What should we believe about New Jersey’s drones?

The past few weeks’ frenzy around alleged sightings of mysterious drones flying above my home state of New Jersey reminds me of one of my grandfather Jack McCarthy’s favorite stories. He was a teenager on October 30, 1938 — the day that Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds Halloween broadcast claimed that Martians had landed in a rural Garden State hamlet called Grovers Mill, which happened to be one town over from where my grandfather lived. 

According to Jack’s frequent retellings of the story during family holidays, he and his friends hadn’t actually heard the broadcast themselves. They were loitering around Princeton when someone they knew drove by in a car and asked if they wanted to hop in and drive to Grovers Mill to see the Martians. Unlike the people who were reportedly thrown into mass panic by the broadcast (which media historians now say was far fewer people than long assumed), this group of bored teenage boys was apparently thrilled that something exciting had finally happened in their small town.

Upon arriving in Grovers Mill, there was no sign of an alien landing. There was, however, a farmer who was either riding a tractor or pushing a plow (depending on which version of the story you heard). The boys approached him and said they were looking for the Martians.

The farmer looked befuddled. “What Martians?”

Unfortunately, in 2024 few of us in the Garden State have the privilege of being as blissfully offline as that 1930s farmer tending to his fields. Because here, drones are unavoidable even if you refuse to look up at the sky. Local media has been overtaken by reports of drone sightings over nuclear power plants and military facilities. Representative Jeff Van Drew claimed an Iran-owned “mothership” was sending the drones from offshore, only to be corrected by an unnamed former Trump administration official who said that “it’s China.” The sheriff of Ocean County sent his own drones over Seaside Heights, the town best known for being terrorized by the likes of Snooki and the Situation on MTV’s Jersey Shore. 

The drone mania is remarkably bipartisan; it’s also become a sporting ground for armchair pundits eager to rag on elected officials of all political stripes. Politicians ranging from Senator Richard Blumenthal to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested the drones ought to be shot down, which then caused neurosis among skeptics who were concerned people will start shooting at commercial airliners. New Jersey’s Democratic senator Andy Kim, less than a week after taking the oath of office, went on a drone-watching excursion in Hunterdon County (your tax dollars at work!) and said he saw “multiple unexplained and unidentified” flying objects. But UFO enthusiasts on social media, having finally found a news cycle where they can truly shine, quickly corrected Kim and told him he was likely misidentifying planes. 

Are some (perhaps many) of these drone sightings misidentified planes? Absolutely. The skies above New Jersey are jam-packed with planes going in and out of New York and Philadelphia’s airports, plus smaller but highly-trafficked airports such as Trenton and Teterboro. There’s also Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, one of the biggest military installations in the country — and don’t discount the Goodyear blimp that sometimes hovers over MetLife Stadium. Yes, it was mistaken for a UFO several years ago by so many people that it made the national news.

But that doesn’t explain everything. The drone mania came uncomfortably close to home for me when reports on community forum Nextdoor reported early Friday that one had crashed near a Lowe’s Home Improvement store in Hillsborough, a few towns over from where I live with my family now (and, for those curious, about a half-hour drive from Grovers Mill). “Stay away from Lowe’s,” one post warned. “A drone went down and hazmat fire department swat police are there and not letting anyone thru.” A post in a subreddit for Lowe’s employees backed up the rumor. Local news reported that the police hadn’t found anything. False alarm, or cover-up? No one can agree! 

Here in central New Jersey, some people seem genuinely disturbed by the drones, paranoid that Russia or China is creeping closer to our shores — which makes sense, especially for people (like my boomer relatives) who are old enough to remember the genuine miasma of fear during the Cold War. Other people seem to think it’s a whole lot of fun. Some observers are speculating that drone hobbyists are adding to the hysteria by putting their drones in the air, too. That echoes the “creepy clown panic” in the fall of 2016, in which reports of deranged, sometimes machete-wielding clowns — likely set off by a horror movie marketing stunt — undoubtedly kept up momentum when pranksters decided to join in on the antics by donning clown regalia themselves. Some retailers, including Target, pulled clown costumes from their stores in response.

Perhaps the person who “gets it” the most is, oddly enough, President-elect Donald Trump. His take has been alternately serious and silly, ranging from a stern warning that the drones may deserve military action to a meme of former New Jersey governor Chris Christie stuffing his face with McDonald’s hamburgers delivered by drone. Because, put simply, conspiracy theories give us something to believe in together. That collective mania feels strangely like community. Even better when it’s a conspiracy theory that crosses political party lines and allows us to all blame top Pentagon brass or Jeff Bezos (yes, one theory is that it’s all Amazon testing delivery drones). That’s enough to make people take leaps of faith (or credulity) to be a part of it. If I walk outside my house and look up at a clear night sky, and I want to think that I saw a drone, I easily could. We live underneath flight paths for both Philadelphia and Newark; planes going in and out of the nearby Trenton airport often loom low overhead. Sure, I could say I saw some mystery lights.

“Every single video I’ve analyzed of this phenomenon has been either a normal helicopter or plane,” space photographer Andrew McCarthy (no relation) posted on X regarding the drones. “This has become a social contagion where people are going outside and watching air traffic for the first time and assuming it’s unknown aircraft,” he said in a reply.

Do our elected officials owe us better information? Absolutely. But we also ought to accept to ourselves that, Fox Mulder-style, we want to believe.