Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:30 PM | December 15, 2024
MEME

The New Jersey drone story is a Rorschach test. A psychological experiment to determine people's reaction to ambiguous information that can be read in many ways. 

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I don't know whether an actual psychological experiment is being done, but that is just one of the plausible explanations for what is happening, and it makes as much sense as any other explanation for the oddities of a story that will not go away, and that has yet to be explained fully. 

I can't remember when I first heard rumblings about drones flying over New Jersey, and I paid little attention to the story because it seemed unlikely that this was anything terribly unusual. Lots of things zoom around in the sky, and optical illusions--particularly at night when our eyes don't work particularly well and our ability to interpret visual input is especially bad--can create all sorts of false impressions. A plane moving toward you (or away) can look like it is hovering, for instance. 

Photo or video evidence is suspect as well because most people assume that anything recorded is objective information, when in fact, the lens, the camera sensor, the scanning rate of the sensor, and the autofocus algorithm can all create bizarre images that are anything but "objective" reality. The more you know about how modern cameras work, the more you realize that the recording instrument is not a passive instrument but one of the most important factors in how an image comes out. 

Camera phones in particular, rely on algorithms and artificial intelligence to create images; far from "recording" what they see, they make images the camera thinks should be there. 

But it sure seems like SOMETHING unusual is happening in New Jersey, even if most of the reports you see are easily explainable through some method or another. And it also seems like the government wants us to believe that something real is happening, and saying just enough to keep the story alive and just enough to make us suspicious that they are hiding something. 

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If the goal is to make people suspicious that they are hiding something, they have done a bang-up job. They don't quite knock down the story by saying that these are all non-drone events. They say there really ARE drones, that they don't know whose they are, but that they present no threat. 

Given all the ambiguity, it's no wonder that many people are worried. And for every worried person, there is a hyperrationalist who pooh-poohs the whole story as a moral panic. And for all we know, there may be nothing to it. 

But then, why is the government keeping the story alive? They appear to be almost nurturing it, or at least they are acting like something is being hidden. 

It seems to me that the likeliest explanations are:

  1. There are drones and they are run by the government, testing out some capability or another that requires being used in a semi-urban area. Perhaps testing out the ability to find weapons of mass destruction. 
  2. There are drones flown by the government actually looking for reported weapons of mass destruction, and they don't want to panic people about a potential danger.
  3. There are drones flown by an adversary (a la Chinese spy balloon, which they also downplayed until caught), and they don't want people to blame the government for obvious failures. 
  4. There are drones flown by the government, and they really are doing a psychological experiment to see how people respond both the the drones and to the government messaging. 
  5. There were drones, and now everything reported is noise generated by people being hyperaware of the possibility of drones. 
  6. There never were drones, and this is just one of those stories that got rolling, and now people see drones everywhere. 
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Certainly, most drone reports now are reports of easily explained phenomena. That is always the case when people are primed to see things, but that doesn't mean that buried in all the noise is a genuine signal of something. 

If I had to bet, the story is either #1 or #2, but I don't have high confidence. 

What is weird about this is that the story has gone on so long without anybody giving us a straight answer--even a convincing lie--about what is happening. You would think that the concern about the drones is becoming dangerous enough in itself to convince somebody in power to address the whole thing forthrightly. But even Senators and state legislators seem frustrated about how little information they are being given. 

The whole thing is weird. 

Generally speaking, most weird things have benign explanations, so I am less worried about drones than annoyed that the government appears to be hiding what they know. It strains credulity to believe they are truly ignorant about what is going on, and "classified" military tests are an insufficient explanation. It's well-known something is happening, and generally speaking, "classified" things are secret, and there is nothing secret about drones with flashing lights and nationwide news coverage. 

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What do you think is happening?

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