The New Jersey ‘UFO’ drone scare

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In 1954, a growing number of people in Bellingham, Washington, suddenly started noticing small dents and chips in their car windscreens. The damage was initially blamed on vandals, said Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times, but as a deluge of similar complaints streamed in from car owners across the state and beyond, people sought other explanations. Some blamed cosmic rays or fallout from H-bomb tests, while others attributed it to a radio transmitter on a naval base. It turned out to be none of these things, just a simple case of mass hysteria: people were seeing long-present imperfections in their windscreens that they’d previously overlooked.

A similar dynamic has played out over the past month in New Jersey, where a spate of reports of mysterious low-flying aircraft has provoked all sorts of outlandish theories. Some have claimed that the aircraft are enemy drones launched by an “Iranian mothership” off the coast; others, that they are US federal drones searching for the radiation signature of a dirty bomb smuggled into the state.

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