We blocked out the stars and were frightened when we saw our lights in the darkness. America is in the midst of a full-blown drone panic and it is I became so stupid. People in the northeastern part of the United States are terrified by strange lights in the sky and have all kinds of whirlwinds Conspiracy theories. The dark truth is that America’s memory is short, and we have panicked about lights in the sky—whether drones, unidentified flying objects, or German bombers—many times before.
Over the past few weeks, people in New Jersey and New York City have pointed to the sky and shuddered in fear at strange lights above them that they had never noticed before. FBI contract Briefings on the issue. New York State Some runways closed at Stewart International Airport in Poughkeepsie. The White House asks Congress To do something.
We’ve been here before. newly. What’s frustrating to me about this is that we’ll be doing it again in a few years. When that happens, we don’t remember all the panics that happened in the sky before.
It is natural to be afraid of things we see in the sky that we do not understand. It’s been happening for hundreds of years. The only thing that changes from century to century is the interpretation of fear. The answer to this question tells you about the community that feels fear, but it may not give you an explanation of what actually happened.
“The airspace above us is big, mysterious and scary. It’s completely normal for people to display wild visions of secret, unknown aircraft in the night sky,” Arthur Holland Michel, a journalist who covers drones and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs, told Gizmodo.
“At the same time, I don’t think we should rule out every possible drone sighting,” he added. “We know for a fact that drones can sometimes be used to cause harm, and we probably shouldn’t lose sight of that fact just because a group of people see drones in the sky, and they don’t actually exist.”
Over the past 25 years, there has been a lot of consternation about strange lights in the sky that mirror what’s happening in New Jersey right now. In the last month of 2019 and the first month of 2020, people in Colorado were convinced they had seen… Unexplained lights in the sky. As in 2024, the national press covered the event and local politicians were shaken. Washington has promised to do something. Cases that could be verified and chased had normal answers. Commercial airplanes, drones, and other things were common.
In 2016, a passenger plane was landing at Heathrow International Airport when it collided with what it thought was a drone. If this had actually happened, it would have been the first time a commercial aircraft had collided with a drone mid-flight. A report later found that it was Maybe a plastic bag.
One of the first big scares about lights in the sky occurred in Canada, not the United States. In 1915, after Canada entered World War I, the city of Ottawa became convinced that it would soon be attacked from the sky.
The mayor of Brockville, Ontario called the prime minister on February 14, 1915 and told him an amazing story. The city’s mayor said that three German planes had entered Canadian airspace coming from New York. Dozens of citizens saw them. The planes shone lights across the city and dropped fireballs.
Panicked, the Prime Minister made some calls of his own. Fearing an attack, much of Ottawa went dark. “Ottawa in the dark waiting for a plane raid. Several aircraft carried out a raid on Canada’s sovereignty. Reading newspaper From that time. No attack occurred, and some children later confessed to sending balloons loaded with fireworks in a village near Brockville. They wanted to scare people. Little did they realize that it would shut down their country’s capital for a few hours.
Similar concerns occurred across the East Coast of the United States over the next few years. As World War I began, the nation was convinced that German spies were flying alien planes in the sky. In 1916, sightings centered around Delaware, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. In 1917, a week after the United States entered World War I, two New Hampshire National Guardsmen were fired upon by a strange light they saw in the sky.
During World War II, America trained its citizens to be paranoid about what it saw in the sky. Motivated by fear of attacks on the mainland, and the need to make citizens feel part of the war effort, the US Civil Defense Forces launched the Ground Observation Corps. The Americans practiced what Axis planes looked like and then sat at 14,000 coastal positions and scanned the sky with binoculars.
After the war ended, people did not hang up their binoculars. The United States has trained more than a million of its citizens to monitor the sky. And so they did. In 1947, a military balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, sparking the first major sky-watching scare of the postwar years. UFOs were already in the news before the incident, but Roswell enhanced the phenomenon.
“The Roswell incident was discovered weeks before the farmer who discovered it reported it. “For weeks, it was just strange debris and trash in the high desert,” Kelsey Atherton, an editor at the Center for International Policy, told me. “And later, after reading news of the saucer sightings The plane, the rancher who discovered it, reported it to the sheriff, retroactively making it the most famous UFO site. But without panicking, he’s just a rancher who saw some trash.
The Cold War years were full of concerns about UFOs in the sky. It has permeated our media, generating subcultures, cults, and recurring panics. Some feared they were advanced Soviet weapons systems, but today we mostly remember them as aliens. The Cold War UFO scare reached its peak in the Clinton years with the broadcast of The X-Files, a superhero procedural whose mythology focused heavily on UFO legends.
With the dawn of a new century, old fears of the lights in the sky have faded a little. But they come back with a vengeance. As part of the global war on terror, America has been using drones to assassinate its enemies. Internally, affordable four-copter drones have hit the market, and the little things are taking to the skies in droves.
The appearance of what we feared in the sky has changed. No longer were Soviet superweapons or UFOs, people began to see drones flying in the sky. And they were afraid of them. Journalist and drone expert Vine Greenwood I predicted this in 2019months before the panic in Colorado.
“An essential part of being human is our drive to make sense of things we cannot adequately explain, and we all do it, including the most intelligent and incredible among us. The best we can do is moderate this natural tendency, because although it is understandable, However, it can lead to opposite results. He wrote in the salon at that time. “If we jump too quickly to the assumption that something strange in the sky is a drone, we may miss other explanations, such as faulty weather balloons, plastic bags, or certainly an alien spacecraft. Over-focusing on one type of threat or problem can It leads us to miss other problems.
The Greenwood Salon piece contains other sky scares from that era, including sightings at Gatwick Airport During the holiday season, there were increasing numbers of sightings at Heathrow Airport, and an airport in Australia was briefly closed after staff mistook a balloon for a drone.
I reached out to Greenwood to find out what their favorite little-known drone scare is, and they go back further than 100 years. Greenwood says they are “very interested in the mysterious panics that occurred in the United Kingdom in 1909 and 1913.” “I also like the celestial phenomena that occurred in 1561 over Nuremberg,” he pointed me out Roman writings About strange things in the sky.
It seems that humans have long been fascinated and frightened by strange things in the sky. As Michel warned, it’s important to remember that panics past and present don’t mean something isn’t happening. As Greenwood warned in 2019, it’s important to focus on what’s really happening around us.
Drones and cameras are everywhere. Both are weapons of war. The dominant image of the war in Ukraine is the FPV drone. The viewer sits aboard the machine as it chases a soldier into a trench. He finds them. The soldier panics and shoots into the sky. But it’s no use. The drone lands, the camera cuts out, and we learn that the soldier is dead.
Authorities around the world place cameras on flying machines and use them to spy on citizens, agents, and enemies. We read about it daily. We know this happens. Is it any wonder, then, that we look to the sky and fear what may be watching or waiting in the wings to bring about death for an unseen and unknown purpose?
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