Are these foreign objects sent by a foreign country or an illusion fueled by modern fears?
Look… Up in the Sky…It’s a Bird…. It’s a Plane… It’s a Drone!
It appears that drones did not interfere with Santa Claus’s busy delivery system this past Christmas.
Phew!
At this time of year when we normally are busy tracking Santa’s progress as he makes his way around the globe, nervous Americans in the northeast were furiously monitoring drones.
My online Nextdoor site suddenly was no longer about tips on home improvement or where to get a decent plumber in Huntington, Long Island. It was all about strange drone sightings that had infiltrated my area. 50, count em’ 50 drones were spotted mere blocks from my home, an alarmist thread warned. The unexplained, ominous drones that began in New Jersey and have been spotted across the Tri-State area have taken on a nefarious tone.
Blinking drones, humming drones. Small drones, big drones. Drones the size of automobiles. Swarms of drones with red lights green lights one two three. Were they spy drones sent by China? Iran? North Kore? Or maybe from our own government.
Could they, some speculated be visitors from out of space?
Our mealy-mouthed government never provided a satisfactory answer.
Without facts, it was pure oxygen on social media.
Local sheriffs got involved. So did Homeland Security, mayors, and governors. Donald Trump called for them to be shot down. Even Reality TV stars opined. Real Housewife of NYC Bethenny Frankel weighed in about “the very dangerous drones.” Freaked out after spotting the spate of mystery drones, the 54-year-old took to TikTok with her own convoluted explanation claiming it came directly from a friend’s father who works for NASA and the Pentagon. She claimed the areas in which the drones were spotted in the Northeast have “spiked in radiation.”
Should we be rushing to our safe rooms and stocking up on water?
UFOs
This is all very déjà vu all over again
Will sky gazing for mysterious swarms of drones become a part of cultural mass hysteria the way flying saucers once did?
The mid-century blue skies of my childhood were pretty crowded with air traffic. Beeping Soviet Satellites were circling the globe and, radioactive fallout was blowin’ in the wind.
A disproportionate amount of my time as a child was spent looking skywards.
It wasn’t just squinting my eyes upward to try and spot Superman or maybe the tooth fairy lost in some cumulous clouds. Nor was it due to my living in the flight path of the new jets that were flying dangerously low on their way to Idlewild Airport that caused me to constantly look up.
It was more ominous.
If I wasn’t scanning the skies for flying saucers, I was looking overhead for that Soviet plane we were all terrified of – the one carrying an atomic bomb. I was certain its sighting would give me ample time to hide under my kitchen table to protect myself from the atomic blast. Sometimes the two fears blended together.
Martians or Communists, they were both to be feared.
Cold War
As the Cold War began reports of flying saucers became an American phenomenon.
In June 1947, a commercial pilot claimed to have seen nine “flying discs” zipping across Washington state at 1,200 mph. The editor of a local paper the East Oregonian newspaper sent this unverifiable story to the Associated Press news service, and a few weeks later, Hearst International put out a press release that contained the fateful term “flying saucers.”
The story spread around the globe.
Soon there were hundreds of other reported sightings – including one of crashed flying-saucer debris in Roswell, New Mexico. Some of these reports were clearly hoaxes: it wasn’t hard to fake a saucer photograph if you had a hubcap, frisbee or pizza on hand. Some sightings were of weather balloons, Zeppelins, cloud formations and experimental aircraft being developed by the US Air Force as part of the Cold War.
But one thing was certain: saucer-mania had begun.
By this time, flying saucers had flown all the way through popular culture. Movies and Comics, unsurprisingly, were bursting with saucers
In time for Christmas you could decorate your tree with Flying Saucer lights? Will next years trees sport drone ornaments?
The government never explained the UFO sighting from the 1950s and they seem to be taking the same approach now. Many believed Uncle Sam was in on a coverup of UFO sighting. Reports were kept secret. The government did not want to admit that it could not explain the UFO hysteria
What is noteworthy is why were so many people thinking and envisioning UFOs at that particular moment? What was happening in society at that moment that elicited this kind of collective visionary experience?
It is no coincidence that the UFO craze began at the start of the Cold War when the new threat of atomic warfare with the Soviet Union hung over the world.
We all had a bad case of the jitters.
We lived in a world that had suddenly become hostile. We had unleashed forces we couldn’t control; many feared we were heading towards a war that would destroy us.
Some circumstances feel similar.
Today we are equally on edge.
A multitude of apocalyptic scenarios haunt people, of forces we cannot control, whether environmental catastrophes or economic collapse. We live in an uncertain world, the fears unleashed by the prospect of a Trump presidency and the troubled geopolitical climate contribute to our sense of distrust and vulnerability.
Are these drones being used to distract us from something bigger?