“What are we waiting for?” chants Laurie Anderson in the opening lines of Waiting for the Barbarians. The answer, of course, is the title of Constantine Cavafy’s 1898 poem, of which Anderson gives such a compelling rendition.
Premièred in Manhattan in November last year, Anderson’s performance was revived in May and a live a recording released on YouTube. Following the American election the recording has gone viral. It does seem to capture the mood of a nation anticipating the arrival of an administration promising to disband most of the government structures it has inherited.
As the date of the inauguration looms, though, a curious distraction has emerged, jostling for prominence in news headlines and generating intense social media engagement. Growing numbers of the American public have started to wait for something else: an explanation. Why are large numbers of drones being spotted nightly by citizens of New Jersey and surrounding states, some apparently travelling in formation, some dipping to low flight paths, making them clearly visible above houses and roads?
“Everyone is asking for answers,” says New Jersey mayor Murello, who along with twenty-four other mayors from that state and governors from New York and Maryland converged across party lines late last week to demand an explanation from Pentagon representatives. They left frustrated, having been offered nothing more than evasive assurances. All Homeland Security would say was that the drones aren’t of foreign origin and don’t pose a threat.
That, as many commentators pointed out, doesn’t add up. If the government doesn’t know what they are, how can it be confident there is no threat? And if it does know but is choosing to leave the public in an information vacuum, it is opening the door wide to conspiracy theorists and other amateur sleuths. “The longer you go, the more outlandish people are going to start thinking,” as one New Jersey reporter put it.
Public concern has been building since the second week of November when accounts of large drones in the New Jersey skies were reported in USA Today. Witnesses included state law enforcement officers, who set up a program to monitor the activity.
With reports continuing to flood in, the Pentagon’s “nothing to see here” rang hollow. Video recordings showed craft flying over the Picatinny Arsenal and Earl Naval weapons station; others were reported hovering above coastguard vessels.
Last Friday evening New York governor Kathy Hochul ordered the temporary closure of runways at Stewart airfield due to drone activity in the airspace, issuing a statement that “this has gone too far.” A few hours later, reports of “heavy UAS [unmanned aerial systems] movement” led to a four-hour shutdown at the Wright Patterson Airforce Base in Ohio, a facility of critical importance for airforce command.
Considering the national security implications and the legitimate anxieties of citizens about a potential crash in their neighbourhood, social media dialogue in those first weeks was remarkable for its restraint. If it was a US security operation, why was this not being acknowledged? Was it a corporate data-gathering exercise? Was it a search for nuclear material that had somehow been dropped in the area?
Of course, there was also talk of UFOs, especially on X, but posts on Bluesky and Threads consisted mainly of people sharing accounts of what they saw and expressing mystification and exasperation with federal authorities for essentially giving the brush-off. The thought that witnesses might be dismissed as conspiracy nuts was in many people’s minds, causing outrage among those who’d made reports of craft hovering above their own houses at low altitude.
As the furore entered its fourth week on social media, scepticism was gaining the upper hand. A widespread awareness of disinformation campaigns has perhaps raised the bar: people don’t want to be taken for fools or be caught out scare-mongering when an apparent crisis turns out to be a nothingburger.
Political divisions along these lines have also started to surface in the past couple of days. Donald Trump pronounced his view that “something strange is going on” and that the drones should be shot down if they threatened national security, while vocal Trump critic Adam Kinzinger, a former Congressman with experience in the Air National Guard, put it all down to mass hysteria.
The Kinzinger view was reinforced by a claimed sighting from former Republican governor Larry Hogan, who videotaped “dozens of large drones” over his house in Maryland and posted the evidence on X, where it earned a community note pointing out that this was the constellation of Orion. Cue the satirists, who are having a field day suggesting that stars, regular planes and anything else with a legitimate presence in the air are cause for suspicion. People are looking at the sky a lot more than usual. Might that not be part of the problem?
At the conspiracy end of the spectrum, UFO controversies are active, though those with a seasoned interest in these phenomena are more likely to counsel their audience to practice critical thinking than launch into a sensationalist tirade.
Australian journalist Ross Coulthart, an advocate for the view that UFO sightings have been subject to cover-up, delivered a two-part report for the You Tube Channel NewsNation. His interview with journalist Katie Corrado, reporting from Picatinny Arsenal, was professional and informative. The word “alien” was mentioned only once, and in passing. Corrado, who had witnessed the fly-overs herself, showed no inclination to speculate along those lines. People were not rushing to explanation, she said, nor at this stage were they panicked. They were “unsettled.”
Coulthart followed up with two of his regular consultants, John and Gerry Tedesco, whose project Nightcrawler is an ongoing investigation of unexplained aerial phenomena, with state-of-the-art spectral equipment. In other words, they are professional UFO hunters. Had they been in touch with the FBI and Homeland Security over the situation in New Jersey? Yes, was the answer, “though there’s not a lot we can share publicly.” Their insider “contacts,” though, raised many questions to which they thought the public should be demanding answers.
“That is really alarming,” Coulthart said, adding that the level of ignorance admitted by official spokesmen was “breathtaking.” The way to open the door to serious UFO speculation is not to run Project Blue Book–style conspiracy narratives about hidden certainties, but to ramp up the uncertainty factor so that refusal to comment becomes an issue in itself.
On the other side of the UFO hypothesis is the counter-conspiracy theory of Project Blue Beam, which promotes the idea that phenomena designed to raise suspicion of extraterrestrial activity are actually a false flag used by governments to generate panic and distract public attention when critical agendas are in play. Proponents of this theory are strong advocates for their version of critical thinking, the premise being that the powerful agencies of Deep State are engaged in an enterprise of mass deception so constant that mental resistance is the challenge.
Among them is Chase Hughes — “I’m the guy that trains psy-ops” — who runs a YouTube channel purporting to educate the public on how to tell when they are being “prepped.” When the public feel threatened, the need for a saviour can be projected onto a political leader, who is then in a position to call for increased powers. It’s a gradual process, he emphasises, the first phase being to induce escalated levels of speculation, but without panic. That comes later. The government has a fully prepared plan, he insists, to stage a simulated UFO attack.
The Project Blue Beam narrative has been promoted by high-profile influencers from the Trump camp, including Alex Jones and Roseanne Barr, but is somewhat hard to reconcile with repeated and unequivocal statements from official quarters that these are normal craft, with regulation lights and signalling.
“The drones are coming,” declared late show host Stephen Colbert with mock seriousness at the start of his first monologue this week. Whatever may or may not be going in the skies over New Jersey and surrounding states, the reality is that some psycho-social phenomenon has arisen, itself calling for explanation. As to that, Laurie Anderson may be our best guide. An ominous sense that something is coming, something no one is fully able to account for, is spreading across the United States. •
