The calls about the mystery drones lighting up the night sky were sporadic at first. Then they came daily, from all over the state. A multi-agency task force was convened. The FBI got involved. So did the military. The local news reported on a “band of large drones” hovering over the state that came out most nights. The sightings became national news. People theorized that they were classified government aircraft, or foreign spies. Some people wondered whether they were aliens.

This was not New Jersey this month, where drone sightings have caused a mass panic and involvement from local officials all the way up to the White House. It was Colorado in December, 2019 and January, 2020. Months passed, and Colorado’s mystery drones turned out not to be mysterious at all. Authorities eventually determined that some of the “drones” were SpaceX Starlink satellites. Others were regular passenger aircraft approaching the airport, and many “were visually confirmed to be hobbyist drones by law enforcement” and which were not breaking any laws. Some were absolutely nothing and were chalked up to people perceiving lights because of atmospheric conditions. In other cases, law enforcement started to fly their own drones to investigate the supposed mystery drones, creating the possibility of further “mystery drone” sightings, according to public records released after the initial mass panic.

It remains unclear what the “mystery drones” that are currently being seen above New Jersey and Staten Island actually are. But the pattern we are seeing in New Jersey right now is following the exact pattern we saw in Colorado in the winter of 2019 and that has been seen numerous times throughout human history when there are mass drone or mass UFO sightings. 

The drones have captured the public’s imagination, and the concern of local, state, and national politicians. In the last few days, the mayors of 21 different New Jersey towns wrote a letter to Gov. Phil Murphy demanding a full investigation and stating that “the lack of information and clarity regarding these operations has caused fear and frustration among our constituents.” The FBI is investigating, as is the Department of Homeland Security. New Jersey congressional representatives and senators are demanding answers. The Pentagon has said that the drones are not an Iranian “mothership,” despite what one lawmaker has claimed, and the White House says Joe Biden is aware of the situation. The story is everywhere: It is the talk of many of my group texts, is all over my social media feeds, and is being discussed by everyone I know who has even a passing connection to New Jersey. Conspiracy theorists, as you’d expect, are running wild with the story.

Again, we don’t know what these drones are right now, or if they are even drones at all. But in the past, this exact hype and fear cycle has played out, and, when the dust has settled, it has turned out that the “mystery drones” were neither mysterious nor drones. 

“I’ve been puzzling about the NJ drone stuff, and I think that it’s an interesting example of the latest form of mass public panics over mysterious aircraft—which have been happening since the time of the Ancient Greeks,” Faine Greenwood, who studies civilian drone activity, told 404 Media. “My best guess about what’s actually happening is some form of confidential US aerial testing or contractor testing is happening and the federal authorities are communicating very badly with each other and others. And then people heard about one or two sightings, and everybody starts seeing drones everywhere (much like UFOs). Quite a few people [are] posting videos that seem like normal flight patterns … There’s such a huge amount of confusion around normal non-drone stuff in the sky. People are remarkably bad at identifying objects in flight.”

(The Pentagon has denied that the drones are U.S. military, but the Pentagon has a long documented history of lying about such things to keep classified testing a secret).

Greenwood is right: Regular people, politicians, and even commercial pilots are remarkably bad at identifying exactly what things flying in the air actually are. In New Jersey, there have been many news stories that are based on politicians confidently saying that the drones are a specific size or act in a specific manner or have specific characteristics, which is exactly what happened in Colorado, and the vast majority of those initial stories were wildly incorrect.

“In a post on the social media platform X, the assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia described the drones as up to 6ft in diameter and sometimes traveling with their lights switched off,” the Guardian wrote. “The devices do not appear to be being flown by hobbyists, Fantasia wrote.” Fantasia did write this on X, in a post that is deeply unhinged that also called for “military intervention” and said “to state that there is no known or credible threat is incredibly misleading.” 

Greenwood wrote an article in 2019 that posited that “Drones are the new flying saucers,” which they said they believe still holds up in 2024. In 2015, I wrote an article called “Drones are the new UFOs” that, nearly a decade later, still feels relevant. That article was based on a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report based on reports from commercial airline pilots that showed in 2014 pilots reported 678 “drone sightings” and near misses. An analysis of that data by the Academy of Model Aeronautics showed that a huge number of these “drone sightings,” which, again, were reported by commercial pilots whose job is to monitor the sky while they’re flying, were not drones at all. Items classified as “drones” by pilots and the objects were “a balloon,” a “mini blimp,” a “large vulture,” and a “fast moving gray object.” Other objects initially classified as drones were later just deemed to be “UFOs.”

Loretta Alkalay, who worked at the FAA for 30 years and is now an attorney focusing on aviation law and drone consulting, told 404 Media that they may be U.S. government or military drones, because their appearance over bodies of water would make them safe to knock out of the sky without threatening people on the ground. (Again, the Pentagon has said that they are not military drones, but the military is not always forthcoming about such things and inter-agency communication about who is flying where and when is sometimes lacking). 

“I assume they’re government or military drones because otherwise why wouldn’t the government take them down?” Alkalay said. “The military and other agencies are authorized to use jamming technology to neutralize drone threats and many of these drones have been spotted over water where the risk of harm from a falling drone would be negligible.” The FAA has put up a no fly zone in the areas where the drones have been spotted, which syncs to geofences in many types of drones. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy says he wants the feds to shoot them down. Greenwood pointed out that “we do have remote ID systems that allow authorities to readily identify law-abiding drones, so blanket airspace restrictions are unnecessary and will only harm people abiding by the rules.”

In Colorado in 2020, authorities eventually said they “confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity.” In addition to SpaceX satellites being falsely reported as drones, 13 sightings ended up being “planets, stars, or small hobbyist drones.” Six of them were commercial planes reported as being drones. Additional public records obtained about similar drone sightings in Nebraska that became part of the Colorado scare discussed the concern of “space potatoes” being dropped from unidentified drones over farmland. It turned out that these were gel logs called SOILPAM, which are used by farmers to keep their irrigation systems from moving around in wet soil, and that farmers were dropping these from drones over their fields.

It should be noted that hobby and commercial drones are legal. And that many, many police departments and public agencies now have drones, and that many of them do a bad job of coordinating with other parts of the government about where and when they are flying. In Colorado, after hearing reports about mystery drones, government entities began flying their own drones to attempt to surveil the drones in the sky, and drone monitoring companies that uses drones to look for drones also swooped in. It was a self-perpetuating hysteria. 

For years, I worked on a Netflix documentary about UFO mass sightings called Encounters, and one thing that became clear from working on that documentary, which followed specific mass UFO sightings in Texas, Wales, Zimbabwe, and Japan, is that people don’t spend a lot of time looking at the sky until they have a reason to do so. News reports about UFOs or “mystery drones” cause more people to look to the sky, which begets more reports and more panic. Often, these sightings do have a straightforward explanation; there are lots of things that fly through our atmosphere or low Earth orbit that are allowed to be there and that are known that are suddenly being reported as anomalous. 

In Colorado, interest in the “mystery drones” disappeared as reports about the first cases of COVID-19 began in the United States. Media attention and public interest in the drones disappeared. And then so did the sightings.