Beginning in November 2024, numerous aerial drones have been reported on the East Coast of the United States, centering on New Jersey. The number of drone sightings increased exponentially, and shot up even more as the media took up the cry. The FAA got involved, and even presidential travel plans were changed in the wake of the alleged drone invasion (West, 2025).

By January 2025, the White House felt it necessary to issue a somewhat unusual statement, stating that the drones were authorized by the FAA for research and various other purposes, and that a number of them were flown by hobbyists anyway. Who knows what the various other reasons were, but since this statement seemed to encompass all possible drones in an essentially exhaustive manner, many people became suspicious, especially as more drones were reported.

But were real drones responsible for the reports? People have seen and believed in things that weren’t actually there before. Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds convinced many people that they were under Martian attack, and in more terrestrial terms, similar psychological processes convinced large numbers of people in Los Angeles in 1942 that they were under attack by a Japanese air armada, when in fact no air raid was occurring at all (e.g., Sharps, 2024, pgs. 207-211). But was this the case here? What was responsible for the Incredible New Jersey Drone Effect?

Mick West (2025) provided an answer to this question. West found two categories of New Jersey “drones”: those that looked like airplanes and those that were ambiguous lights in the sky. He found nothing that looked unambiguously like a drone at all.

West obviously could not investigate every reported observation—there were simply too many of them—but in “every single case........

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