Drones!??!!!?!!!
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Learn more at phrma.org slash IPWorksWonders. 964 sightings of SUV-sized drones have been recorded across New Jersey, some of which have even been over critical military infrastructure. Woo boy. That breathless TikTok comes courtesy of the British tabloid, The Daily Mail.

This next one is from former Real Housewife Bethany Frankel. So this is unsettling. It's the upside down. One party that I just spoke to saw four aircrafts in Monmouth County, Monmouth Beaches, New Jersey, and one was a plane and three were drones flying low, gigantic. Over the last few weeks, people all over New Jersey have become obsessed with drones or what they say are drones.

Things, lights, items in the sky at night. I've never seen them. Wow, they're just fast. Yeah, I've never seen them before.

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim went out on patrol with local cops and saw something flying around. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan posted his own sighting on X and urged the government to take the issue seriously. Though what Hogan saw turned out to be the constellation Orion, which, as far as I know, has been there for millions of years. We decided to do some very serious investigative journalism.

Okay, this is Ben Mathis-Lilley, Slate staff writer, reporting from Maplewood, New Jersey, about five miles from the Newark airport. So the bad news, drama-wise, is that it's raining. It's very overcast. And I can't really see anything in the sky. Various government agencies have repeatedly said that nothing dangerous is happening.

Nevertheless, there have been reports that people are now sending up drones to check on the supposed other drones. On Thursday, the FAA issued a temporary flight restriction banning drones from flying over, quote, critical New Jersey infrastructure until mid-January. In light of all of this, we wanted to understand what makes it so easy for lots of people to believe that something nefarious is going on.

So I called up the best aviation journalist I know. John, can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Absolutely. I'm John Ostro. I'm editor-in-chief of The Occurrent. John has been covering aviation for 17 years, and he's broken countless stories, including lots about Boeing. You've heard him on this show a number of times. Your site covers, like, everything aviation. Are you guys even covering this? We're watching it.

We're watching it. So we're also, we're a small team. So we have to really pick our battles. But fundamentally, this is one of those things where we're looking at kind of what the developments are. And we're seeing people post genuinely, vaguely psychotic takes on where we are right now. People that should know better. And it just kind of causes a froth. And we're anti-froth.

So today on the show, no froth, no conspiracies, and some actual answers about what people are seeing when they look up. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. The truth is out there.

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So you have all these people on the ground. They go outside. A lot of them are in New Jersey. Some of them include senators, governors, etc. They are speculating about what drones, in their words, are doing all over the East Coast. You are not concerned. Tell me why. I think it's important to remember that the sky has changed.

in the last 10 years. And we spent a lot of time inside that, yes, the pandemic has all of that. We spent a lot of time looking down at our phones or, you know, we're distracted by what's going on around us, just, you know, living life. And so when people look up and they see things happening around them, that may be either unfamiliar or, you

They just haven't spent a lot of time realizing that this guy also does play tricks on you in terms of perception and depth perception and angles and, and, you know, all kinds of different things. So what, what happened in the last 10 years? So number one, there are a lot of drones.

Commercial drones, what you can get for under $1,000, way under $1,000 to fly in your backyard, is really incredible. Battery technology has allowed that to happen. Quadcopters, there's been initial delivery trials with Amazon in various parts of the country actually delivering small parcels. And there's been a huge push in that direction. So the sky at a low altitude is more crowded.

But when you kind of step back from that, you go way up high. The other thing that's happened is there are like 6,000 more satellites in orbit than there were, you know, like five or 10 years ago. And yes, Elon Musk and Starlink was where that kind of happened. Oh my God, there's always an Elon Musk angle. You know what? Here we are. But it's true. You know, 6,700 and...

64 Starlink satellites in orbit as of a few weeks ago, which is an incredible number. And by the way, that's like double the number of satellites. There is a space economy that's being created. But here's the thing. Putting 6,764 Starlink satellites in orbit also changes what the sky looks like. They are flying around in what these call them trains, effectively, of satellites that are going around the Earth at, again, orbiting once every 90 minutes.

And there are just thousands of them. And so it drives astronomers crazy because we're now putting pollution and light pollution in front of, you know, the sky and the incredible universe that we exist in, in the Milky Way galaxy. But it's also changed what we see.

And so that's at a really, really high level. I think a lot of people are seeing those for the first time and realizing that the critical mass of satellites that are now in low Earth orbit is beginning to affect the view and also our perception of what's going on up there. And I would just add one more piece, which is that the number of flights and the amount of flying we're doing since the pandemic has not only rebound, but it's actually more.

than where we were before. So in a place like New Jersey, which, yes, is in the middle of probably one of the busiest air corridors in all of the world, you're also just going to see more airplanes. So you've got people basically looking at airplanes, satellites, and yeah, some drones. Yeah. And I know that the people are seeing drones, right? The question is, are they nefarious? Are they coordinated? Is there...

