{"id":282791,"date":"2024-12-23T12:01:14","date_gmt":"2024-12-23T12:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=282791"},"modified":"2024-12-20T06:40:16","modified_gmt":"2024-12-20T06:40:16","slug":"drones-and-mass-hysteria-an-inquest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/12\/drones-and-mass-hysteria-an-inquest\/","title":{"rendered":"Drones and Mass Hysteria: An Inquest"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Twitter user @Martya45<\/p><\/div>\n

15 Dec 2024 <\/em>– Friday night [13 Dec] I went out driving to see if I could get a look at one of these darned mystery drones for myself. Ground zero was reportedly Morris County, NJ, so I made the short trek. Let me first acknowledge that I could easily be suffering from a variant of the syndrome commonly known as confirmation bias. It\u2019s an affliction I typically try to guard against, in many facets of journalism and life, but it\u2019s never totally avoidable, as we all subjectively hurtle through day-to-day consciousness with no full control of how we absorb and process information. This often leads to cognitive biases, whereby the information we receive is filtered through a predetermined, confirmatory lens, and disconfirmatory information is ignored or discarded. Managing the inevitability of confirmation bias is a constant struggle, or at least should be for those who aspire to maximum rationality.<\/p>\n

So far as I can ascertain my own conscious will, I had no particular desire to validate the burgeoning narrative of a \u201cmystery drone\u201d incursion. Group psychology and mass hysteria have bedeviled humanity for millennia. You can read about instances of mass hysteria from the Middle Ages when hundreds or thousands of people danced erratically<\/a> for weeks at a time, before collapsing dead. More contemporary political group psychology frequently compels people to justify or rationalize an infinite array of bad behavior, out of a desire to remain in good standing with a certain ingroup.<\/p>\n

Having ventured out for the specific purpose of drone-spotting, I was a huge candidate for confirmation bias. It wasn\u2019t as though I was just ambling through a pasture, looked up, and saw a bedazzling drone of unknown provenance. I was purposely looking for drones, spurred by social and political chatter that had reached a crescendo. This might mean that my observations should be disregarded, or at least viewed with heightened skepticism.<\/p>\n

That said, driving Friday night in Rockaway, NJ, I saw a drone, with multiple red lights, hovering stationary in the sky. I definitely have never witnessed such a flying object before. I was able to look at it for around 10-15 seconds, before losing it in the trees, as I was operating a moving vehicle at the time. It wasn\u2019t long enough to attempt to safely snap a photo, which probably would not have captured a useful image anyway.<\/p>\n

This was probably a mile or so from Picatinny Arsenal, a US military facility which produces artillery munition, including for the current war in Ukraine. Whether there\u2019s a connection here with the drone sighting, it\u2019s not possible for me to say. Unlike so many others who populate the internet, I try not to be too flippant about drawing causal conclusory inferences, which is often a hallmark of poor reasoning. But a lot of the mystery drone activity does seem to be taking place in the vicinity of this military base. To the degree that my visual perception is at all reliable, what I saw was definitely not a plane.<\/p>\n

After a bit more driving, I stopped at a location where I saw another apparent drone, at a higher altitude, which seems to be the type most people in the area are reporting to have witnessed. It resembled some sort of fixed-wing aircraft. It was traveling in a straight line, with red and green lights. I don\u2019t think this was a plane either, but it appeared more plane-like, so my confidence is lesser than with the first drone. (I\u2019m only using the word \u201cdrone\u201d as a stand-in, because obviously I don\u2019t know for certain what any of these objects are. Maybe \u201cobject\u201d would be a better stand-in word.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I would preliminarily urge people to consider. Group psychology and mass hysteria are real things. Undoubtedly, plenty of interested parties would love for the drone\/object \u2018invasion\u2019 to be attributable to the standard cadre of scary \u201cadversaries\u201d like Russia, China, or Iran. Others may wish for it to be a secret Pentagon program being covered up by some elements of the Biden Administration, because they dislike the Biden Administration and a cover-up would be another datapoint confirming their dislike. Others may want to somehow blame it on Trump, who has now called for the drones to be shot down. Whatever your preferred explanation for these object sightings, harboring that preference should be paired with an openness to receipt of information without overwhelming confirmatory bias. Ideally, there should probably be no preference at all. Why should you have a preference, one way or another, what the genesis of the activity is? My preference is to simply know<\/em> what the genesis is, rather than having a preference for any particular explanation. In other words, my dominant preference here is for truth-seeking, rather than explanation-hoping.<\/p>\n

With the public backlash and interest growing exponentially, it\u2019s plausible that the uproar could be harnessed for questionable ends, like bombing Iran. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), who I interviewed<\/a> at the Republican Convention last summer, has already come out with his characteristically wild claim<\/a>, based on secret consultations with secret sources, that the drones could be from an Iranian \u201cdrone mothership\u201d that somehow managed to get off the coast of New Jersey without (public) detection. It would certainly be strange if Iran, which has been so emasculated in its own home region that it could do nothing to prevent the disintegration of the Syrian government, nonetheless could still marshal the resources for an audacious drone-mothership journey to New Jersey.<\/p>\n

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), another piece of work who\u2019s hardly ever met a foreign entanglement he didn\u2019t like since entering the House of Representatives 44 years ago (yes, you read that number right) made the following statement<\/a> at a press conference he convened Saturday. \u201cThe elusive maneuvering of these drones suggests a major military power sophistication that begs the question whether they have been deployed to test our defense capabilities \u2014 or worse \u2014 by violent dictatorships including Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other than the typical misuse of \u201cbeg the question,\u201d something to be flagged with this statement is Smith\u2019s serious thirst for the drone sightings to serve as the basis for some sort of punitive military action. Or at the very least, to serve as justification for increased military-industrial expenditure.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s silly for anyone to dismiss the drone sighting phenomenon as entirely<\/em> an instance of mass hysteria. I apparently saw one myself, and don\u2019t think I\u2019m in the throes of hysteria. On the other hand, mass hysteria could certainly be a component<\/em>, and it\u2019s very possible that politicians will attempt to leverage the reasonable public alarm by fomenting their own version of hysteria in pursuit of pre-existing objectives. So those are the factors I would have front of mind when evaluating this curious episode.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Over the years, Michael Tracey has contributed to a wide range of publications across the political spectrum, from<\/em> The Nation\u00a0to\u00a0<\/em>The American Conservative, the\u00a0<\/em>New York Daily News\u00a0to the<\/em>\u00a0New York Post, and many more. A substantial portion of his recent columns can be found at the website\u00a0Unherd. From 2017 to 2018, he was a correspondent for\u00a0<\/em>The Young Turks, prior to that he was a columnist for\u00a0<\/em>VICE.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – mtracey.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday night [13 Dec 2024] I went out driving to see if I could get a look at one of these darned mystery drones for myself. Let me first acknowledge that I could easily be suffering from a variant of the syndrome commonly known as confirmation bias.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":282793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1106,2638,411,2358],"class_list":["post-282791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-drones","tag-mystery","tag-north-korea","tag-ufo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282794,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282791\/revisions\/282794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}