Category: Uncategorized

This article originally ran on Saturday, December 14, 2024 in New York magazine.

“Is it frustrating to not have more answers on this?” New Jersey governor Phil Murphy mused on Wednesday, as his state buzzed with consternation over a weeks-long run of unexplained drone sightings. “Is it frustrating to not have a source for these things? Yes.”

The widespread agita is less about the danger these mysterious vehicles might pose than officials’ exasperating inability to figure out who’s operating them and why. It seems like the problem shouldn’t be that hard to solve. For decades the U.S. has maintained an elaborate air-defense system that can detect and intercept everything from supersonic bombers to ballistic missiles. So what’s so tough about a handful of buzzing, low altitude drones that for all we know might have come off the shelf at Best Buy?

It turns out that the problem is way harder than it seems like it should be, and the problem has been repeating for years with no obvious solution in sight. On the contrary, there’s every expectation that the problem could get considerably more widespread in years to come. Basically, if you think this is weird, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The first great drone-swarm mystery to capture the public imagination happened five years ago, when residents of Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas began to report unidentified craft appearing overhead in large numbers at the start of 2020. Residents reported that drones were lighting up the sky “with Christmas lights” and “zipping around all over the place.” I visited the area and dropped in on Rick Bain, a retired power-plant operator who took me into his backyard and showed me where he’d seen a craft hovering for several minutes. “It was right over the house, about 300 or 400 feet up in the air, barely moving,” he told me. “Probably five or six feet across, definitely not big enough to be any kind of manned thing.” His account seemed sober and credible. But drone-swarm skeptics abounded. Vice headlined one report “Mass Panic: It’s Not Clear That Colorado’s Mystery Drones Even Exist.” The visitations stopped shortly before COVID hit, and suddenly everyone had something more obviously dangerous to worry about.

The U.S. Marine Corps suffered a major embarrassment yesterday when one of the $75 million top-of-the-line fighters, designed to be virtually undetectable to enemy radar, kept flying after its pilot punched out during a “mishap” Sunday afternoon. Evidently whatever had gone wrong wasn’t as bad as the pilot had feared, because the plane kept on flying on autopilot for several more hours — but to where, exactly, the Marines didn’t know, the F-35’s stealth capabilities in this context being a positive hindrance. Search planes flew grid patterns over South Carolina Monday as Joint Base Charleston put out an appeal to the public asking for “any information that may help our recovery teams.” Eventually, the wreckage was located Monday evening in a wooded area about 80 miles north of the base.

This was not the first time an F35 has been lost, in either sense of the word. In 2019, a Japanese F-35 vanished off the coast of Honshu during a training flight; pieces of debris and the pilot’s body were located, but the plane itself was never found. Last January, a U.S. Navy F-35 slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson after a botched landing and sank to the bottom. A month later it was successfully recovered from a depth of 12,400 feet. In 2018, the U.S. grounded the entire fleet after an earlier crash in South Carolina. All told, at least half a dozen F-35s have been destroyed in various mishaps, with others severely damaged but repairable.

[Here’s video of a pilot ejecting from an F35 at low altitude shortly before it crashed in Forth Worth, Texas last December]

The Coast Guard announced at a press conference on Thursday that debris from the submersible Titan was found on the seafloor near the Titanic, confirming the deaths of the five crew members onboard.

While searching an area of flat seabed approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, a remotely operated vehicle discovered “five major pieces of debris that told us it was the remains of the Titan,” said undersea expert Paul Hanken, including the front end of the pressure hull. “That was the first indication that it was a catastrophic event.”