The current scare over mass sightings of drones over the United States can be understood through the lens of social psychology. The history of the United States is replete with similar waves of not only UFO reports but mass sightings of all sorts of strange creatures and extraordinary things. Many years ago, I completed a Masters thesis on the history of UFO waves and kindred phenomena, which opened my eyes to an array of scares that are driven by similar psychological processes.
Let’s begin with the drone scare. The United States has experienced dozens of similar scares involving unidentified flying objects (UFOs) over the past 130 years. Here are just a few:
1915, Eastern Canada: Between 1915 and 1917, there was a series of phantom aircraft sightings by what was rumored to have been German sympathizers in the U.S. who were said to be conducting aerial reconnaissance missions as a prelude to an eventual attack. British consul-general Sir Courtney Bennett, stationed in New York, stoked the scare when he made the sensational claim in 1915 that thousands of highly trained German Americans had been drilling in Niagara Falls and Buffalo and were planning to invade Canada from northwestern New York State.
1916, Delaware, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.: A spate of mysterious airplane sightings were reported amid claims that German covert agents were going to target military installations and government offices. Popular books like German-American Conspiracies in America by William Skaggs and The German-American Plot by Frederic Wile fueled rumors that a prime target for such activities was military bases along the Eastern Seaboard due to their close proximity to Europe.
1917, New Hampshire: There were mass sightings of mysterious lights over the strategic naval base at Portsmouth, prompting fears that German agents were spying in readiness for an attack. One week after the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, two National Guardsmen from the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry near Portsmouth opened fire on a mysterious aerial light thought to be of German origin.
1947, Nationwide: Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of nine disc-shaped objects while flying over Washington State triggered a deluge of “flying saucer” reports that summer.
1974, Midwest: A wave of UFO reports coinciding with a spate of “cattle mutilations” took place.
The phantom airplane scares during the war years were almost certainly not aircraft. The airplanes of the period were crude contraptions and treacherous to fly, particularly at night. Taking off and landing from a secret base in the mountains and remaining aloft for hours at a time was impossible. Most of these war years’ sightings correspond with the appearance of Venus or were fire balloons similar to Chinese lanterns of today that were later found in the vicinity.
When Kenneth Arnold was interviewed after his 1947 sighting, he told a reporter that the crescent-shaped objects he had spotted moved “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” The journalist mistakenly wrote that they were “saucer-like,” which triggered a spate of “flying saucer” reports.
During the 1974 “cattle mutilation” and UFO wave—great significance was placed on media reports about farmers finding mutilated cows and UFOs being spotted nearby. Such assertions are meaningless given that there are always mysterious objects in the sky, ranging from Venus to small aircraft. The dramatic media reports prompted residents to be more aware of dead cows and aerial lights.
As it turned out, several studies of cattle mutilations, including one by a former FBI agent, concluded that the animals had died of natural causes and were attacked by predators: buzzards, blowflies, coyotes, and so on. The wounds gave the impression of surgical incisions as they tended to eat the exposed parts, such as the eyes and sex organs.
Several factors dove these scares, which have parallels with mass sightings of Bigfoot, chupacabras, and the Loch Ness Monster. These waves were typically triggered by a sighting that received sensational media coverage. This prompted readers to scrutinize their environment—the lakes, woods, and the sky—for evidence of the reported object or creature.
There are always mysterious things swimming or floating in lakes and moving through the woods, rustling bushes. Ordinary, we don’t pay much attention. But prompted by media reports, people tend to notice things that were always there.
New Jersey has one of the busiest flight paths in the world. Also, human perception is notoriously unreliable, as are our brains. There is a tendency to see what we expect to see.
In this regard, believing is seeing. The brain is wired to connect dots and create meaning where there is none. The face of Mars. The image of Jesus on a tortilla. Throw in fears about nefarious foreign actors in the form of the Iranians or Chinese—along with widespread distrust of the government and politicians—and you have the recipe for a drone scare.
In the words of Carl Sagan, “Where we have strong emotions, we’re liable to fool ourselves.”
