Drone sightings along the East Coast and recently in North Texas near some sensitive military facilities have caused a stir in the media for the last several weeks.
The FBI has received reports of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings, and the government has done little to shed light on what is happening in the skies.
TPR's Jerry Clayton recently spoke with aerospace expert Chris Combs, Dee Howard Endowed Associate Professor in Aerodynamics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Clayton: Let's talk about the possibility that all, or most, of these sightings are just mass hysteria. Is that a possibility?
Combs: I think it's a possibility that many of them are. This is the type of thing that tends to happen when you have a lot of publicity and attention drawn to something that's up in the sky that's maybe unidentified. You have a lot of non-experts that are now just citing reports of regular commercial aircraft on approach to an airport, or just regular, commonplace drones or piloted aircraft, and citing those as drones or UAPs or foreign adversaries or something like that.
So, the vast majority of these, I think, are just confused and uninformed members of the public that are a little bit scared because of what they've been hearing on the news, and people who probably don't normally look up in the sky for things in the first place. And so, they're not used to identifying these things. If you see blinking red and green lights on one of these objects, that's a really good chance it's just a regular drone or airplane. So, I do encourage a lot of caution about seeing what you may consider to be an unknown object up in the sky.
Clayton: What about actual incursions of foreign drones? Is that a thing?
Combs: There's a really interesting article back from 2021 in a publication called The War Zone that a guy named Tyler Rogoway wrote where they laid out a case for a lot of the UFO and what they now call UAP sightings actually were probably foreign drones and balloons. This is something that our fighter pilots and our Navy have probably been dealing with for some time, and they've noticed some strange things around the coast that's naturally something that people wouldn't want publicized too much, and so there is some precedent for this. It's a very cheap technology. It's an easy way for somebody to get some intelligence.
There was a lot of news about the balloon that floated across the country. This is kind of a similar thing. I do think there are cases where we have foreign adversaries that are using drone and balloon technology that's very cheap to look at what we're doing or try and study a response. But I think the vast, vast majority of the reports that are coming out right now are probably just regular, conventional aircraft and domestic drones.
Clayton: The government has stated publicly that most of these sightings pose no sort of threat to the public. However, the FAA this week did shut down or restrict drone activity for over a large area of New York and New Jersey. What do you think is going on with the government involving these aircraft?
Combs: I mean, I think there's also a possibility that some of the things that people are seeing, or maybe what even kickstarted this, was something that the U.S. government was developing and testing. I've seen some evidence online that that was possible and maybe makes sense based on the locations of some of the sightings, that would also explain sort of the "hush, hush" response to a lot of this, at least initially.
I think really the biggest problem now is because of this hysteria that's happened and the mass panic you see, [including] people shining lasers at regular commercial aircraft, which is putting a lot of people in danger.
As a reminder, if you fire a laser at an aircraft that can blind the pilot and make them unable to land a plane, you can go to jail for that. So please do not do that — we're going to end up hurting each other if we don't calm down and get careful about this.
I hope that the government can come out with maybe a stronger response and give people some of the answers that they're asking for without totally dismissing some of these claims but should also cool the hysteria about a lot of the just regular occurrences that people are now citing as a foreign drone.
