The recent sightings of puzzling unidentified aircraft in New Jersey and other states have triggered yet another round of unanswered questions — and fueled conspiracy theories.
For one, the odd objects have sparked a visual public mayday and melee — one that might be mirroring elements of the ongoing unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) issue, spurring talk of secretive saucer crashes by run-amok alien crewmembers with expired driver licenses.
Mischaracterization of what’s seen. Public anxiety about what’s not known. Government officials seemingly not clear on what’s happening. Toss in Capitol Hill lawmakers demanding answers about what to do next. It’s all enough to give you a case of the high- and low-altitude heebie-jeebies.
People don’t usually look up
Jamey Jacob, executive director of the Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, has some thoughts about what’s likely going on.
Related: UFOs and UAP: History, sightings and mysteries
“This is a case of the general populace not being familiar with the density of air traffic in the national airspace, particularly on the Eastern Seaboard,” Jacob told Space.com. “Most people today generally don’t spend much time looking up at the night sky, and when you do, you finally start to see what’s around you.”
Jacob said that, while the possibility of drone threats is something that we should be concerned about — particularly since we’re largely unprepared to deal with it — the present scenario appears to be mostly misidentification of piloted aircraft.
The drones that have been sighted, Jacob added, look to be generally operating under the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s night authorization for drone pilots.
“Nefarious operations would as a rule of thumb not fly with navigation lights so [as] to be harder to track,” said Jacob. “The misidentification of commercial airliners and private aircraft as drones are predominantly due to the difficulty of determining size and distance of a vehicle without a reference scale. Research that we have done on estimating size and location of both drones and manned aircraft back this up.”
Does the government know more?
Others have different ideas, however. For example, the drone sightings are real and they are government- and/or industry-operated drones, said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies in Austin.
“There are too many, and they are too large for them to be civilian,” Powell told Space.com. “I don’t think any adversary of the United States would dare try to fly drones into our territory at this level, and if they did, I would think we would respond.”
Powell added that that he feels confident that government officials know much more about the drones than they are telling the public.
“This of course leads to the same type of problems as with the UAP issue. Anxiety kicks in and people see drones everywhere they look,” said Powell.
Moreover, the media is not capable of distinguishing between reports of drones versus reports of normal aircraft, nor are they adept at asking the right questions of government officials, Powell said.
Kernel of truth
“Conspiracy theories start to grow because the government withholds information and makes nonsensical statements, such as ‘We don’t know where the drones come from or what they are, but we know they pose no risk,'” Powell said.
Some members of the public are indeed seeing drones, Powell said. “Amazingly, the same debunkers that argue against UAP are arguing against drones. They cite examples of misidentification, which of course exists.”
Bottom line from Powell: “There is a kernel of truth in these drone reports, and I think the government knows the truth. I hope people will understand that as long as the government withholds information that this is the type of mess that unfolds.”
Standard practice
“Many of these fly like human-made drones and others appear to be airplanes or helicopters,” said Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb.
“It is standard practice for the U.S. military to notify law enforcement authorities of any plans to fly drones over residential areas,” he told Space.com. “Therefore, unidentified drones must have originated from civilians or an adversarial nation.”
Loeb is a co-founder of the Galileo Project initiative. Its goal is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.
Inappropriate smoke screen?
As for drones from adversarial nations, Loeb said that possibility should come as no surprise, since a Chinese spy balloon was spotted back in early 2023 flying at a high altitude across the United States.
Even though the balloon was nearly 150 feet (45 meters) in diameter, Loeb recalled, it took a while for the U.S. Air Force to shoot it down off the coast of South Carolina.
Drones are used routinely in the current conflict in Ukraine, which began with the Russian invasion in February 2022. And drone technology has advanced considerably in recent years, especially in China, Loeb said.
“The primary question that needs to be clarified is whether these flying objects are used for espionage or pose any other national security threat,” Loeb said. “Alluding to an extraterrestrial origin is an inappropriate smoke screen to hide the incompetence of the U.S. intelligence agencies.”