Mass hysteria was the inevitable outcome of the UFO craze

Dancing in Strasbourg, vol. 3675

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Something's going on.

As reported credulously and breathlessly by just about every major media outlet, there are strange lights in the night sky all over the East Coast; particularly, it seems, in areas heavy with air traffic. Residents are going on “drone hunts” to look at the heavens (a direction that humans don’t usually examine for long periods) and suddenly seeing all sorts of things they can’t explain. “Something's going on,” a New Jersey town mayor says; President-elect Trump says the same. “New Jersey drones” are being spotted as far away as California. '“Shoot them down already!” demands a NJ Assemblyman.

In response, locals are shining lasers at drones that turn out to be planes (like poor FedEx flight 3926) because it’s hard to judge distance well in the night sky. The FBI had to release a statement yesterday begging people not to shoot.

In the rare cases where people use flight trackers appropriately, like when New Jersey Senator Andy Kim went out on a drone hunt with local police, he found that what he saw was… just planes. Meanwhile, ABC News aired this picture of what is probably Venus or Jupiter.

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Other prominent examples of sightings include the former governor of Maryland mistaking the constellation of Orion for drones, or this still from a video shared by UFO activists (taken near, ahem, Newark Airport).

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Demands for action has led to the FBI deploying observation teams throughout New Jersey and creating a tip line. Of ~5,000 tips received, about 100 leads were deemed even worthy of investigation, finding at most a couple hobby or law-enforcement drones. An FBI spokesperson had to gently explain their findings in the kindest possible way at a White House press briefing.

In overlaying the visual sightings reported to the FBI with approach patterns for Newark, Liberty, JFK, and LaGuardia airports, the density of reported sightings matches the approach patterns of these very busy airports with flights coming in throughout the night.

Meanwhile, downed drone searches turn up nada, and many of the most-shared reports have been unfalsifiable verbal accounts of “I saw something weird in the sky.”

So the only noteworthy thing about this is what it represents at a cultural level: the “I Saw a Mysterious Drone” craze is really the disguised evolution of the UFO craze that began seven years ago with a garbage New York Times article. It is pushed by much of the same people for much of the same reasons (right now the UFO and UAP subreddits are going absolutely bonkers over sightings).

All mass delusions and hysterias have a cause. In the summer of 1518, the year of the Dancing Plague, it was a French woman, Frau Troffea, who began to dance without music on the cobbled streets of Strasbourg in some sort of modern-esque fanatical fashion. Frau must have been very good, maybe the best improvisational dancer to ever live, because hundreds of others joined and danced until they collapsed (some claimed ~15 people died a day, although accounts are unreliable).

An engraving based on a contemporary artist’s depiction

Humans don’t change. In the 80s and 90s we had the Satanic abuse panic which broke apart thousands of households based on false confabulations. Such cases require an initial cause which prompts mimicry. It was Frau Troffea in 1518, and it was psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder who created the satanic panic with his discredited book Michelle Remembers in 1980, and now this entire phenomenon of “drones are attacking!” and blurry iPhone videos is a result of a 2017 New York Times article announcing that the government spent years secretly hunting unexplainable UFOs which buzz military bases and dance like Tinkerbell away from pilots.

So to understand the current delusion, we must go back to the beginning. For quietly over the past years it has come to light that essentially nothing about the original UFO story reported by the Times was true.

Remember this?

Well, now we know the program was a farce with government money, conducted mostly by a private company hunting ghouls and goblins and dino-beavers at “Skinwalker Ranch.” I summarized the saga as:

Diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid [privately, a UFO “believer”] by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research” and being the sole bidder for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including… dino-beavers. Viola! That’s how there was a “government-funded program to study UFOs.”

The best insight into how this has all operated is via the reality TV show about Skinwalker Ranch, where they regularly do things like take recordings of flies buzzing across the camera and blur them so they look like unidentified objects.

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The associated government-funded paranormal “research program” was called AATIP and ended in 2012. Five years later The New York Times decided to report it as if AATIP was a real serious program headed by a man named Luis Elizondo at the Pentagon who, it is suggested in the article, had been officially compiling and investigating more credible UFO reports such as now-famous videos like FLIR, GIMBAL, and GOFAST.

Except that later, it was reported by The New York Post that:

In 2019, the Pentagon released a statement saying Elizondo had “no responsibilities” with AATIP, a program which they also said wasn’t created to investigate UFOs.

Whoops!

Public interest was (understandably) so great after the Times article that an actual government program to investigate UFO reports was memed into existence, the AARO.

Since their founding the AARO has consistently come up empty handed, over and over, because of course they have. Quietly, most major sightings has now been thoroughly explained. Pilots, it turns out, are also human beings, and one in ten thousand missions they see something weird that they can't explain, which is always just the standard stuff skeptics point out, like balloons, bags, or lanterns. According to the November testimony by current AARO director Jon Kosloski:

Among AARO’s closed cases from the May 1, 2023 to June 1, 2024 time period, about 70 precent of the UAP were deemed to have been balloons, 16 percent drones, eight percent birds, four percent satellites and two percent aircraft, according to the report.

Remember the famous “Go Fast” video?

“The Go Fast … captured the public attention and congressional attention when it was made public in 2017. [It] looks like an object flying very fast over the water, very close to the water. Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis, using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet,” Kosloski said. “As the platform is flying and capturing the object, if it is closer to the platform at a higher altitude, a trick of the eye called ‘parallax’ makes it look like the object is moving much faster.”

Using trigonometry! Why that's what skeptics did immediately when they got access to the video… because simple math led to the nominative conclusion: given a UFO video titled “Go Fast,” the object will inevitably turn out to be very slow.

The first director of the AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick, recently confirmed the shady origin of this entire endeavor, along with the rank incorrectness of the 2017 Times article, in an op-ed he penned in Scientific America after leaving his post this year.

… this narrative has been simmering for years and is largely an outgrowth of a former program at the DOD’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was heavily influenced by a group of individuals associated with businessman and longtime ufologist Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace…. after a review by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and DIA concluded that… taxpayer money was being inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah.

His testimony completely contradicts the more serious picture painted by the 2017 Times article, confirming from the inside the truth that I and others have been pointing out for a while.

Not that people want to hear this. In fact, being sane and working at the AARO is a pretty thankless job, it turns out.

Kirkpatrick has received violent threats, social-media smear campaigns, and even had to call the FBI after a UFO fanatic showed up at his home. “I’ve had people threaten my wife and daughter, and try to break into our online accounts—far more than I ever had as the deputy director of intelligence,” Kirkpatrick says. “I didn’t have China and Russia trying to get on me as much as these people are.”

Coming up empty-handed isn’t because the AARO members are hiding anything, because by nature of the job the AARO has been staffed with UFO believers.

The “chief scientist” of this Pentagon task force was Travis Taylor, who is and was a co-star of “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel. He currently stars on “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” on the same network.

Yet, now that they have to operate with a modicum of oversight, being an actual official government program, they continuously disappoint those in the outside UFO community, who get mad at them for not confirming their beliefs.

In a sane world, the AARO and its continual null results would be a cautionary tale about getting exactly what you want. Instead, its mere creation has implicitly supported the idea that something’s going on. And now the FBI has to ask people not to shoot at planes landing in Newark.

A disturbing reminder that, despite all our technology and education and literacy, we are still just dancing in Strasbourg. Only the location changes. Under the light-polluted New Jersey night sky our movements become erratic and there is sweat on our brow once again, as, iPhone in hand, we thumb record.