Drones and Mass Hysteria: An Inquest

Friday night I went out driving to see if I could get a look at one of these darned mystery drones for myself. Ground zero was reportedly Morris County, NJ, so I made the short trek. Let me first acknowledge that I could easily be suffering from a variant of the syndrome commonly known as confirmation bias. It’s an affliction I typically try to guard against, in many facets of journalism and life, but it’s never totally avoidable, as we all subjectively hurtle through day-to-day consciousness with no full control of how we absorb and process information. This often leads to cognitive biases, whereby the information we receive is filtered through a predetermined, confirmatory lens, and disconfirmatory information is ignored or discarded. Managing the inevitability of confirmation bias is a constant struggle, or at least should be for those who aspire to maximum rationality.

So far as I can ascertain my own conscious will, I had no particular desire to validate the burgeoning narrative of a “mystery drone” incursion. Group psychology and mass hysteria have bedeviled humanity for millennia. You can read about instances of mass hysteria from the Middle Ages when hundreds or thousands of people danced erratically for weeks at a time, before collapsing dead. More contemporary political group psychology frequently compels people to justify or rationalize an infinite array of bad behavior, out of a desire to remain in good standing with a certain ingroup.

Having ventured out for the specific purpose of drone-spotting, I was a huge candidate for confirmation bias. It wasn’t as though I was just ambling through a pasture, looked up, and saw a bedazzling drone of unknown provenance. I was purposely looking for drones, spurred by social and political chatter that had reached a crescendo. This might mean that my observations should be disregarded, or at least viewed with heightened skepticism.

That said, driving Friday night in Rockaway, NJ, I saw a drone, with multiple red lights, hovering stationary in the sky. I definitely have never witnessed such a flying object before. I was able to look at it for around 10-15 seconds, before losing it in the trees, as I was operating a moving vehicle at the time. It wasn’t long enough to attempt to safely snap a photo, which probably would not have captured a useful image anyway.

This was probably a mile or so from Picatinny Arsenal, a US military facility which produces artillery munition, including for the current war in Ukraine. Whether there’s a connection here with the drone sighting, it’s not possible for me to say. Unlike so many others who populate the internet, I try not to be too flippant about drawing causal conclusory inferences, which is often a hallmark of poor reasoning. But a lot of the mystery drone activity does seem to be taking place in the vicinity of this military base. To the degree that my visual perception is at all reliable, what I saw was definitely not a plane.

After a bit more driving, I stopped at a location where I saw another apparent drone, at a higher altitude, which seems to be the type most people in the area are reporting to have witnessed. It resembled some sort of fixed-wing aircraft. It was traveling in a straight line, with red and green lights. I don’t think this was a plane either, but it appeared more plane-like, so my confidence is lesser than with the first drone. (I’m only using the word “drone” as a stand-in, because obviously I don’t know for certain what any of these objects are. Maybe “object” would be a better stand-in word.)

Here’s what I would preliminarily urge people to consider. Group psychology and mass hysteria are real things. Undoubtedly, plenty of interested parties would love for the drone/object ‘invasion’ to be attributable to the standard cadre of scary “adversaries” like Russia, China, or Iran. Others may wish for it to be a secret Pentagon program being covered up by some elements of the Biden Administration, because they dislike the Biden Administration and a cover-up would be another datapoint confirming their dislike. Others may want to somehow blame it on Trump, who has now called for the drones to be shot down. Whatever your preferred explanation for these object sightings, harboring that preference should be paired with an openness to receipt of information without overwhelming confirmatory bias. Ideally, there should probably be no preference at all. Why should you have a preference, one way or another, what the genesis of the activity is? My preference is to simply know what the genesis is, rather than having a preference for any particular explanation. In other words, my dominant preference here is for truth-seeking, rather than explanation-hoping.

With the public backlash and interest growing exponentially, it’s plausible that the uproar could be harnessed for questionable ends, like bombing Iran. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), who I interviewed at the Republican Convention last summer, has already come out with his characteristically wild claim, based on secret consultations with secret sources, that the drones could be from an Iranian “drone mothership” that somehow managed to get off the coast of New Jersey without (public) detection. It would certainly be strange if Iran, which has been so emasculated in its own home region that it could do nothing to prevent the disintegration of the Syrian government, nonetheless could still marshal the resources for an audacious drone-mothership journey to New Jersey.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), another piece of work who’s hardly ever met a foreign entanglement he didn’t like since entering the House of Representatives 44 years ago (yes, you read that number right) made the following statement at a press conference he convened Saturday. “The elusive maneuvering of these drones suggests a major military power sophistication that begs the question whether they have been deployed to test our defense capabilities — or worse — by violent dictatorships including Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea.”

Other than the typical misuse of “beg the question,” something to be flagged with this statement is Smith’s serious thirst for the drone sightings to serve as the basis for some sort of punitive military action. Or at the very least, to serve as justification for increased military-industrial expenditure.

It’s silly for anyone to dismiss the drone sighting phenomenon as entirely an instance of mass hysteria. I apparently saw one myself, and don’t think I’m in the throes of hysteria. On the other hand, mass hysteria could certainly be a component, and it’s very possible that politicians will attempt to leverage the reasonable public alarm by fomenting their own version of hysteria in pursuit of pre-existing objectives. So those are the factors I would have front of mind when evaluating this curious episode.

---