Is there something more to all of this? Part of the reason for the conspiratorial mindset is that while regulators have mostly kept up with the ballooning number of things in the sky, they don't always have clear answers or easy directives. One of the big challenges that the FAA has faced is putting what is ostensibly a proliferation of drone operators behind

in with a regular, you know, airspace environment while there are regular sized airplanes, crewed airplanes going in and out of airports all over the country. Have they caused trouble, drones? One of the things that the FAA and safety officials have been worried about for a long time is

The effect, you know, we had bird strikes for, well, since as long as there's been flying, right? But that same idea kind of plays here, which is that they're also worried about airplanes running into drones and people not flying them where and when they're supposed to. And so, yes, there are restrictions on where you can fly them. A lot of the new software for running these drones actually takes into account the regulations of...

where you're flying them. So it literally won't let you go past a certain altitude if there are certain restrictions and, you know, kind of no-go zones baked in. So it will, there's those kind of, you know, guardrails. Certainly there are people who, you know, more or less can get around those and just by virtue of if you create a barrier, people find a way around it.

But more and more it's baked into the software. But yes, there are dedicated regulations which are around altitude and lighting and all of that. And that is something that we have seen with how drones are just operating in the world right now, in the U.S. When we come back, guess what? It's all going to get worse.

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We got this statement this week, and it's a joint statement from the FAA, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the Department of Defense saying, having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, I didn't even want to think about, like, the number of calls they got, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars, mistaken reportedly as drones.

drones. And like, I can feel the the feds kind of saying like, everybody, please calm down here. But I wonder what it says to you that these agencies have have had to put out this statement saying that, you know, this doesn't present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey. We're in a really interesting moment.

You know, people are seeing what they're seeing on the internet. They're seeing things that are either fabricated, misinterpreted, wholly false. And they're existing in an environment where there aren't as many trusted voices. There's been a significant amount of skepticism and downright mistrust infused into how we hear things. And that makes all of us, by the way,

exhausted because you're constantly having to evaluate, is what I'm seeing real? Can I trust this? Why should I trust this? And, you know, it directly intersects with effectively the breakdown in our belief in institutions, whether it's at the FAA, whether it's, you know, aircraft manufacturers, whether it's, you know,

Professional sports leagues, whether it's politicians, organized religion, take your pick in terms of where people are feeling the trust that they used to have in telling them that everything was going to be okay or that they could trust what they were seeing and hearing or, yes, the media.

quote-unquote, there's a bureaucratic element to this, which is how individual agencies within the government communicate with one another, how they respond, seriously or unseriously, to what they see online and how people are responding to that, and whether or not they need to even weigh in on that. Because in many ways, you have a legitimization of people looking up at the sky being like, oh my god, the sky is falling, right? And that becomes...

challenging in its own right to be in a democracy where you have a government and its institutions responding to what's going on in terms of people's backyards and what they're seeing and experiencing, but also not adding to

Whether it's hysteria or panic or the sort of endemic lack of trust that people have with what's going on around them. And so it's a really hard needle to thread. Okay, but then I want to throw this one at you because there have been some...

real things, which I think adds to this problem that you're talking about. So in October, a bunch of pilots at Langley Air Force Base reported being swarmed by drones for a couple of weeks. And the Pentagon was like, yeah, we don't really know what's going on. It feels like there are these moments when sometimes there is

actual stuff up there. I hearken back to the Chinese spy balloon brouhaha, whether it's ours or someone else's, that adds a layer of secrecy and suspicion that makes it easy for someone to mistake, you know, Orion's belt for a creepy satellite spying on them. What's amazing is that we have access to so much information. And

You don't use it all the time or give it the respect it has earned. But all of this information proliferates. Like I can right now...

go into a feed inside X or blue sky and look at an, you know, a collected group of accounts of open source intelligence reports. And a lot of these include, you know, what's going on in the battlefield in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Syria, all over the world where these real time events are happening and they're being captured online.

by people on the ground and then shared obviously online. And it creates a sum total of a new almost pipeline of information that people never had access to before. There are very scary parts of where we are right now. And I count myself as someone who is of the belief that as trust has declined, to be trusted is the most

incredible gift you can be given by either your audience, your readership, your subscribers, whatever. And so it's not something to be trifled with as trust has declined. But it also means that in a media environment where someone is sitting on the battlefield in Ukraine and uploading first-person video drone attacks on a Russian convoy, for example, that allows you this ability to

take advantage of these barriers that have become so low to just enter the information environment. Well, you're making me think about the future and it just makes me wonder, are people just going to have to get ready to see a lot of stuff in the sky and not freak out every time? The proliferation of drones and autonomous systems in the sky is only going to grow.

And that's going to be in a civilian context. That's going to be in a military context. And, you know, look, the war in Ukraine completely changed how the world thinks about warfare in the 21st century.

The battlefield in Ukraine showed us that drones are going to be an integral part of that environment where effectively you can have not a smart bomb, but literally someone flying a drone for under $500 a pop with a very improvised explosive on it and do a significant amount of damage. And there's not a lot...

you can do about that. What we're also seeing is the capability of actually being able to control these drone swarms in a really coordinated way, which is both incredible from a civilian perspective to see an alternative to a fireworks display, but also what that means for the battlefield of the future or the battlefield of right now, actually.

And so that is going to change how we see the sky and how the sky is used. John Ostrower, thank you for being willing to come on and talk about this. My pleasure. John Ostrower is editor-in-chief of The Air Current. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Shana Roth. Special thanks to Ben Mathis-Lilley.

Our show is edited by Paige Osborne, and Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate. TBD is part of the larger What Next family, and just a heads up about that, our friends at What Next have a fun little holiday treat for all Slate Plus subscribers. Mary Harris decided we needed to cap off this year with a little karaoke party. My karaoke anthem is in there, so I recommend it.

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