The great drone freak-out is upon us

The drone age is here and the skies are going to get a lot more crowded.

- Alex Kingsbury

The US public has already been given the government's best answers to the latest panic over mysterious lights in the sky over New Jersey. Many Americans simply don't like a mundane answer - fixed-wing piloted aircraft, smaller planes, hobbyist drones - that implies they are rubes at best and paranoid at worst.

Even assurances from New Jersey officials in particular have done little to quiet the current public clamor. Perhaps that's unsurprising for a state where, like so many other parts of the country, people were duped by Orson Welles' radio play, War Of The Worlds, 86 years ago this fall. Perhaps that's a cheap shot at the Garden State on my part: A YouGov poll in 2024 found that some 18 per cent of Americans nationwide report having seen a UFO.

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a joint statement on Dec 12 assuring the public that they "take seriously the threat that can be posed by unmanned aircraft systems". And on Dec 19, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) temporarily banned drones from flying over nearly two dozen communities in the state.

In some cases, people in New Jersey have been sending their own commercially available drones aloft to investigate reports of all the flying drones.

I suspect what's going on in some of the cases is that people are seeing real drones aloft for the first time. Not only that: The government did not allow drones to be flown at night until late 2023. No doubt, the public's unfamiliarity will decrease as these devices become more and more widespread and visible in all of our daily lives.