We blotted out the stars and became frightened when we saw our own lights amidst the darkness.
America is in the midst of a full-on drone panic and itsgotten very stupid.
The FBI has heldbriefings about the issue.
A drone released in a soybean field.© evandrorigon image via Getty Images.
New York Stateclosed some runwaysat Stewart International Airport in Poughkeepsie.
The White House is asking Congressto do something.
We have been here before.
And when it happens, we dont remember all the sky panics that have come before.
Its natural to be afraid of things we see in the sky and dont understand.
Its been happening for hundreds of years.
The only thing that changes, from century to century, is the explanation for the fear.
The airspace above us is big, mysterious, and spooky.
Like in 2024, the national press covered it and local politicians quavered.
Washington promised to do something.
The cases that could be verified and chased down had mundane answers.
They were planes, commercial drones, and other common objects.
A report later found it wasprobably a plastic bag.
One of the first great panics about lights in the sky happened in Canada, not the U.S.
The mayor said that three German airplanes had penetrated Canadian airspace from New York.
Dozens of citizens had seen them.
The planes shined a light across the town and they dropped fireballs.
Freaked out, the Prime Minister placed some calls of his own.
Fearing an attack, much of Ottawa went dark.
Ottawa In Darkness Awaits Aeroplane Raid.
Several Aeroplanes Make A Raid Into The Dominion Of Canada,read a newspaperfrom the time.
They wanted to scare people.
They didnt realize it would shut down their nations capital for a few hours.
Similar scares happened across the eastern seaboard in the U.S. over the next few years.
In 1916, the sightings were centered around Delaware, New Jersey, and Washington D.C. During World War II, America trained its citizens to be paranoid about what it saw in the sky.
After the war ended people didnt hang up their binoculars.
The U.S. had trained more than a million of its citizens to watch the skies.
And so they did.
UFOs were already in the news before the crash, but Roswell supercharged the phenomenon.
The Roswell crash was discovered weeks before the rancher who discovered it reported it.
But without the panic, its just a rancher who saw some junk.
The Cold War years were awash in fears about strange objects in the sky.
It permeated our media, birthed subcultures, cults, and repeated panics.
Some feared it was advanced Soviet weapons systems but, today, we remember it mostly as aliens.
As a new century dawned, the old fears of lights in the sky faded a bit.
But they come back with a vengeance.
As part of the Global War on Terror, America was using unmanned aerial vehicles to assassinate its enemies.
On the homefront, affordable quadcopter drones hit the market and small objects took to the skies in droves.
The shape of what we feared was in the sky changed.
No longer Soviet super weapons or UFOs, people began to see consumer drones flying through the sky.
And they feared them.
Journalist and drone expert Faine Greenwoodpredicted this in 2019, months ahead of the panic in Colorado.
An overemphasis on one kind of threat or problem can lead us to miss other problems.
Greenwood says theyre very interested in the U.K. 1909 and 1913 mystery airship panics.
Humans, it seems, have long been fascinated and frightened by strange things in the sky.
As Greenwood cautioned in 2019, its important to focus on whats actually happening around us.
Drones and cameras are ubiquitous.
Theyre both weapons of war.
The dominant visual of the war in Ukraine is that of an FPV drone.
The viewer sits aboard the machine as it hunts down a soldier in a trench.
The soldier panics and fires at the sky.
But its no use.
The drone descends, the camera cuts out, and we know the soldier is dead.
News from the future, delivered to your present.
The War in Ukraine Is Fought on Horseback Against Drones Carrying Machine Guns
War.
Mystery Drone Sightings Reappear in the Northeast
Didn’t Donald Trump promise to reveal what these are?
