Eyewitness Memory and the Drone Invasion of New Jersey

Source: Matthew Sharps

Beginning in November 2024, numerous aerial drones have been reported on the East Coast of the United States, centering on New Jersey. The number of drone sightings increased exponentially, and shot up even more as the media took up the cry. The FAA got involved, and even presidential travel plans were changed in the wake of the alleged drone invasion (West, 2025).

By January 2025, the White House felt it necessary to issue a somewhat unusual statement, stating that the drones were authorized by the FAA for research and various other purposes, and that a number of them were flown by hobbyists anyway. Who knows what the various other reasons were, but since this statement seemed to encompass all possible drones in an essentially exhaustive manner, many people became suspicious, especially as more drones were reported.

But were real drones responsible for the reports? People have seen and believed in things that weren’t actually there before. Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds convinced many people that they were under Martian attack, and in more terrestrial terms, similar psychological processes convinced large numbers of people in Los Angeles in 1942 that they were under attack by a Japanese air armada, when in fact no air raid was occurring at all (e.g., Sharps, 2024, pgs. 207-211). But was this the case here? What was responsible for the Incredible New Jersey Drone Effect?

Mick West (2025) provided an answer to this question. West found two categories of New Jersey “drones”: those that looked like airplanes and those that were ambiguous lights in the sky. He found nothing that looked unambiguously like a drone at all.

West obviously could not investigate every reported observation—there were simply too many of them—but in “every single case where we had good details” (West, 2025, pg. 24), the “drone” turned out to be an airplane or “other innocuous object.” Even in those cases in which the observers had used public flight radar to eliminate the airplane option, they turned out to be airplanes—flight radar applications are not easy to use, and people simply got things wrong in the attempt to use them (West, 2025, p. 24).

West's data indicates that there was no drone invasion at all. People simply identified aircraft as drones, and other witnesses threw in a few additional unidentified objects as well. This happens a lot; the single supernal object that is most identified as a UFO is the planet Venus. Granted, it's hard to see how anybody could mistake Venus for a drone, but the point is that there are all sorts of things in the night sky that produce light, reflect light, or that otherwise might appear, if you have the right state of mind, to be a drone. This is an eyewitness issue, and it leads us to an important question: What psychological processes may have contributed to West’s results, and to the entire drone flap?

Decades of research by many authors, reviewed in depth elsewhere (Sharps, 2024), provides a ready answer. Studies of social learning and obedience demonstrate that we tend to go along with the beliefs of authority figures. The initial observation that led to the entire drone flap occurred on a military base. The U.S. military is generally seen, in the United States, as powerful and authoritative. Therefore, people started paying attention, especially to the sky, where the presumed drones were putatively to be found, and we should note that the sky also contained all those airplanes, artificial satellites, and astronomical bodies which, with the right frame of mind, could be mentally transmuted into drones.

Media coverage of the drone “invasion” was ubiquitous, verging on epic. Information on the putative drones was amazingly available, and the availability heuristic tends to bias our decisions in the direction of information that is more readily available to us. Given the ready availability of drone information, it is unsurprising that people's decisions about what they saw in the night sky tended to veer away from natural phenomena and move more in the direction of the much-publicized drones.

All of this would have contributed strongly to a prior framework for understanding any given anomalous sightings in the night sky; specifically, a framework consistent with the idea that any oddball light or reflection in the night sky was a potentially hostile drone.

We are a social species; human beings tend to conform to other people’s beliefs and actions. As more and more people began to report drone observations, it would have been a rare individual who seriously entertained alternative explanations of anomalous supernal sightings, especially as the drone coverage continued to drone on. As a species, we frequently tend to go along with the crowd, and the crowd was reporting drone observations in epic numbers.

We must also mention the influence of emotional investment here; the principle of cognitive dissonance suggests very strongly that once we've reported drone sightings, our psychological investment in those sightings, and in our subsequent beliefs in them, would tend to maintain them in mind very strongly. This would also contribute to the strength of our prior mental framework for interpreting any new flying object that we can’t immediately identify as a drone.

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It is, of course, true that powers hostile to the United States, or to any other nation for that matter, might make use of drones in a variety of nefarious ways. It may therefore prove extremely important to understand the processes that contribute to false drone identifications, as opposed to the real thing. Also, from a forensic standpoint, it is very important to understand the many cases in which a number of people, beyond the more typical single eyewitness, have been influenced to report anomalies that ultimately proved to be misinterpreted or even nonexistent. Together with West’s analysis, a consideration of the New Jersey drone event from the standpoint of forensic psychology might enhance our understanding of these and similar events substantially.