Skepticism Drones On

Michael Shermer, a well-known skeptic, has spent much of his career offering dismissive analyses of virtually every class of paranormal phenomena. Recently, he weighed in on Twitter/X regarding the ongoing controversy about mysterious drones sighted over New Jersey. His response was to post photos of what appeared to be fixed-wing aircraft, declaring that all drone sightings could essentially be explained as misidentifications of ordinary airplanes (and presumably helicopters).

His response is a textbook example of an approach often employed by professional and militant skeptics. I’m not talking about average folks who are skeptical of subjects they’ve never studied and would prefer to ignore. I’m referring to those who claim expertise in both the empirical data and logical reasoning surrounding paranormal claims, yet dismiss them wholesale.

In this case, the issue isn’t even paranormal—it’s a straightforward question of whether mysterious drones have been overflying parts of New Jersey for more than a month. Shermer’s response suggests that because some drone sightings can be explained as observational errors, all sightings can be dismissed. This is akin to saying that because some money is counterfeit, all money is counterfeit—or that because some people are crooks, all people are crooks.

Let’s concede that a given percentage of these sightings are mistaken. No doubt, some reported “drones” are actually small planes, helicopters, or hobbyists’ toys. Others may be something as mundane as stars. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan posted a video of the night sky near his house, claiming to see “dozens” of drones hovering overhead. The tweet earned a Community Note claiming that what he saw was the constellation Orion. (The video, or at least the version I’ve seen, is too blurry and low-resolution to be conclusive.)

So, okay, people make mistakes. This isn’t news. And once drones are on people’s minds, they’re more likely to see drones everywhere—much like how focusing on the color red makes you notice red things all around you.

However, none of this negates the fact that many reliable reports of New Jersey drone sightings exist. These include accounts from police officers and pilots, as well as videos showing objects that are clearly drones—not small hobby drones, but larger and more sophisticated devices.

Defense representatives say there were confirmed drone sightings by military personnel at Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County and Naval Weapons Station Earle in Monmouth, which has bases in Colts Neck and Middletown."

“These are visual sightings by highly trained security personnel," a defense representative said at the briefing.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-NJ, said a Coast Guard commander told him that one of his 47-foot boats was trailed and harassed by some 12 to 30 drones. …

State Police Col. Pat Callahan told state lawmakers last week that its officers have seen drones. He told lawmakers that they sent a helicopter up after one of the craft, which was six feet in diameter, and that as soon as the helicopter was over the craft, the drone turned its lights off.

That prompted the decision to have the helicopter disengage because they determined it was not safe, according to lawmakers who attended the briefing.

Callahan also noted that these drone flights were coordinated and flew in swarms, and were airborne for 6 to 7 hours — which officials said was “extraordinary” battery life.

[Ocean County Sheriff Michael] Mastronardy said that while airplanes on the flight paths of Newark Liberty and John F. Kennedy international airports fly at altitudes of 18,000 to 20,000 feet, the mystery drones are flying at altitudes of less than 1,000 feet.

Sgt. Kevin Fennessy of the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office, who has been scouring the skies nightly for drones, said his agency uses Flight Radar and other technology to check if the objects they see are manned aircraft, Fennessy said. This allows them to rule out commercial planes, private planes, medical evacuation helicopters and most military planes.

“I do think it's some sort of drones are out there,” Fennessy said. “We saw a couple, one flying low at us that was coming basically straight on and stopped. Did a 180, went back, did a 180, and then took a big loop around us, probably out here in the bay to go south of us.”

Mastronardy has said the drone unit has so far detected drones that are three to four feet long, twice the size of those in his department's unit. Another law enforcement agency reported one as large as eight feet long, he said.

He said they were looking at a drone last week that shut its lights off and went away as their drone approached. …

"The Jersey Shore especially is a very busy place for plane traffic," Fennessy said. "We've got a lot of planes in this area. Luckily we're able to try to deconflict everything we're seeing." [Asbury Park Press, December 17, 2024; link)

Furthermore, this isn’t the first time such a phenomenon has been reported.

