Mystery Drones, UFOs, and Other "Out There" Stuff: A 3-Part Post
Inexplicable lights in the skies, wild Congressional hearings, and my weirdest assignment ever...
Lately, while reading headlines about what’s happening in our skies, I can’t help thinking back a few centuries to an era of great uncertainty.
Starting around 1493, when news made the rounds that Christopher Columbus had discovered an inhabited island where no such land had previously been believed to exist, there was a long and awkward stretch when Western thinkers realized they could no longer explain exactly what was happening. They were unsure of the model of our planet, what physical laws governed it, and where Earth fit into the universe, matters that had previously appeared entirely sorted.
While some had thought the world flat, ancient Greek thinkers such as Aristotle, whose ideas still provided the widely accepted framework for understanding our planet, had assured that any land in the realm where Columbus had shored up existed in a “torrid zone” with scorching temperatures that squelched the possibility of life, particularly for humans. So his ideas were now in doubt.
The Bible made no mention of this “New World” that Columbus stumbled onto while trying to reach Asia, making church explanations ripe for questioning and further exploding existing certitudes. Meanwhile, radical theories were floating around — the most outrageous being that of Polish mathematician/astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who in 1543 published a book theorizing that our universe held the sun at its center, not the Earth, which blew up the long-held geocentric model of Ptolemy and cast yet more confusion upon the long-accepted rules for how our planet worked and its place in the universe.
The Copernican model of a heliocentric universe, however, was not widely accepted for 150 years — and wasn’t even taught, or mentioned, at the finest universities like Cambridge.
That Renaissance-era Age of Uncertainty, when the working model of our planet and our place in the universe was obscured, dragged on for two centuries, until Isaac Newton, in between working on his alchemical experiments, calculated his way out of it and stitched together assorted random pieces — from Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus — providing a new framework with gravity and laws of motion that explained the physical realm of our planet and its place in the universe.
Quickly accepted in Britain, and catching on worldwide within a few decades, Newton’s explanations of the workings of our world, freed up thinkers to ponder other matters like politics, the meaning of life, how to fly, and what cool weapons they could create to blow everything up.
I’m beginning to think we’ve entered another Age of Uncertainty because of two phenomena, which may or may not be related: mystery drones as well as new reports of UFOs, the second being a topic under investigation by Congress.
We may think we understand pretty much everything from cars to cybercommunications and sophisticated weaponry. We know how to manipulate nanoparticles and create artificial black holes, how to launch space probes and space telescopes to photograph distant nebulae as well as how to unravel genetic codes and engineer artificial ones.
And if there’s something we don’t already know, AI can figure it out soon enough — or so seems to be the current thinking.
But for the past month, enigmas have been zipping around in the night skies over New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Ohio, Connecticut, California, Virginia, and a U.S. military base in Germany for that matter. And neither AI nor officials are coming up with reassuring answers.
The mystery drones, which witnesses say appear to be SUV-sized and can stay aloft far longer than normal drones, are hanging around over military installations, farms, and golf courses — they’re hovering over Connecticut and the Bronx, they’re causing planes to delay take off, they’re prompting the closing of airspace over military sites, such as Dayton’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Picatinny Arsenal, a “sensitive” military research facility in New Jersey.
Unauthorized drones also have been spotted flying over U.S. military bases in Germany earlier this month and around U.S. bases in the UK in November. And last December dozens of drones hovered over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where in recent weeks they’ve been spotted again.
A Few Things to Consider about the “Mystery Drones”
The drones recently spotted over the Eastern U.S. seem to have the sort of lights mandated by the FAA for night flights. This has led “UFOlogist” Jimmy Church to conclude, “Unless E.T. is now conforming to FAA standards, we can safely assume that the ‘mystery drones’ originate from here on earth.”
Secondly, the recent appearances of mystery drones over American bases in Germany and the UK, as well as in the U.S., during the past month makes some wonder if they are Russian or Chinese. (Do Russia and China comply with FAA regulations?)
Thirdly, on November 19th — one day after the first drone sighting in New Jersey — Rowman & Littlefield published a new book, Dead Air, about the day in 1938 when Orson Welles scared the bejeesus out of radio listeners everywhere with his “The War of the Worlds” broadcast about a fictitious Martian invasion. Could this have started as a publicity stunt? (It seems unlikely given book publicity budgets these days.)
Finally, SpaceX — Elon Musk’s aerospace company — has been launching hundreds of satellites in recent months, at least 22 in December. And Musk likes to put on fabulous “drone shows” in the skies. When asked via X if he’s involved in the “mystery drones” or knows what they’re about, Musk deflected, turning his response into an advertisement for his new AI chatbot, Grok, saying Grok had the answer.
The federal government says that many of the thousands of sightings of supposed drones were actually caused by manned flights and helicopters, but that, yes, a hundred or more sightings, in fact, appear to be of unidentified drones, the sources of which are unknown as are what the heck they are doing up there. The government maintains that thus far they pose no apparent security threat and there’s no indication that they are being operated by a foreign country.
What’s more, last year the FAA approved night flights for the country’s million of so recreational and commercial drones, which might be part of the reason people are seeing more of them.
It all adds up to a big question mark so far.
But something else is happening in the midst of this month of uncertainty: we’re also getting new credible reports of UFOs, flying much higher than the drones — some even seen by pilots hovering as high as 9 miles over our planet.
On December 7, unidentified objects with red lights were seen flying high in the skies over Oregon, with a United Airlines pilot saying he witnessed several UFOs — one near 50,000 feet — while flying to Eugene, with other pilots calling in the same, seeing some at much lower altitudes as well.
While those, too, might be explained by SpaceX launches, the whole phenomenon of UFOs or UAPs is entering a whole new, fascinating chapter as Congress is holding hearings and delving deeper into secret government activities that representatives allege are being covered up. Whatever your views on UFOs, the hearings are riveting at least as Congressional hearings go. And that will be the topic of the next post, which will arrive later this week…