Or is it? The general public is on high alert this December to the presence of "drones" over New Jersey, our UK airbases, and off the coast of Oregon. Coverage has been widespread on legacy media and everywhere on social media. The government says: nothing to see here. Just a bunch of copycat knuckleheads and hobbyists. No foreign adversaries. No threat to the public.
This is not new. Neither the government’s response nor the sightings. The blatant flyovers, the hovering of Unidentified Aircraft Systems (UAS) over US military assets is not new. It has been happening since the dawn of the nuclear age in the 1940’s. What is new: is the smart phone; ubiquitous and in every citizen's hand, making every neighbor a witness and every person a citizen journalist. When these phones first hit the market getting high resolution images off one's screen and onto one's computer was a real pain. Now we take fairly high-resolution photos or video and post it to social media in the time it takes to tie a pair of sneakers for a toddler.
Hence, the hysteria. The smart phone may be new, but mass hysteria is not. So, who knows? Is it is, or is it isn't, a drone? I want to be clear here, these UAS have, to this point, not been sourced. Which is a little unnerving. The government says, literally, we do not know what they are, and we do not where they came from. Also unnerving, are the reports of similar sightings coming in from other states: NH, MA, VA, CA, CT, just to name a few. Witnesses claim the objects are the size of a sport utility vehicle and they make little to no sound. To heighten the tension, there are reports of similar sightings coming in from Asia, South and Central America, and Europe, too.
What are these UAS? I'm not going to venture a guess. Clearly, I do not want to give posterity a chuckle. I'll just say this: sometimes a rose is a rose is a rose. Sometimes.
