The recent rise in mystery drone sightings is not surprising given the surging use of quadcopters, VTOLs, and other flying robots. However, the ongoing lack of verifiable information about them is concerning. Prevailing explanations come from:

  1. The alarmists: these drones are operated by foreign governments with bad intentions, and we are powerless to stop them.
  2. The United States Government: we don’t know and nobody panic.
  3. The conspiracy theorists: gamma rays.

This leaves the rest of us feeling like Marvin Gaye:

The self-proclaimed drone experts here at Astral.us have a few ideas, in what may soon be our most provably-wrong post:

  1. Regardless of who is operating these drones, it’s not a guy, or a lot of guys, standing nearby with transmitters. They would have to stand nearby a lot of places. If half the sightings are to be believed, they would have bern noticed deploying, piloting, and retrieving the drones, some of which are allegedly “car-sized” and with blinking lights, no less. That means the drones are operated remotely by cellular, satellite, or other datalink, or they are autonomous. Given the inconsistency of wireless data coverage, we believe that the drones are at least partially autonomous – they can fly themselves when there is no internet connection, and even better when there is.
  2. The U.S. Government knows what the drones are doing and who is responsible.
  3. The drones are looking for something. Because that’s what drones do: either they fly around searching, or they interact with their environment, such as by planting seeds or killing people. No sightings mention interaction. So what are they looking for? It could be fugitives, or unsecured WiFi, or gamma rays for that matter. They sure are looking a lot, as if they lost something important, maybe in New Jersey. Assuming – boldly – that the eyewitness accounts are to be believed, we infer from the drones’ blinking lights that they are on official business, not malicious foreign agents. But the most intriguing claim is that they are car-sized. If true, then this means that they are carrying some large sensors and/or they fly long distances. There are no consistent reports whether the drones are quadcopters or fixed-wing, but only the latter are suitable for surveillance over large areas.

The takeaway from this exercise is that drone technology is crash-landing on society faster than we are prepared for, like the first motorists with their tootling horns startling pedestrians and horses alike as they clatter past, leaving a cloud of dust and fumes.