The Great American Drone Game

Hard to ignore low-hanging fruit. And what’s sagging nearest to hand these days are UFOs spotted all across our fruited plains. If you’re a stickler or fluent in bureaucratese, you’ll want to call them UAPs or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. If you’re an unlettered oaf like me, you’ll just say drones.

Used to be we mostly read about bomb-carrying drones of various shapes and sizes swarming over the Red Sea or the embattled skies of Ukraine. Now we’ve got civilians right here at home going bat-crap crazy over drone sightings nearly everywhere. It’s given a whole new meaning to the term fly-over country. Squinting at the night skies over my own little patch of globe, I’ve failed to spot anything more than stars, the moon, and passing airliners but that hasn’t kept me from exercising due diligence in an effort to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Among a bunch of semi-literate pals that gather regularly at my local watering trough, I posed the question regarding all these drone sightings. Responses were…well, let’s just call them interesting. It’s the heathen Chinese running a massive aerial-reconnaissance operation. Or it’s a gang of high-tech jihadis scouting for targets in the US power grid. Could be some kind of nefarious drone operation run on our own citizens by a super-secret government outfit. A political junkie in the crowd believed it was just sore loser Dems trying to distract attention from the president-elect with shiny flying objects. The guy down at the end of the bar, a Star Trek fan from way back, said we should all just accept the fact that we are not alone in the universe. Those lights in the sky are scout ships full of alien visitors from another galaxy.

Credibility was an issue here. Three of the four sources were wearing a couple of inches of tinfoil under their hats and one of them was a notorious doomsday prepper. The Trekker guy gave the Vulcan salute along with his opinion so I discounted the space aliens immediately. Walking home, watching a far off streetlight blinking intermittently, I formulated my own opinion that had nothing to do with enemy spies, secret-squirrel government operations, or any other sort of official efforts, friendly or enemy.

Most likely, we are seeing games being played by bored citizens looking to thumb their collective noses at all levels of government in an effort to create controversy. It’s a bunch of snickering, rebellious teens and young adults pranking right out there on the thin edge of illegal activity. It’s today’s high tech version of egging storefronts or wrapping neighborhood trees in toilet paper. Given the affordable cost and ready availability of cheap drones in practically every Walmart, Target, or hobby shop in the nation, clubbing up into a loose gang of miscreants is easy enough. I can picture these guys and gals swiping through apps on their phones in a dark state of ennui. So bored. And then: “You know what would be cool?” Out come the drones, on go strings of weird lights, and the thrills commence. When stories start appearing on TV or on the net, there’s an adrenaline charge. Cackles and high-fives all around. “Those bozos don’t have a clue!”

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. It’s regularly reinforced by actual scientists who study such things for a living and say most of it is either natural phenomena or misinterpretation of what amateurs are seeing in our night skies. Of course, some questions remain. Flying drones near a military installation like Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio is a no-brainer if you’re into an enemy recon conspiracy. But why New Jersey? Could be spectral ghosts of good fellas whacked by the mafia rising over the pine barrens. Or it could be a bunch of Jersey Shore goombahs organized to flip a high-tech middle digit to the establishment. My money is on that kind of thing.

Rest assured that the more time and space our discredited national press tries to milk out of this kind of story, the more mysterious drones various brat-packs will launch. What’s needed at that point is a couple of wing-shooting good old boys with shotguns as I’ve said before in this space. Relatively cheap as off-the-shelf drones are these days, you start losing a bunch of them to double-ought buckshot and it all becomes a matter of economics. How much are you willing to fork over for illicit thrills?

As I like to think of myself as open-minded, I’m willing to be disabused of my semi-organized mischief theory. I could be wrong. And just in case, I’m stocking up on tinfoil.

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