Drones in New Jersey are flooding social media. Here's a bigger picture

North Jersey was in turmoil as mysterious drones reportedly filled the skies – and our imaginations and social media feeds.

Authorities have been forced to issue both warnings and public reassurances in recent days due to reported sightings from Wyckoff to Wantage and from the Raritan River to Rockaway Township.

Where does the excitement come from? Many North Jersey residents look up at the sky and see lights that genuinely unsettle them. But psychologists and social scientists say there are other factors that need to be considered: our human tendency to follow a crowd and social media’s ability to amplify fears and narratives.

As authorities struggle to identify the objects’ origins (if any), the drone story resonates at a time when trust in institutions and the desire for security are waning in uncertain times.

“It scares people,” said Richard Waldron, a Closter psychologist. “It’s a bit like a peeping tom, and it heightens everyone’s alertness – they become hypervigilant about the whole thing.”

Large drones over New Jersey and a fixed wing aircraft

Reports of unidentified drones have been circulating on social media since mid-November. What began as a few isolated sightings in Morris County quickly became a viral sensation, prompting authorities at Picatinny Arsenal, a military research facility in Rockaway and Jefferson, to issue warnings about drones flying over the airspace.

The FBI said last week it was investigating the drone reports as well as what it described as a “possible fixed-wing aircraft” on the Raritan River, whose tributaries flow near the military arsenal and President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course.

But the reports have expanded far beyond these potential targets to small towns across New Jersey. Just check your local Facebook group.

In a 2009 study by scientists at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, just before the dawn of the social media era, researchers found that perceptions of online information can be influenced by its apparent popularity.

Research from the school’s Center for Decision Technologies used the online publishing platform Digg.com. By manipulating the number of “upvotes” for a post, the researchers found that they could increase the number of real readers who upvoted articles. It worked regardless of the type of content, the authors said in “2,377 people like this article: The influence of other people’s decisions on yours.”

More:Is it a drone? A plane? Our experts assess the recent lights in North Jersey’s night sky

The popularity of a narrative becomes its own validation and can turn anecdotal reports into ironclad evidence, said researchers Yasuaki Sakamoto, Jing Ma and Jeffrey Nickerson. “Although people may not explicitly process information about others’ decisions, they may be influenced by them unconsciously,” they wrote.

It’s easy to imagine that the more people see posts about drones flooding the sky, the more likely they are to interpret inconsistent information – maybe those lights are just an airplane? − as evidence of a trend phenomenon.

However, social media does not have to have a negative influence. It can connect us to knowledgeable sources.

Civil Air Patrol speaks out

In Rockaway Township, for example, Chris Thomas took to Facebook this week to educate his fellow Morris County residents about the difference between drones and airplanes, which admittedly can be difficult to distinguish in the dark skies that accompanied this week’s new moon.

To put it simply, drones typically have two front lights of one color and two rear lights of a different color that flash together. Airplanes, on the other hand, have distinct red and green lights on both wings and white flashes that drones lack.

“People see strobe lights in the sky and often assume it’s a drone, but 99% of the time it’s an airplane,” Thomas said.

But Thomas, who works as an aerospace training officer with the U.S. Civil Air Patrol and is a certified drone pilot, admits the discussion isn’t quite so dry these days.

Just ask his wife, who said she saw one of the mysterious drones.

“We are in a debate about whether a flashing light in the sky was a drone or another type of aircraft,” Thomas said. “But I’m very skeptical about the possibility of a drone anywhere around us.”

Although he may be a skeptic, fast, blurry videos posted online will continue to gain traction for a while because there is something deeper going on, said Waldron, the Closter psychologist.

America has “communal PTSD”

“If you look back a few years, up until 9/11 everyone thought this country was relatively safe – that was destroyed,” Waldron said. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were followed by the financial crisis, then COVID and a wild political cycle, he said.

“The country has been going through its own post-traumatic stress disorder,” Waldron said.

“I am 73 years old and there has never been a comparable moment in my life,” he added. “This is a completely new thing. I’m studying all of this and it’s just uncharted territory – very unknown and in many ways very, very scary.”

We expect what we read to be true. The American Psychological Association noted on its website in March that it is “difficult to identify false information. When we encounter new information, we tend to focus on understanding it and deciding what to do next rather than evaluating it for its accuracy. It takes effort to compare new information with what we already know; when new information is false but plausible, we can learn it as fact.”

The APA said people are also more likely to trust information from “internal sources than from sources external to the group” – such as neighbors or Facebook friends. People are also more likely to believe information that causes anxious or angry feelings.

This may be a unique moment, but the tenor of the time reminds Waldron, a history buff, of the disillusionment that followed the assassination of 1960s leaders as the Vietnam War gained momentum. The collective trust in the government and media that helped people feel safe began to erode. Then an infamous conspiracy theory emerged.

The official investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot the president. Many doubted this conclusion and rumors spread that groups such as the CIA, the Mafia, and even Cuba were working to overthrow Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Compare this to a current era characterized by its own political instability, unreliable information, and rapid social change. Looking for drones in the sky seems like a harmless pastime.

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