After watching a flood of reports about “drones” flying over New Jersey and – increasingly – other neighboring states, I stepped into the cold night air Friday, December 13th – yes, Friday the 13th! – not expecting to see anything flying around my house but curious whether I might. I almost immediately started filming quite a few things in the air around my home. It felt bizarre in light of countless media reports of unidentified “drones” across much of the US East Coast and beyond.

Saturday night, I bought access to historic flight information from FlightRadar24 and was able to match up many – but not all – of the objects I had recorded flying around my home the previous night to known aircraft.

Since I seldom observe the night sky for long periods, I had been weirded out by some strange lights that were very likely commercial and private jets, many of which FlightRadar24 said originated from or were headed to Newark or Westchester airports, whose flight paths to/from Europe/Israel/India/Iceland that night were in my general direction.

(The government and many subsequent news reports say that many of the “drone” sightings in New Jersey were from people like me who seldom looked up at the sky and were surprised/confused by how planes appear at night. Many didn’t bother cross-referencing their sightings against air traffic records.)

Within several days, I saw reports of sightings all along the Eastern Seaboard from Massachusetts to Florida, in Tennessee, Minnesota, Southern California, Iran, Russia, New Zealand, Australia, Oregon (pilots claiming to see objects dashing at crazy speed between 20,000 and 50,000 feet!), at least three US military bases in the UK, and US military base(s) in Germany.

What the hell is happening? Much of the current reporting suggests that many “drone” sightings are easily explicable but that some are not easily explained. This matches my experience.

What I saw & filmed

I was weirded out Friday night by the large number of lights I saw flying around my home, but I was able to match many of them up against known air traffic. Here’s one I could not.

Ten seconds into this video, something not in FlightRadar24 flew from the right to the left of my camera:

My phone recorded the time as 10:08 pm Friday 13th. I’m in the New York area, implying a time of 03:08 UTC. As you can see from the screenshot below, the only aircraft I should have been able to see at that time (looking westward) should have been moving from my left (south) to my right (north), since I live below the “aa"s in New Canaan. In the video, however, the “drone” is clearly moving from my right (north) to my left (south).

FlightRadar24 map at 10:08 pm

Regrettably, I did not follow that “drone” with my camera after it traversed my field of vision. Instead, I focused on the “orb,” which seemed fascinating and suspicious because the colors seemed to be changing, but it was likely a star or planet. (I even have a sky app (Sky Guide) that would have told me, but I foolishly didn’t even think to check!) The “orb” fascinated me because I had seen videos online of orbs that were supposedly drones.

As embarrassed as I am not to have immediately suspected a star/planet, at least I didn’t jump to conclusions:

Former governor of Maryland Larry Hogan shared a video on Friday, claiming to have “personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland.”

…there’s a good chance the former governor was simply seeing the ordinary night sky. A community note appended to Hogan’s original tweet notes that the “stars at the 39-second mark are recognizably the constellation Orion.”

“From this, you can determine that the bright lights behind the trees are the stars Sirius and Procyon,” the note reads. “No anomalous objects are apparent in this video.”

…“Congratulations Governor, you have ‘discovered’ Betelgeuse and Bellatrix,” one user replied, along with a video superimposing Hogan’s “drones” on a map of the night sky, showing that they seem to align perfectly with known stars.

– https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/former-governor-of-maryland-mocked-for-posting-video-of-drones-that-appear-to-be-ordinary-stars/ar-AA1vXG8W

Most likely, I was simply unaware that that’s what stars/planets look like when I zoom with my new iPhone 16. I obsessed over something I had never before seen because I had never before zoomed in on a planet or star with such a good phone camera lens. The color “changes” could be caused by pixelation, since the phone camera records using discrete color pixels???

Regardless, I’m quite curious what flew by me in that recording.

