Game of Drones

Unidentified drones and other mysterious airborne objects are fueling a new age of UFO mania — and renewing public demands for government transparency

Illustration by DALL-e and New Rules Media

The hullabaloo over mysterious lights and unidentified objects moving around in the skies over five states and key U.S. military facilities is ushering Americans into a new era of UFO mania. The federal government’s insistence that it still doesn’t know the origin of some of these objects—some cited as being drones—is also triggering the growing ire of hundreds of state and local officials.

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NEW YORK—"Shoot ‘em down!” President-elect Donald Trump bellowed in capital letters recently on his social media platform, Truth Social, referring to the strange lights swarming the nation’s northeast skies in recent days and weeks.

Are they drones? All of them? What else might some of the moving lights and objects be, sky-dancing now in loose clusters over five U.S. states and key military outlets? Why are they swarming? What might they be monitoring? Who or what is sending and operating them, and from where?

“Our government knows what’s happening,” Trump said Monday at a national press conference aired from Mar-a-Lago. “Our military knows. Our president knows, but for some reason they all want to keep people in suspense.” [Later, when asked if he’d received any classified briefings about the sightings, Trump declined to comment.]

So what’s up? Why the secrecy? There is still no single answer to what’s behind the recent surge in citizen reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs, previously known as UFOs) being sighted over New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. And while the White House says there is no threat to public safety, it’s also acknowledging that it is “still unclear” about what’s happening— and why now. The FBI says it has received more than 5,000 citizen reports of local sightings. It says initial investigations have revealed that some of the objects are private planes and others are, in fact, drones. [There are more than 1 million drones registered with the Federal Aviation Administration in the tri-state area of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.] But there also are some other objects still—as yet—unidentified, catalyzing a surge of citizen reports flooding agency inboxes.

“We’re following this closely,” President Joe Biden said Wednesday morning. “Nothing nefarious so far, apparently, but we’re still checking it all out.”

Mass Interest

Public interest has been overwhelming. Posts about the “mysterious drones” are being shared on TikTok. A raft of new conspiracy theories are emerging, along with an older one, called Project Blue Beam. There’s even been some ribbing from late night talk show hosts, some of whom have been saying that shooting down any of these aerial objects, especially during this time of year, might accidentally remove Santa Claus and his sleigh permanently from the night skies this holiday season.

Yet for many state residents, especially those in New Jersey, where the sightings began a few months ago, it’s no laughing matter.

Recent statements by state, local and national lawmakers sound like they would not be out of place in the widely popular 1990s television series, The X-Files, which built a foundation among many Americans that “the truth is out there”—meaning that unidentified flying objects are real but the government is keeping it all a big secret. [Series creators say they are developing a new version of the show for release some time in 2026.]

Lack of government transparency, and confusion over the origin of this month’s real-life sightings, is growing. In Pennsylvania, state police are flying helicopters to try to “determine where these objects are originating from and what their purpose is,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Friday. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, many local officials are going public with their frustration over the lack of information being shared by the federal government.

New Jersey state Senator Jon Bramnick, R-Union, told CNN Monday that “Bigfoot might be a myth, but the drones and lights in New Jersey are very real.” In a recent interview with CNN anchor Kate Bolduan, Bramnick asked: “Why are some of these objects so large? Some are six feet large, some are the size of small SUVs and there are many of them coming in at the same times in swarms—in as many as 50 objects in a swarm over New Jersey, and for weeks. …This doesn’t seem like a surge in hobbyist drone activity. …If the (federal) government wants to calm things down, they need to understand that the public is rooted in the fact that some things are—and have been—very abnormal in our skies, for a while now, and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

New Jersey state Assemblyman Brian Bergen also weighed in, telling CNN affiliate News 12 New Jersey last week, after attending a briefing at state police headquarters, that he is “legitimately concerned for what the hell is going on because nobody knows.”

According to Mayor Michael Melham of Belleville Township in New Jersey, most of the drone-like objects seem to be “primarily operating at night, often displaying flashing lights, then going dark to evade police helicopters when approached.” Melham says there is also local concern over where some of the drones have been spotted. “One of the takeaways from the police briefings we’ve had on this indicates that these objects appear to be surveilling New Jersey’s critical infrastructure,” he said. The mayor of West Milford, Michele Dale, has reported 60 drones hovering over local reservoirs.

