Conspiracy Theories Flourish as Mystery ‘Drones’ Spotted Across U.S.

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It’s the story everybody in America is talking about. No, not the story about Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, setting off a national debate about health insurance in the U.S. and who profits from denying everyday Americans care. We’re talking about drones. Specifically, those mystery drones that have launched a million conspiracy theories online about what they could be.

The drones have been reported every night in New Jersey since Nov. 18, according to NBC News, except for just one day that didn’t have any sightings in the state: Thanksgiving. That’s weird, of course, but not as weird as the fact that everyone seems to be confused about what these flying objects might be.

Most of the viral videos appear to show aircraft that are plainly just normal commercial jets. But there are plenty that can’t be easily explained. The supposed “drones” have been spotted in other parts of the country too, like Southern California, though nothing has emerged on the west coast quite like the videos on the east coast. And elected leaders are calling for serious action.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate for another month before Democrats lose control of the Senate, has called for a recently declassified drone-detection technology to be used to figure out what these flying objects might be.

“Some of the drones are small. Some of the drones’ flight patterns are erratic,” Schumer said on Sunday, according to NBC News. “Multiple drones flying together can confuse a traditional radar system and that’s why, again, this new technology can really get us the answers that we need.”

And with no easy answers yet, the internet is absolutely bubbling over with conspiracy theories. To be clear, we’re in no position to confirm or deny any of these theories right now. Because politicians and average people alike are still scratching their heads about what could be going on. Is it mass hysteria? Probably. But there are also videos with confusing elements that are difficult to explain. And whereas normally we can pretty definitively say that a conspiracy theory is clearly absurd, we have to remain open to almost any ridiculous angle at this point. Almost.

Arguably the most popular conspiracy theory to emerge over the weekend started with a TikTok from John Ferguson, the CEO of Saxon Aerospace in Kansas. The video was deleted from TikTok but sparked such a wide-ranging conversation that clips have been shared on all kinds of social media sites. And you can watch the entire thing here.

The long and the short of it is that this guy believes the drones may be hunting for some kind of chemical leak or, more disturbingly, may be looking for a rogue nuclear weapon that’s somewhere in the U.S. The man claims that a nuclear weapon that went missing from Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union somehow made its way to U.S. soil recently and the American government is hunting for it with these drones. Joe Rogan helped amplify the theory on Sunday, giving it a lot more attention.

There is a team of people from the National Nuclear Safety Administration, housed under the Department of Energy, who are specifically tasked with looking for any rogue nukes. It was set up in the 1970s after a spate of bad nuclear extortion threats against U.S. cities, most of which were not credible and involved people just trying to get money from the government. But there have been some instances of people obtaining real nuclear material and threatening to blow people up.

There’s no available evidence at this point, however, that we’re dealing with government-sanctioned nuke hunters. There have been sensationalist claims made on X in the wake of this video about lost nuclear material. Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson tried to make it sound like a scandal on Monday that a report on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s website listed some lost radioactive material in New Jersey recently.

But this kind of thing happens all the time. And you’ll notice in the report it’s clearly not a nuclear weapon. Radioactive material is used in all kinds of scientific equipment and this kind of stuff gets lost in transit sometimes and needs to be reported to the authorities. It doesn’t mean that anyone can make a nuclear bomb out of it.

As a Community Note points out in one of the alarmist tweets, the amount of radiation that one could receive from the missing material, in this case, would be roughly equivalent to a CT scan, provided you stood next to it for a full year.

Incoming president Donald Trump said the government knows what’s going on but won’t tell anyone. And while it’s entirely possible that he’s right, he also lies all the time and has plenty of motivation to make it seem like the U.S. government is currently inept and deceitful, which will surely be remedied when he takes power gain on Jan. 20, 2025.

“Look, our military knows where they took off from,” Trump said at a press conference Monday. “If it’s a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don’t want to comment.”

Then there were the people who insisted the U.S. government was planning a staged alien invasion to distract Americans, called Project Blue Beam. The conspiracy theory pushes the idea that a fake alien invasion will be used to justify a world government and then be used to destroy Christianity and Judaism, replacing traditional religion with New Age beliefs. The idea was first dubbed Project Blue Beam by Serge Monast, a Canadian conspiracy theorist in the 1990s. But it’s still popular among figures like Alex Jones.

And the InfoWars host insisted as early as Dec. 11 that this spate of drone sightings was all about setting up a New World Order—a term he’s been obsessed with since he first got his start on local public access TV in Texas during the 1990s.

The theory was also pushed by right-wing figures, like comedian Roseanne Barr. “Now you see why I mention Project Blue Beam every week on my podcast…..” Barr tweeted Dec. 14.

It wasn’t just Trump who was floating his own conspiracy theories about the so-called drones. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, said it’s “total bullshit that no one knows what these are.” And while Greene may be correct, she hasn’t presented any evidence for that assertion just yet. Instead, she just insists that once Trump gets back into power, we’ll know everything.

Eventually, Greene escalated her rhetoric, as she often does when there’s attention to be had. By Dec. 14 she was claiming that not only does the U.S. government know what the drones are, they’re controlling them.

“The government is in control of the drones and refuses to tell the American people what is going on. It really is that bad,” Greene wrote on X.

Then there are the politicians like Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Republican congressman from New Jersey, who claims the drones are actually Iranian in origin and are being launched from a mothership off the east coast. There’s no evidence for that and it’s a claim the Pentagon has denied. But it’s not like Rep. Van Drew is some random guy on the internet. This is an elected official who’s making this claim and says he’s talking with people who would know.

Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, also posted his own video of what he said were “dozens of drones” spotted over Maryland.

“We are being told that neither the White House, the military, the FBI, or Homeland Security have any idea what they are, where they came from, or who has launched or is controlling them–and that they pose no threat,” Hogan wrote. “That response is entirely unacceptable. I join with the growing bipartisan chorus of leaders demanding that the federal government immediately address this issue. The American people deserve answers and action now.”

But the video is very shaky and at least some of the lights in the video appeared to be just stars in the sky.

And this all brings us full circle. We don’t know what’s going on, but it really seems like nobody does at this point. And the vast majority of the videos that are circulating online can be explained as either regular planes or stars in the sky. The FBI released a joint statement with the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 14 that promised the public that both agencies were investigating.

“We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” the statement read. “The FBI, DHS, and our federal partners, in close coordination with the New Jersey State Police, continue to deploy personnel and technology to investigate this situation and confirm whether the reported drone flights are actually drones or are instead manned aircraft or otherwise inaccurate sightings.”

“Historically, we have experienced cases of mistaken identity, where reported drones are, in fact, manned aircraft or facilities,” the statement continued. “We are supporting local law enforcement in New Jersey with numerous detection methods but have not corroborated any of the reported visual sightings with electronic detection. To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully. There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space. ”

The statement ended by saying the agencies hadn’t seen “malicious activity” which is both encouraging and vague if you really think about what it means.

“We take seriously the threat that can be posed by unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), which is why law enforcement and other agencies continue to support New Jersey and investigate the reports,” the statement read. “To be clear, they have uncovered no such malicious activity or intent at this stage. While there is no known malicious activity occurring in New Jersey, the reported sightings there do, however, highlight the insufficiency of current authorities.”



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