A remote-controlled drone over an ocean coast. – Credit: Getty Images
Over the past month, residents of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have posted thousands of reports and posts on social media about alleged sightings of suspicious drones and unidentified aerial objects at night. And because government agencies have not provided an explanation as sensational as people think their photo and video “evidence” is, the public has gone wild with outlandish conspiracy theories ranging from foreign spy operations to alien visitations.
The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense attempted to quell the hysteria on Monday with a joint statement that read: “We believe that the sightings to date include a combination of legal commercial drones, hobbyist drones and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and stars incorrectly reported as drones.” Even the iconic Goodyear Blimp was deemed a UFO by someone who captured footage of it with his phone. (The official term for what was once categorized as an unidentified flying object, or UFO, is now Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP, and includes “any objects in the sky, at sea, or in space that defy scientific explanation,” according to the Ministry of Defense)
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But for the more paranoid amateur researchers, this nothing-to-see-here response, along with the agency’s continued assurances that no one will be endangered by aircraft they may have seen, is evidence of a cover-up. President-elect Donald Trump himself suggested during a press conference on Monday that the government and military both knew exactly what was going on, but they weren’t telling the American people. Expressions of concern from other politicians about a lack of transparency – including from a Pennsylvania state lawmaker who fell for misinformation that Star Wars The spaceship model transported by truck was labeled a ‘crashed drone’ – encouraging further speculation.
One of the most prominent unfounded theories at the moment is that the alleged drones are searching for radioactive material. This was an idea, without evidence, suggested by John Furgeson, CEO of Saxon Aerospace, a Kansas-based company that makes unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). In a TikTok video posted over the weekend that has since been viewed more than 1.5 million times, Furgeson argued that “if (the objects) are drones, the only reason they would fly, and fly so low, is because they trying to smell something on the ground. This could include gas leaks or radiation, he said.
Various and increasingly extreme versions of this hypothesis circulated until some were convinced that suspected drones were searching for a nuclear warhead. “Has anyone heard rumors of a smuggled suitcase bomb or a dirty bomb that got through customs or something like that?” wrote one commenter on the Facebook group “New Jersey Mystery Drones – Let’s Solve It,” which has more than 75,000 members. (Northern New Jersey was the epicenter of the alleged drone activity.) Another noted: “I spoke to a friend in the military who also works with drones, he said these are 100% our drones and they are only used in such an excess would be used. for serious reasons and gave examples such as: tracking the nuclear fallout of a dirty bomb going off, tracking biological weapons, tracking weapons of mass destruction.”
More fear-mongering came from a source no less reputable than Bethenny Frankel The Real Housewives of New York Citywho also claimed in a TikTok to have heard the search theory from a trusted source: in this case, a “man” whose father “worked with the Pentagon and NASA and, for example, with secret projects.” Frankel said this person told her that any drones “could very possibly sniff out something very dangerous.” The video has been viewed 1.7 million times since she posted it on Monday. And on Tuesday, Michael Melham, the mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, appeared on the local Fox affiliate show Good day New Yorkwhere he gave credence to the “radioactive material” theory, noting that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had confirmed earlier in December that a shipment of such content had gone missing in the state.
But the missing object is an Eckert & Ziegler HEGL-0132, a medical scanning device that was shipped for safe disposal, and the radiation it contains rates less than Category 3 on the International Atomic Energy Agency scale, meaning it is “It is very unlikely that this will cause permanent injury to persons,” the NRC report said. While certain drones are equipped to conduct radiological research, it would be incredibly surprising if this device were responsible for thousands of reported drone sightings from Virginia to New England and as far west as Ohio.
While aliens have long been a popular explanation for UAPs — and many have argued that images now circulating online show alien craft — some have brought up the so-called Project Blue Beam, a conspiracy theory originated by the late Canadian conspirator Serge Monast. In the 1990s, Monast predicted that NASA and the United Nations would use advanced technology to fake an alien invasion or encounter, tricking countries into falling under a totalitarian New World Order. “I believe this could be some kind of projection, hologram or illusion based on several factors,” wrote a member of the New Jersey drone research group, echoing this concept. “This means they are not REAL, they are essentially images used to stoke mass hysteria in the US.” Others theorized that the UAPs could be computer-generated phantoms or referred to Project Blue Beam by name, arguing that the visual phenomena were staged.
The increased attention to aircraft has now led to an abundance of commentary on flying objects ‘spraying’ the ground below with unknown substances. This ties in with the enduring conspiracy theory that planes emit in their wake ‘chemtrails’, chemical agents used to poison or manipulate the general population. (In reality, these cloudy streaks are contrails, formed by water vapor that has condensed and frozen around particles found in aircraft exhaust.) A user on in New Jersey of a plane leaving contrails in the sky, and asked, “What is this plane releasing? Could it be a biological attack from an unknown adversary? Or something even more sinister?”
Another group of conspirators is fixated on flying objects that they call not drones, but “spheres,” points of floating or moving light. There are claims of orbs on video turning into ‘crafts’ or interacting with similar orbs – although some seem convinced that orbs and drones are shooting each other. (The so-called orbs are occasionally called “plasmoids,” a real effect observed in physics, although there is nothing to support this identification.) One Redditor came up with a particularly complicated theory on the subject: “The real phenomenon is the orbs, not the drones,” they wrote in the comments on a video of sky lights over Phoenix. “The drones are military. The government has either infested the airspace with drones to distract the public’s attention from the orbs (which are much more rarely spotted than the drones) or to use the drones for surveillance of the orbs. Or both.”
Perhaps even worse than this kind of eccentric nonsense is the trend of people within social media conspiracy groups asking AI chatbots to interpret the wave of alleged drone sightings. One woman asked Meta’s Llama program for the “highly likely” answer to the mystery and shared the screenshot of the bot’s response and shared a screenshot of the bot’s response on Facebook. Lama responded: “I would speculate that the most likely origin of the NJ drones is China, with a probability of about 60-70%.” The chatbot noted that “the drones appear to be coming from the ocean, which could indicate a maritime launch pad.” China, of course, has no military or naval presence in the Atlantic Ocean – because the US has made diplomatic efforts to prevent this.
Yet Meta’s software was no further removed from the masses making up their own fantastic stories about a treacherous drone fleet. If the plausible, boring answer simply doesn’t cut it, everyone and everything – including AI – apparently has to create a more exciting possibility out of thin air.
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