We’ve Been Here Before

It’s not the first time Americans have felt they’re being kept in the dark about strange sightings in the night skies.

Our national fascination with UFOs dates back to the late 1940s and Hollywood’s dozens of movies about Visitors from Outer Space, while some tales of strange sightings are even older than that. There were reports of “mystery airships” spotted over the western United States in the 1890s, and George Orwell’s 1898 sci-fi classic, War of the Worlds, subsequently captured the imagination of generations—in books, music, movies and stories told and retold by Hollywood and throughout popular culture.

But it was one thing when stories about UFOs were made by Hollywood writer-director Stephen Spielberg into heart-warming movie blockbusters [E.T. (1982) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ], or morphed into conspiracy theories and fringe subcultures during NASA’s manned missions to the Moon —or referenced in a small number of pilot sightings recorded in military investigations and classified testimony.

Today, though, UFO sightings are becoming far less rare or reimagined. Strange moving lights in the sky are now captured on smartphones by ordinary citizens, then shared on TikTok. According to a 2021 report by Pew Research, more than half of Americans now believe civilian and military UFO reports constitute probable or definite evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Greg Eghigian, the author of After the Flying Saucers Came, a recent global history published last summer about the public’s fascination with UAPs around the world, says modern-day belief in their existence began growing after a December 2017 article in The New York Times revealed a top-secret U.S. Department of Defense program which had been investigating UFO sightings between 2007 and 2012.

Americans’ belief that we are not alone surged again in February 2023, when the United States marshaled fighter jets to shoot down not one, not two, but three unidentified flying objects over North America in less than a week—following the highly publicized takedown of a fourth flying object, the giant Chinese spy balloon that crossed the country before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina. One of the three objects, felled over the waters of Alaska, was described in news reports only as being “the size of a small car” and “most likely not a balloon.” The second, shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory, was described as being “cylindrical”—but without much else shared about it publicly. The third object, brought down off the coast of Michigan, was “octagonal in structure, with strings hanging off.”

Not much else has been shared by government authorities about these sightings, but since then, new History channel programs have begun showing verified, leaked video footage of strange UAPs observed in November 2004 by military pilots flying a Navy fighter jet off the coast of California, sightings not disputed by the government and now shared widely on TikTok, Twitch and other social platforms.

And now, in a string of recent media interviews, national security spokesman John Kirby acknowledges that the current swarms of lights being spotted in the nation’s northeast skies are not entirely drone-generated.

True or false, Trump said in a news conference Monday, the drones and UAPs “seem to be targeting certain locations.” He said he canceled a planned trip to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, this weekend because of “the clusters and many lights” being observed in the skies near the club.

More Hearings

So what’s next? More congressional hearings and agency investigations into this latest “done-swarm” phenomenon have been scheduled. More information may (or may not) be forthcoming before or after the holiday break.

“It has to be recognized that in large measure, sightings of UFOs and UAPs are often grassroots phenomena that aren’t triggered by anything except people actually seeing things,” the author Eghigian told The Guardian last week. “…It’s also true that whenever this stuff crops up, conspiracy theories and government secrecy also pops up. It’s also important to understand that the public is now more ready than ever to hear more about unidentified sightings. Since 2016, with the advent of the notion of a ‘deep state’ thwarting the efforts of the Republican Party and god-fearing Americans, the notion of UAPs has been given new life.”

At least one thing is certain, Eghigian concludes. Public interest in UFOs is growing, and is not likely to fade—at least not anytime soon. “There’s no question that regardless of what anyone actually believes, there’s something about these sightings now that is not merely feeding our fascination with UFOs, but is now making more people question our safety and security and desire to get to the bottom of things.”

Indeed, the truth is out there, somewhere — just not (yet) in the public hearing rooms on Capitol Hill.

Stay tuned.

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What is your take on these recent sightings, and the lack of transparency so far by federal agencies and government investigators? Let us know your thoughts and theories.

NOTE: This article was updated Wednesday, December 18th, with new survey data, President Joe Biden’s latest remarks on the sightings—and expanded cultural and historical context.