters. What people are claiming to see in New Jersey, though, is not high strangeness. It is not even strangeness. It's just... a little odd, at most.

The most authoritative government response to the New Jersey drones comes in the form of the "DHS, FBI, FAA & DoD Joint Statement on Ongoing Response to Reported Drone Sightings". Such a boring title gives you a degree of confidence that this is a Genuine Government Position, straight out of some ponderous subcommittee of the faceless bureaucracy. In other words, it's the real shit, too worked over by public information staff to likely contain baseless speculation or meaningless repetition of political discourse. If it's untruthful, it's at least intentionally untruthful, in some big organizational sense. It reads in part:

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.

Here the government is saying: those aircraft you're seeing in the sky? Well, they're aircraft. You know, airplanes and stuff. Some of them are even drones! You know people just have drones, right? You can buy them at Costco. I don't think they have Costco in Iran, so I don't know where the Mothership gets them, but here in the god-bless-the-USA the DJI Mavic 3 Pro is $3,000 on Amazon and you can fly it all around New Jersey, at least for the moment. Probably just for the moment. If you're thinking about it I'd recommend that you buy now.

The real Fortean strangeness of the drone flap is that it is not Fortean. It's not paranormal, it's not mysterious. People are just looking at the sky and claiming to see something that is manifestly, objectively, actually a real thing that exists in the sky.

And yet they are still wrong about it most of the time.

I think that's why the government's messaging has been so weird and scattered. It's not like the Air Force is going to reassure us that there are no drones in the sky, because there are. I know people are getting really tired of the "does not pose a threat" language but what else are they supposed to say? It's like if there was a New Jersey Bird Flap. The National Audobon Society continues to examine the data, but to date the reported sightings of birds are assessed to be lawfully operating birds, or airplanes or helicopters or stars mistaken for birds. There is no indication that they pose a danger to national security.

And after all of this, what is left? Well, as always, the mystery is left.

For every ten thousand sounding balloons, there is a Chinese Spy Balloon (these numbers are made up for the purpose of rhetoric, please do not check my math). For every ten thousand "drone sightings," there is a real drone, operating somewhere it shouldn't, for unknown reasons.

The Joint Statement again:

Additionally, there have been a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere, including within restricted air space. Such sightings near or over DoD installations are not new.

The military, and airports, and other security-sensitive installations have experienced occasional drone incursions for years. It rarely gets press. Most of the time it's some clueless hobbyist who crosses a line they shouldn't' have; this problem got bad enough that the FAA ended up deciding technical controls were required to make these mistakes more difficult.

There may be more more afoot: weeks ago some Chinese citizen, Yinpiao Zhou, was arrested for flying a consumer drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base to take photos. He reportedly said to federal investigators that the whole thing was "probably not a good idea," and it seems most likely he was just a SpaceX fan who wanted to get closeups of their facility at Vandenberg and severely didn't think things out. But there are reasons to be suspicious, a couple of months ago five Chinese nationals who had been attending a US college were arrested for sneaking around a military exercise taking photos of sensitive equipment. Their whole sequence of activities, including lying about their travel and coordinating to destroy evidence, can succinctly be described as "very suspicious." They seem to have been fully aware that they were doing something illegal, which encourages one to speculate about their motivations even if the charges of espionage have not yet been adjudicated in court.

There is good evidence that Chinese intelligence coordinates with more or less random people that travel between the US and China to opportunistically collect information on military capabilities, so the idea that there are people operating consumer drones around military bases in service of Chinese interests is not a particularly far-fetched one. It just kind of makes sense. If you were a Chinese intelligence agent, wouldn't you give it a try? It's so low risk and low cost it could practically be some handler's side project.

Foreign adversaries do provide reasons to keep a close eye on drones, especially as they interact with sensitive sites and military operations. The DoD has an admitted inability to do so effectively, leading to a significant investment in methods of detecting and countering small drones. There is a drone problem. It's just not new, it's not specific to New Jersey, and it's not some big dramatic event, but a slow evolution of military and intelligence practice akin to the development of aviation itself.

The FAA has issued a number of temporary flight restrictions in the area, and the media has made a pretty big deal of that. But most of the flight restrictions aren't even that restrictive (they allow private operations if the FAA is notified and provided with a statement of work), and the FAA tends to reflexively issue flight restrictions when anyone gets nervous. It's probably a wise decision: all this talk of drones has, ironically, almost certainly brought the drones out. People probably are more likely to operate in an unsafe fashion near sensitive infrastructure sites. They're using their drones to look for all these drones they're hearing about! And they barely even know what drones are!

[1] One of the reasons I don't write about UFOs that often, besides the fact that it gets me more weird threatening emails than any other topic, is that it's very hard to explain a lot of the events of UFO history without providing extensive background. The beliefs of individual people in the UFO community vary widely with respect to the credibility of well-known individuals. When someone admits a hoax, there is virtually always someone else who will claim the admission of the hoax to itself be a hoax (if not CIA disinfo). Some people, like Doty, have gone through this cycle so many times that it's hard to tell which of his lies he's lying about. The point is that you can't really say anything about UFOs without someone disagreeing with you to the point of anger, and so if I'm going to say anything at all I have to sort of push through and just write what I think. I encourage vigorous debate, and historically it has often been the lack of such debate that has created the biggest problems. But, you know, please be polite. If I am a CIA shill they're not paying me much for it.

[2] Inconsistent quotation-and-punctuation style is in the original due to the BBC's internally consistent but odd looking style manual rules for putting the punctuation inside or outside of the quote. They are, incidentally, pretty close to what I usually do. See, it's not just me struggling with where to put the period.