Dirty Bombs, Aliens, Holograms, and Orbs: Drone Mania Unleashes Conspiracy Theories

For the past month, residents of the northeast and mid-Atlantic U.S. have made thousands of reports and social media posts about supposed sightings of suspicious drones and unidentified aerial objects at night. And because government agencies have not provided an explanation as sensational as people believe their photo and video “evidence” to be, the public has begun to run wild with outlandish conspiracy theories, ranging from foreign spy operations to extraterrestrial visitation.

The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Defense on Monday tried to quell the hysteria with a joint statement that read: “We assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.” Even the iconic Goodyear Blimp was thought to be a UFO by someone who captured images of it on their phone. (The official term for what was once categorized as an unidentified flying object, or UFO, is now unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, which includes “any objects in air, sea or space that defies scientific explanation,” per the Defense Department.)

Yet to the more paranoid amateur investigators, this nothing-to-see-here response, along with continued agency assurances that no one is endangered by aircraft they may have seen, are proof of a cover-up. Indeed, President-elect Donald Trump himself suggested in a Monday press conference that the government and military both knew exactly what was going on but weren’t telling the American people. Statements of concern from other politicians about a lack of transparency — including from a Pennsylvania state legislator who fell for misinformation in which a Star Wars spaceship model being transported by truck was labeled a “crashed drone” — encouraged further speculation.

One of the most prominent unfounded theories at the moment is that the alleged drones are searching for radioactive material. This was an idea floated, without evidence, by John Furgeson, CEO of Saxon Aerospace, a Kansas-based company that makes unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). In a TikTok video posted over the weekend that has since been viewed more than 1.5 million times, Furgeson posited that “if [the objects] are drones, the only reason why they would be flying, and flying that low, is because they’re trying to smell something on the ground.” This could include gas leaks or radiation, he said.

Different and increasingly extreme versions of this hypothetical made the rounds until some were convinced that any suspected drones were searching for a nuclear warhead. “Anyone hearing rumors of a smuggled suitcase nuke or dirty bomb that got through customs or something like that?” wrote a commenter on the Facebook group “New Jersey Mystery Drones – let’s solve it,” which has more than 75,000 members. (Northern New Jersey has been the epicenter of the supposed drone activity.) Another commented, “I talked to a friend in the military who also works with drones, he said 100 percent these are our drones and they would only be used in such excess for a serious reasons and gave examples like: Tracking nuclear fallout from a dirty bomb that went off, tracking biological weapons, tracking [weapons of mass destruction.”

More fear-mongering came from no less reputable a source than Bethenny Frankel of The Real Housewives of New York City, who in a TikTok likewise claimed to have heard the search theory from a trusted source: in this case, a “guy” whose dad “worked with the Pentagon and NASA and, like, secret projects.” Frankel said this person had told her any drones “could very possibly be sniffing out something very dangerous.” The video has been viewed 1.7 million times since she posted it on Monday. And on Tuesday, Michael Melham, the mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, appeared on the local Fox affiliate show Good Day New York, where he lent credence to the “radioactive material” theory, noting that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had earlier in December confirmed that a shipment of such content had gone missing in the state.

But the missing object is an Eckert & Ziegler HEGL-0132, a piece of medical scanning equipment that was being shipped for safe disposal, and the radiation it contains rates less than a Category 3 on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s scale, which means it is “very unlikely to cause permanent injury to individuals,” according to the NRC report. While certain drones are equipped to conduct radiological surveys, it would be incredibly surprising if this piece of equipment accounted for thousands of reported drone sightings from Virginia up to New England and as far west as Ohio.

While aliens have long been a popular explanation of UAPs — and many have argued that images now circulating online show extraterrestrial crafts — some have brought up so-called Project Blue Beam, a conspiracy theory originated by the late Canadian conspiracist Serge Monast. In the Nineties, Monast predicted that NASA and the United Nations would use advanced technology to fake an alien invasion or encounter, deceiving countries into falling under a totalitarian New World Order. “I believe these may be some sort of projection, hologram, or illusion based on several factors,” wrote a member of the New Jersey drone investigation group, echoing this concept. “Meaning, they are not REAL, they are essentially images being used to incite mass hysteria in the US.” Others theorized that the UAPs could be computer-generated phantoms or referenced Project Blue Beam by name, arguing that the visual phenomena were staged.

Increased attention to aircraft has meanwhile prompted a glut of commentary on flying objects “spraying” the ground below with unknown substances. This is of a piece with the enduring conspiracy theory which holds that planes emit “chemtrails” in their wake, chemical agents used to poison or manipulate the general populace. (In reality, these cloudy streaks are contrails, formed from water vapor that has condensed and frozen around particles found in plane exhaust.) A user on X, formerly Twitter, with a quarter of a million followers, on Monday shared a video taken in New Jersey of a plane leaving contrails in the sky, and asked: “What is this craft releasing? Could it be a biological attack from an unknown adversary? Or something even more sinister?”

Another faction of conspiracists are fixated on flying objects they refer to not as drones but “orbs,” pinpoints of hovering or moving light. There are claims about orbs turning into “crafts” on video or interacting with similar orbs — although some seem convinced that orbs and drones are shooting each other down. (The so-called orbs have occasionally been referred to as “plasmoids,” a real effect observed in physics, though without anything to back up this identification.) A redditor offered an especially convoluted theory on the topic: “The real phenomenon are the orbs not the drones,” they wrote in the comments on a video of aerial lights over Phoenix. “The drones are military. The government either infested the skies with drones to take the public’s focus away from the orbs (which are being spotted much more rarely than the drones) or to use the drones for surveillance of the orbs. Or both.”

Perhaps even worse than this kind of eccentric nonsense is the trend of people within conspiracy groups on social media asking AI chatbots to interpret the wave of purported drone sightings. One woman asked Meta’s Llama program for the “highest probable” answer to the mystery and shared a screenshot of the bot’s response on Facebook. Llama answered, “I’d speculate that the highest probably origin of the NJ drones is China, with a probability of around 60-70%.” The chatbot observed that “the drones seem to be coming from the ocean, which could suggest a maritime launch platform.” China, of course, has no military or naval presence in the Atlantic — because the U.S. has made diplomatic efforts to prevent it.

Still, Meta’s software was no further off-base than the multitudes spinning their own fantastic tales of an insidious drone fleet. When the plausible, boring answer simply won’t do, everyone and everything — AI included — apparently has to pull a more exciting possibility out of thin air.