Not-so-crazy theories

Drone speculation has ranged wildly. Here are some not-so-crazy ideas I’ve heard or thought:

  • Many videos are of airplanes
  • Some videos are helicopters or hobbyist drones
  • Some videos are hoaxes
  • Some videos are seeing stars and interpreting them as glowing orbs
  • Some videos are satellites
  • Some videos are optical illusions
  • As news of mysterious “drones” has spread, many more people (like me) began looking up into the sky, and still more people started launching commercial and police (and possibly military) drones to search for the mysterious “drones.” All these extra drones flying overhead then lead more people to notice and report strange things overhead, which spurred even more people to look upwards and/or launch even more drones. (I saw that the US has nearly 800,000 registered drones, so if the proportion of these in the night sky rises significantly, that could easily cause even more UFO/UAP reports.)

I seldom go outside and watch planes, so when I started recording videos Friday evening, some of what I recorded turned out to be actual commercial and private jets. I figured this out by paying for an inexpensive subscription to a service that will replay all air traffic at any given time/day.

By matching timestamps on my videos against the historic flight paths of all known planes I might have seen at those times, I was able to rule out a good number of my “unidentified” sightings as likely known jet traffic. My “UFO"s became “IFO"s. The government claims many sightings are actually passenger aircraft or legally operated drones.

But I was unable to rule out some of what I recorded as known traffic. It could still have been helicopters or drones, but it did not appear as such to me. It was far lower than the planes I had seen, it looked different, it flashed its lights in odd ways, and my recorded audio sometimes crackled in sync with the light pulses, which makes me think it was emitting radiation of some kind, possibly in an attempt to scan or jam or convey a message of some kind. And many others – including governors, congressmen, police, soldiers, and Coast Guard personnel – have recorded videos of very strange behavior and witnessed it with their own eyes. So, let’s move on to the wilder speculation.

Crazy theories/speculation

I haven’t seen strong evidence for any of the following theories, but they’re all interesting possibilities I’ve had or heard:

  • US military is searching for something really dangerous in America, like a nuclear bomb, using new EVTOLs – “electrical vertical take-off and landing” aircraft – armed with sophisticated electronic jamming and possibly camouflage technology
  • US defense industry is trying to scare everyone to maintain/boost defense spending because Donald Trump is talking about canceling military jet contracts and Elon Musk is arguing that advanced human-operated fighters are obsolete, etc.
  • US defense industry is testing some sophisticated new aircraft. One possibility that has gotten attention is Archer Aviation, which has a contract with the Air Force.
  • Advanced foreign adversary, like China, which has a very sophisticated drone industry and strong computing and AI and has recently hacked many US telecom networks
  • They’re very sophisticated holograms
  • It’s a government psy-op campaign to “justify” imposing martial law
  • It’s a psy-op by military contractors to “justify” greater military spending (possibly in response to signals from Trump and Musk that they plan to reduce US spending on manned military aircraft?)
  • It’s a psy-op to pressure Congress into re-authorizing “current drone-countering authorities – authorized as part of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 – [which] are set to expire next week on Dec. 20.” See: the bill, this article, and this article.
  • The government is doing a “red-team” - “blue-team” operation to test our drone defenses and identify weaknesses before our enemies can find and exploit them. They’re using hard-to-detect drones to test our ability to detect hard-to-detect drones.
  • Aliens have been monitoring us and are now coming to save us from ourselves because we’re like babies playing with loaded guns (nuclear weapons, AI, biological weapons, global warming/climate change, large-scale drone and hypersonic missile warfare, etc.)

Mysteries and questions

  • Why do they shine brightly at night, enabling us to see (at least some of) them?
  • Why don’t we see them during the day?
    • They’re searching for something findable only at night?
    • They’re recharging during the day?
    • They can camouflage their true form only at night?
    • They can’t operate in sunlight for some reason? (let’s call this the “vampire drone theory”)
  • Why can’t anyone seem to see them landing or taking off (aside from reports they may be going into / coming out from the ocean)?
  • What to make of reports that they seem capable of interfering with attempts to record or approach them closely?
  • Are these thousands of sightings related to the many, many UFO sightings over the past century?
  • If the government knows what’s happening, why are they pretending not to know?
  • If the government doesn’t know what’s happening, could this be another nation, a rogue billionaire or corporation, or aliens?
  • Are the number of “drones” increasing over time or are they merely leaving New Jersey and spreading out geographically? (If they’re just spreading out, this might be suggestive of a search)

Could this possibly be aliens???

