Science & Tech

It’s Christmas time again, and people in America are looking up at the sky and believing insane things.

I don’t mean the story about a jovial old man who surveils our kids’ behavior all year, and then steals into our homes to bring them gifts – made with apparently unpaid labor – based on a “naughty-nice” social credit score.

No. This year, a new gift comes to us from an improbable place: the night skies over New Jersey, where for several weeks now people have been seeing, or think they have been seeing, hundreds of mysterious drones.

These drones are already the stuff of legend. They are strangely big. They are weirdly small. They turn off their lights when you see them. They instantly drain the batteries of any other drones that come near them. They are going to military bases. They are actually coming from military bases. They all live on an offshore mothership belonging to an alien regime: this regime is either Iranian or extraterrestrial.

The memes, as you might imagine, have been superb. Here’s a coked-up Henry Hill in Goodfellas, driving around North Jersey in a state of sweaty, chain-smoking paranoia about that helicopt–, I mean that drone up there. Here’s a real life paisan’ unveiling a drone shaped Italian cheese-bread at a restaurant in North Bergen.

It’s endless and of course it’s become political. The governor of New Jersey has been holding press conferences about the issue. The newly-elected junior Senator of New Jersey even went out with local cops one night to try to capture video. The frenzy and the fear have gotten so intense that both the Pentagon and the White House have had to respond: we don’t know exactly what these alleged sightings are, they’ve been saying, but we do know they aren’t a threat.

That may be reasonable and true, but it has done little to sway millions of people looking at blurry images of some lights in the sky over the industrialized swamplands of north Jersey and concluding that Independence Day just got real. After all, this is a country where the government and the media have -- in some ways deservedly -- lost the trust of a majority of Americans.

That so many of these sightings seem, upon further inspection, to actually be conventional airplanes or ordinary recreational drone users, none of this matters now.

The story isn’t the story. As ever, the story is the story of the story. And the story of the story is this: our problem isn’t up there in the skies, it’s down here on the ground.

As always, there is a grain of truth to the madness. St Nicholas of Myra really was a patron saint of toymakers who is said to have dropped a few gold coins down a chimney into a fireplace stocking for a poor family. And yes, in turn, we really do have a problem with drone security. “Unmanned systems pose both an urgent and enduring threat” – that was the word from the Pentagon, which earlier this month signed off on a massive, classified new strategy meant to improve US ability to track, trace, and fend off drone threats at home and abroad.

But this whole episode exposes a much more basic and easily exploited vulnerability: it's just laughably easy to stoke distrust and hysteria in America these days.

And if you are a Russia, or a China or, say, some inter-galactic civilization keen to travel fifty million light years just to conquer a piece of northern New Jersey, this piece of information is, itself, the greatest holiday gift of all.