The No-Win 'Mystery Drone' Clusterfuck

If you are wondering what to think of the New Jersey mystery drone situation, it is this: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhHhhhhhHHHHHHhhH. 

Last week, I wrote at length that the mystery drones in New Jersey are almost definitely a mass delusion caused by a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re talking about looking at the sky and reporting manned aircraft and hobbyist drones as being something anomalous. I said this because we have seen this pattern of drone reports before, and this is exactly what has happened in those instances. Monday evening, a group of federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Defense issued a joint statement telling everyone to please calm down. 

“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 statement reads. “We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast.”

And yet the New Jersey drone story will not go away and has only gotten worse. Opportunistic politicians are stoking mass panic to cynically raise their profile and to get themselves booked on national cable news channels and perpetuate the panic cycle. The fact that the government is telling people there is no conspiracy is, to a certain set of politicians, itself a conspiracy. 

All of this has become a no-win clusterfuck for everyone except the attention seeking grifters within the government who are themselves railing against the government to focus attention on themselves. To these people, government inaction is unacceptable, and government actions and explanations cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, regular-ass-people on the internet have debunked many viral images and videos of “drones” by cross-referencing them with known flight patterns of actual planes or have been able to identify what the “mystery” drones are by comparing lights on the “drones” to lights on known models of manned aircraft. 

WTF Is Going on With the New Jersey Mystery Drones? Maybe Mass Panic Over Nothing

The New Jersey drone situation is very interesting. We’ve also seen this story before.

404 MediaJason Koebler

This has led to predictable outcomes such as random people in New Jersey shining laser pointers and (possibly shooting guns?) at passenger planes, which is very dangerous.

It is impossible to keep up with every Politician Who Should Know Better who has said something stupid, but Rolling Stone and Defector both have worthwhile rundowns of what has been going on the last few days. 

We have reached Marjorie Taylor Green-is-personally-threatening-to-shoot-down-the-drones levels of insanity. Former Maryland governor and failed Senate candidate Larry Hogan tweeted a viral picture of Orion’s Belt and called it a drone. January 6 attendee, QAnon booster, and Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano, who can regularly be relied on to make any crisis worse by contributing his dumbassery, tweeted an image of TIE Fighter replica from Star Wars that has been regularly used in memes for nearly two years and said “It is inconceivable that the federal government has no answers nor has taken any action to get to the bottom of the unidentified drones.” He got Community Noted, then followed this up with a post saying this was a joke and used it as a commentary on the modern state of journalism. 

Local politicians who fashion themselves as more seriously trying to help the people of New Jersey have also found themselves regularly getting booked on national cable TV shows and their tweets regularly going viral; Dawn Fantasia, a New Jersey assemblywoman who rose to prominence in the state as a principal running against the general concept of Woke, has done interviews on Fox, CNN, and News Nation. Kristen Cobo of Moms for Liberty, which is most famous for pushing schools to ban books and demonize LGBTQ+ students, filmed “approximately 8 suspected drones,” then talked about it in an interview on News Nation. New Jersey State Senator Douglas Steinhardt has said on CNN that the idea that these are manned aircraft is “insulting” and that we must “combat Washington DC gaslighting.” Gubernatorial candidate and AM talk radio host Bill Spadea bravely filmed a video on the side of the road that included drones and suggested that it “might be a foreign government” and suggested they should be shot down.

It is easy to look at social media posts from these folks and to roll one’s eyes and move on. As a reporter and someone who has covered drones endlessly I also find all of this absurdity kind of fun and a welcome distraction from all the other dystopian stuff we report on. But I know many people who live in New Jersey and have family there, and all of this is causing some level of undue panic. 

About the author

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.

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