Most likely, this is all advanced terrestrial technology, but I’ve never wondered more about the possibility of aliens than I did those two nights.

I’ve long mostly ignored UFO research because I hadn’t seen compelling evidence of anything other than advanced US military technology and because the distances between galaxies are so great that it’s hard to imagine intergalactic travel. But I’ve always been curious because we don’t fully understand the laws of physics, and wormholes do – in theory – suggest faster-than-light travel could be possible. And life could be so abundant (esp. given findings like the ability of tardigrades and certain bacteria to survive on asteroids and the outside of the ISS) that intelligent life previously arose elsewhere in our own galaxy, within which travel to Earth could well be realistic, even at speeds a small fraction of the speed of light.

The theory of panspermia seems very plausible to me, given what we now know about extremophile species. And our galaxy is well over 10 billion years old, so space-faring intelligent life could well have evolved long before human civilization arose.

If aliens have been present on Earth, why has their presence been so hard for us to see?

  • Have they been hiding themselves and observing?
  • Do they follow Star Trek’s Prime Directive not to interfere?
  • Did they fear the knee-jerk reaction of humanity would be to attack them as we attack other human groups?
  • Have they been waiting and watching in hopes we might find our way through what I called a few decades ago “The Decisive Century” (I grabbed that domain name long ago and planned to write a book about it but never did) but have now decided we can’t solve the countless collective action problems we’re failing to solve so they now need to step in to prevent self-annihilation and the devastation of this incredible planet we’re so fortunate to have evolved on?

Given the large number of near nuclear disasters humanity has miraculously avoided post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki – watch Veritasium’s “How Humanity Almost Destroyed Itself” – and decades of rumors of UFOs poking around America and Russia’s nuclear weapons facilities and nuclear-armed planes and ships, it’s not absurd to wonder whether aliens might be our guardian angels, perhaps already having prevented global thermonuclear war.

Consider the countless things humanity has “known”:

  • Humans once “knew” the Earth was flat.
  • Then we “knew” the sun revolved around the Earth.
  • Later, we invented calculus and learned “exactly” how gravity worked.
  • …till Einstein showed us we were missing a critical part of the story.
  • We “knew” we lived in a static universe before discovering we live in a universe that seems to be expanding
  • …and now we “know” that the universe isn’t just expanding but is expanding at an accelerating rate, the reason for which completely baffles us, so we label our ignorance “dark energy”. The latest JWST findings confirm this mystery
  • When microscopes powerful enough to see microorganisms were first invented, people struggled to believe the previously invisible microscopic worlds they suddenly saw.
  • Today, when astronomers calculate THE “Hubble Constant,” they instead find TWO different values based on different measurements of our universe. We haven’t managed to reconcile this discrepancy, now known as “The Hubble Tension,” which was just reconfirmed by JWST. “Popular Mechanics” uses this euphemism for humanity’s collective ignorance: “Scientists Just Confirmed the Presence of Unknown Physics in Our Universe”.
  • Finally, as one of the smartest humans, Richard Feynman, famously said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” So, even as humans fumble around building rudimentary quantum computers, we remain completely baffled by the most fundamental feature underlying everything we perceive as “reality.”

We know we’re ignorant, so we must remain open-minded about the consequences of our ignorance and the blind spots humanity has. Humans are even ignorant about human society and seem helpless to prevent ourselves from walking down numerous roads that possibly or likely lead to self-destruction. We’re vastly more ignorant of things much smaller or much larger than phenomena we observe with our eyes every day, like microorganisms and the universe. Science cannot rule out aliens. And we don’t know what seems to be flying over our homes. It’s at least an interesting thought experiment.

With thanks for this photo by Lucas Pezeta