The Pentagon has confirmed a number of “unauthorized” drone flights last year in restricted airspace over a Virginia base that houses the nation’s most advanced fighter jets …

For 17 days in December, a fleet of the unidentified aircraft flew over Langley Air Force Base as well as over the area that includes the Navy’s SEAL Team Six home base and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port. …

The incursions at Langley, home to F-22 Raptors, would take place about 45 minutes to an hour after sunset. Officials estimated that as many as a dozen or more drones that were about 20 feet long kept an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet while flying over the base …

[Gen. Glen VanHerck, then the head of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command,] ordered jet fighters and other aircraft to try to fly close to the drones to figure out more about them and also recommended that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin authorize electronic eavesdropping.

Because the drones flew in a pattern and some didn’t use the usual frequency band available for off-the-shelf commercial UAS, U.S. officials didn’t believe hobbyists were flying them.

The incursions caused Langley officials to cancel nighttime training missions and move the F-22s to another base. The drones last visited the base Dec. 23.

Authorities had no leads until Jan. 6, when a Chinese national, Fengyun Shi, got his drone stuck in a tree about 11 miles from the Langley base and outside a shipyard run by Huntington Ingalls Industries. The company builds nuclear submarines and the Navy’s new aircraft carrier.

A student at the University of Minnesota, Shi abandoned the drone, took an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C., and flew to Oakland, Calif., the next day. The FBI investigated the drone and found he photographed Navy vessels, with some shots taken around midnight.

Federal agents arrested Shi on Jan. 18 as he was about to take a flight to China on a one-way ticket, though he told agents he was just a ship enthusiast. Investigators could not link him to the Chinese government, and he was charged with unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations and sentenced to six months in federal prison.

The Virginia drone swarm bears similarities to the New Jersey sightings: drones appearing shortly after sunset, vanishing hours later, and often hovering over military installations or aircraft and ship construction facilities.

Artist’s rendition of a drone swarm; source

It seems, then, that a plausible explanation for the New Jersey drone swarm is espionage by a foreign power, such as China. If you doubt that China would engage in such brazen provocation, consider that they’ve already sent at least one easily visible spy balloon over the United States. Our government allowed it to complete its mission before shooting it down over the ocean. It’s conceivable that the current administration prefers to avoid acknowledging another act of espionage, in hope of sidestepping a confrontation with China in the final weeks of the Biden presidency.

I’m not asserting that this explanation is correct. Other possibilities exist. The drones could be part of a large-scale test of new military equipment, which the government has reasons to keep under wraps. Alternatively, the swarm could be the work of a private company, though I doubt any private entity would want to alarm the public for so long—when the truth came out, there would be hell to pay. The drones could even be engaged in a search for WMDs, as some people have speculated, though it’s hard to see why the search would be limited to nighttime.

Whatever the truth in this case, the real issue for me lies in the knee-jerk dismissal by professional skeptics like Shermer. This approach oversimplifies controversial phenomena and waves them away with one-size-fits-all explanations that are poorly thought out and unsatisfactory.

It’s a tendency not limited to drone sightings. Professional skeptics use the same tactics to address all manner of paranormal claims. For instance, they point out that some psychics and mediums are frauds (which is true) and conclude that all of them are frauds (which isn’t consistent with the best studies available). Experiments like the Ganzfeld and auto-Ganzfeld tests have consistently demonstrated statistically significant results for ESP—results that are orders of magnitude beyond chance. Similarly, decades-long studies of mediums such as Leonora Piper, Gladys Osborne Leonard, and Eileen Garrett show a track record of producing information that defies explanation, barring either communication with the deceased or some form of “super-ESP,” which would itself be a groundbreaking discovery. (For a good overview of early mediumship studies, see Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Deborah Blum.)

The same applies to other categories of paranormal phenomena. Take the past-life memories of young children. More than 2,500 such cases have been reported. While some may involve conspiracies or confabulation, the accuracy and detail of recall in many well-documented instances resist such explanations. Similarly, veridical accounts during near-death experiences—detailed observations of external events made by individuals who were clinically unresponsive at the time—can’t be hand-waved away.

The list of examples could go on. The bottom line is that professional skeptics like Michael Shermer tend to resolve cognitive dissonance by jumping to convenient conclusions. In doing so, they mislead themselves and their audience by oversimplifying mysteries and ignoring critical facts. This isn’t true skepticism—it’s dogmatism, a militant adherence to conventional wisdom that assumes that all extraordinary claims simply must be baseless.

I don’t know the truth about the drone swarms in New Jersey, Virginia, and elsewhere. But whatever the explanation, it will undoubtedly be more complex—and more interesting—than the hastily constructed, ad hoc speculations of professional debunkers.