Drone Realities & Delusions, Pet Eaters, Aliens, Clown Panics...

Meet two Rutgers professors who had a close drone encounter

This is a must-watch (and share) webcast with Robert Bartholomew, a prominent sociologist and author who studies mass delusion, and two Rutgers faculty, Distinguished Professor of Biology Joanna Burger and her husband, emeritus professor of occupational medicine and toxicology Michael Gochfield, who described in detail a close encounter with a large (all-terrain-vehicle size) drone on the night of December 12.

The full discussion is below and on YouTube here. Here’s a key nugget:

Pre-webcast post: I imagine you’ve heard something about a still-unfolding drone panic.

It’d be one thing if drone-mania was confined to X. There I’ve been among a host of folks trying to push back. I particularly loved when the Goodyear Blimp X account shaned someone trying to harvest clicks using fuzzy video of the Goodyear Blimp.

But network TV news reporters, usually citing unverifiable assertions by elected officials, continue to amplify the story - often slipping from describing reports of drones to just saying drones (as if unmanned armadas are indeed roaming the skies).

Google Image search for “drones New Jersey”

Insert - 2 p.m. ET - I want to be clear that I’m not asserting there are no drones in the mix here. A Wall Street Journal story today includes links to a more-documented drone incursion over sensitive sites last year:

The recent wave of drone sightings involving large, unmanned aircraft often flying near sensitive sites started last month in New Jersey and has spread to other states such as New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The drones appear similar to a fleet seen near sensitive national-security sites in Virginia a year ago.

But it’s also clear that most of what’s made headlines and social media so far is spurious. - End insert

I imagine the buzz recalls some things you’ve heard recently about pet-eating immigrants, UFOs, and more. But do you recall the great “crazy clown” panic of 2016? I didn’t until I began poking around. There’s a broader, deeper pattern here.

Google image search for clown panic 2016

I ran a webcast and posted about UFO-mania a couple of years ago and have been back-and-forthing about all of this with one of my guests on that episode - the longtime conspiracy-debunking journalist Keith Kloor.

Kloor pointed me to the invaluable cross-cutting research on social panics and the like by the medical sociologist Robert E. Barthlomew. I’m happy to say Bartholomew, who has written a batch of relevant books and writes the “It’s Catching” blog at Psychology Today, is my guest on today’s special pop-up Sustain What show on the current social-media-amped drone bubble and the underlying phenomena that feed such moments.

Watch and engage with us on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube or my X/Twitter @revkin account.

Bartholomew latest “It’s Catching” post is a short piece laying out how New Jersey was a focal point for another kind of aerial panic, during “The German Scare” around World War I. Here’s an excerpt but please read the full article:

Mysterious aerial lights—seemingly under intelligent control—are spotted above New Jersey and adjacent Delaware, sometimes over sensitive military installations. Some express fear that it may be a foreign adversary carrying out reconnaissance missions. The current drone scare? No, the northeastern United States over 100 years ago.

Back then, the sightings of mysterious aerial objects coincided with World War I and "the German Scare." Most of the sightings turned out to be misidentifications of known astronomical bodies, such as Venus. Others were fire balloons, which consisted of paper balloons with candles attached near the mouth and were made buoyant by the generation of heat….

The [current] drone scare reflects two recent moral panics in America—the fear of new technologies coupled with the longstanding fear of foreigners and the so-called "enemy at the gate." Just as the lights over New Jersey and Delaware were once attributed to German spies or advanced warfare technologies, today's sightings are likely shaped by fears of foreign interference, espionage, or technological threats. Whether these objects have been sent by a foreign actor or an illusion fueled by modern fears, the current panic appears to be rooted in the same anxieties that marked a similar scare over a century ago.

In early 1915, with war anxieties at a peak, the Canadian Government declared a state of emergency and posted sentries around the Parliament after a series of UFO sightings near the border with New York State amid fears that German sympathizers in America were going to conduct a bombing raid on Canada.

Historically, UFO scares have had a tendency to spread. It would not be surprising to see reports pick up around the country and globally as people scrutinize the skies and begin to notice objects that have always been there.

I also urge you to follow the social media postings of meteorologist Matthew Cappucci on the drone surge. Here’s a great one from his Instagram account.

Mick West, a popular and much-attacked deunker of UFO reports and the folks who anmplify them, has posted an excellent explainer of the drone sightings: