The New Jersey Drones Mass Delusion, Explained

Summary

Summary of "The New Jersey Drones Mass Delusion, Explained"

What A Day by Crooked Media delves into the recent surge of nighttime drone sightings across New Jersey, unpacking the psychological and social mechanisms that fuel such mass delusions. Hosted by Jane Coaston, with insights from Max Fisher, Erin Ryan, and guest William Bernstein, the episode explores historical and contemporary instances of collective misperceptions, using the New Jersey drone phenomenon as a focal point.

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1. The New Jersey Drone Sightings: A Collective Misidentification

The episode begins by addressing the explosion of drone and UFO sightings in New Jersey. Max Fisher introduces the topic by expressing skepticism over the reported phenomena:

Max Fisher [00:00]: "Erin, there's something that's been bugging me about the nighttime drone sightings popping up all over New Jersey this past week."

Erin Ryan counters with a humorous conjecture, suggesting the sightings might be a viral marketing ploy:

Erin Ryan [00:06]: "Is it that nobody has brought up the fact that they could be viral marketing for the Aaron Rodgers documentary on Netflix?"

However, both hosts quickly pivot to debunking the claims, asserting that most alleged drone footage actually depicts conventional passenger airplanes with landing lights. A clip from Network News Nation is played, illustrating this misidentification:

Erin Ryan [00:47]: "There's one over my shoulder right there. One after another after another, these drones appeared in the night sky... fixed wing aircraft about 8 to 10ft wide, colorful white blinking lights."

Max underscores the absurdity of mistaking standard flight activity for unidentified aerial phenomena:

Max Fisher [01:33]: "So this is what I mean. ... they collectively had their brains tell them that those airplanes were UFOs."

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2. Understanding Mass Delusions

The core question posed is: What causes mass delusions like the wave of now mostly debunked drone and UFO sightings around New Jersey? The hosts aim to explore this by examining historical and psychological perspectives on collective misperceptions.

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3. Historical Precedent: The "War of the Worlds" Broadcast

A pivotal example discussed is the infamous 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, which purportedly incited widespread panic by simulating a real alien invasion. A dramatized clip from the broadcast sets the scene:

Max Fisher [03:32]: "Hump shape is rising out of the pit... Lord, they're turning into flames."

Erin humorously challenges each other to adopt historical broadcasting styles, emphasizing the realism that led listeners to believe the fake news:

Erin Ryan [04:14]: "From the mid century... how Americans responded."

Orson Welles's reflection on the public's reaction is highlighted:

Orson Welles (Clip) [05:25]: "A lot of people wanted to know... they've seen Martians landing in their backyards."

This segment illustrates how authoritative presentation can manipulate collective perception, laying the groundwork for understanding modern mass delusions.

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4. The Psychology Behind Mass Delusions: Imitation and Conformity

Enter William Bernstein, a financial theorist and former neurologist, who provides a scientific lens on why humans are susceptible to mass delusions:

William Bernstein [06:16]: "Our primary survival skill as a species is the ability to imitate."

Bernstein elaborates on evolutionary imperatives that make imitation a double-edged sword, facilitating both cultural advancements and susceptibility to collective misbeliefs. The hosts connect this to the Asch conformity experiments:

William Bernstein [08:55]: "If they just performed the test on their own... But then they would shout out wrong answers... the error rate of the actual subjects went up dramatically."

Erin shares a personal anecdote aligning with the experiment's findings, illustrating how social pressure can skew individual judgment:

Erin Ryan [09:43]: "I remembered my thought process being like, there's way more than five in there. But I don't want to be... So I said that there were 12."

The concept of "common knowledge" emerges as a pivotal factor:

Max Fisher [10:35]: "Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon. It's called common knowledge. If you believe that everybody around you thinks something, you become much likelier to believe it too."

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5. Modern Example: Havana Syndrome as a Mass Delusion

Transitioning to contemporary events, the episode examines Havana Syndrome, where U.S. diplomats reported unexplained health issues:

Erin Ryan [11:27]: "Sudden severe headaches, dizziness, nausea, loss of hearing..."

While some officials speculated about foreign weaponry, scientists leaned towards psychogenic explanations—physical symptoms arising from psychological factors:

Erin Ryan [12:23]: "Psychogenic? Generated by the brain... the brain makes what they believe really happen to them."

The hosts draw parallels between Havana Syndrome and the drone sightings, suggesting that fear and collective belief can manifest tangible symptoms and widespread misconceptions.

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6. Visual Misperceptions and the Role of Social Media

The discussion returns to the New Jersey drone sightings, examining how optical illusions and social media amplify mass delusions:

Max Fisher [14:03]: "There are a couple of reasons that people typically mistake planes for UFOs or drones. First is that people have a notoriously hard time judging how far away airborne objects are."

Erin humorously remarks on vision-related errors contributing to misidentifications:

Erin Ryan [14:25]: "Vision insurance. People need glasses, people need contacts..."

Max explains how flight maneuvers can create stationary illusions, further fueling misconceptions:

Max Fisher [14:56]: "Planes that are descending for landing... can make them look like they're holding in place."

As these misidentifications spread through local Facebook groups and Reddit boards, they reinforce each other, creating a feedback loop of belief and misperception.

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7. Influence of Elected Officials and Conspiratorial Narratives

The narrative explores how elected officials exacerbate mass delusions by endorsing unfounded claims. Several instances are highlighted, such as:

Erin Ryan [15:40]: "A New Jersey congressman claims Iran is responsible... refusing to reveal sources to back up his claim."

William Bernstein [15:52]: "Iran launched a mothership... off the east coast of the United States."

These endorsements lend undue credibility to unfounded theories, convincing more individuals to buy into the delusion. Further examples include:

Max Fisher [16:07]: "Charlie Kirk and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene making up stories about how the drones are controlled by the US government."

Bernstein discusses the psychological barriers to correcting such beliefs:

William Bernstein [30:24]: "Confirmation bias most of the time is not about confirming what you believe. It's about ignoring contrary evidence."

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8. Additional Historical Instances: Clown Sightings and Salem Witch Trials

The episode also revisits other notable mass delusions:

• Clown Sightings (2016): Originating from a viral horror film marketing stunt, these sightings escalated into widespread fear, leading to arrests and tarnishing professional clowns' reputations.

Erin Ryan [23:40]: "A series of creepy clown sightings... dozens of reports... more than a dozen people have been arrested."

• Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693): Over 200 people were accused of witchcraft based on spectral evidence, with 30 convicted and 19 hanged. The trials were influenced by existing social tensions and property disputes, showcasing how mass delusions can intertwine with societal conflicts.

Erin Ryan [26:26]: "Between 1692 and 1693, more than 200 people in colonial Massachusetts were accused of witchcraft..."

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9. Conclusion: The Enduring Nature of Mass Delusions

Wrapping up, William Bernstein offers a sobering perspective on the persistence of mass delusions:

William Bernstein [31:18]: "Your friends see drones, you start seeing drones because you're an imitative creature... We've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years."

The hosts reflect on the implications of mass delusions in the digital age, where misinformation spreads rapidly and authoritative figures can either quell or inflame public fears. The episode concludes with a personal anecdote from Erin, illustrating the lasting impact of such collective misperceptions:

Erin Ryan [32:47]: "I saw this drone... She looks at me and she goes, that was a drone, right? And I was like, yeah, that was a drone... am I?"

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Key Takeaways:

• Imitation and Conformity: Human evolutionary traits make us prone to imitating and conforming, often leading to collective misbeliefs when initial misconceptions take hold.

• Role of Media and Authority: Media representations and endorsements by influential figures can significantly amplify and perpetuate mass delusions.

• Psychological Mechanisms: Phenomena like confirmation bias and the boomerang effect hinder the correction of widespread misconceptions, making mass delusions resilient.

• Historical and Modern Parallels: From the Salem witch trials to modern-day UFO sightings, mass delusions are a recurring aspect of human societies, often intertwined with existing social tensions.

What A Day effectively bridges historical examples with contemporary issues, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms behind mass delusions and their enduring presence in society.

Transcript

[Max Fisher]

Erin, there's something that's been bugging me about the nighttime drone sightings popping up all over New Jersey this past week.

[Erin Ryan]

Is it that nobody has brought up the fact that they could be viral marketing for the Aaron Rodgers documentary on Netflix?

[Max Fisher]

So the mystery here isn't what's up in the skies. We know what's up there.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. It's airplanes, right?

[Max Fisher]

By and large, nearly every viral video supposedly showing a drone swarm or UFO has turned out to be just a normal passenger plane with its landing lights on.

[Erin Ryan]

It's odd because it's not like this is happening in some remote corner of the Amazon where people have never seen overhead flights. It's New Jersey. Airplanes are practically the state birth.

[Max Fisher]

Right. That is what's so strange to me about so many people mistaking those planes for UFO drones. Like, let me play you this clip from a report by the Network News Nation.

[Erin Ryan]

1, 2, 3, 4. At least five lights.

[Max Fisher]

Six lights.

[Erin Ryan]

I didn't believe what I was seeing, but what was I seeing? We're here in central Jersey. We've been looking for the past hour. I think we've seen about 40 or 50 of these drones. In fact, there's one over my shoulder right there. One after another after another, these drones appeared in the night sky. If you look real close, they look like fixed wing aircraft about 8 to 10ft wide, colorful white blinking lights.

[Max Fisher]

That is not a plane.

[Erin Ryan]

Definitely not an airplane. But what was it?

[Max Fisher]

Okay, so for listeners, I cannot overstate the degree to which the footage in this report is definitely of an airplane.

[Erin Ryan]

It's not even blurry. That is the most normal video of an airplane taking off I have ever seen. What is he talking about?

[Max Fisher]

So this is what I mean. There was a mysterious mass event in New Jersey this week, but it's not drones or UFOs. It's that one day, all of a sudden, thousands and thousands of people all looked up at airplanes in the night sky. A sight they'd seen countless times before and collectively had their brains tell them that Those airplanes were UFOs. What? I'm Max Fisher.

[Erin Ryan]

I'm Erin Ryan. And this is how we got here. A series where we expl explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question.

[Max Fisher]

Our question this week, what causes mass delusions like the wave of now mostly debunked drone and UFO sightings around New Jersey?

[Erin Ryan]

Before we get into it though, a couple of quick notes.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah. On last week's show about Syria, we opened with a clip of a CNN reporter Stumbling onto a man hiding in one of the country's secret prisons. CNN now says it believes that man is a former military official and not, as he claimed, a freed political prisoner.

[Erin Ryan]

And speaking of freed political pr, Just kidding. This will be the last episode of how we got here.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah. Thank you to everyone who listened, wrote in, or shared an episode with a friend. We hope you enjoyed the show as much as we enjoyed making it.

[Erin Ryan]

You can still catch me every week on Hysteria and catch Max on offline. And look out for more from both of us next year.

[Max Fisher]

Shout out to Emma Ellich Frank, the show's producer, and to Evan Sutton, its audio engineer, who made this show what it is. What a day is. Weekday episodes. Jane Coastin will continue as usual.

[Erin Ryan]

Okay, so that's out of the way. Should we get into it?

[Max Fisher]

Yes. This week going to tell you four stories of famous mass delusions. We'll also talk to the author of a book on the science of mass delusions about why and how they happen.

[Erin Ryan]

Excited to learn about why my brain is so bad at braining.

[Max Fisher]

That is a big takeaway. Yeah, you don't have to be some kind of dummy to get swept up in one of these. They happen to smart, well informed people all the time.

[Erin Ryan]

Here's a clip from one incident that helped trigger what's still to this day one of the largest mass delusions in American history. See if you can place it.

[Max Fisher]

Hump shape is rising out of the pit.

[Erin Ryan]

I can make out a small beam.

[Max Fisher]

Of light against a mirror.

[Erin Ryan]

What's that?

[Max Fisher]

There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror. And it leaps right at the advancing men.

[William Bernstein]

It strikes them head on.

[Erin Ryan]

Lord, they're turning into flames.

[Max Fisher]

The whole field's caught up by the woods of bars. The gas tank tanks of the automobiles spreading everywhere. Coming this way now, about 20 yards to my right.

[William Bernstein]

Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue.

[Erin Ryan]

The broadcast from Grover's Mill. When did we stop talking like this? As broadcasters, I have to say, Max, that one of the things we never got to do on how we got here was do an entire episode in.

[Max Fisher]

North Atlantic accent in a mid Atlantic.

[Erin Ryan]

From the mid century.

[Max Fisher]

I'm challenging you to do the rest of this episode in a mid Atlantic.

[Erin Ryan]

That was from. That was from the 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds, which was recorded to sound like a news broadcast reporting on a genuine alien invasion. That got great scream footage.

[Max Fisher]

They did. And it fooled a lot of people, right? Like they thought this was real and.

[Erin Ryan]

They really acted like it. Emma, our producer, dug up this clip from a documentary that AT&T made, interviewing its telephone operators on duty the night of the broadcast. The people believed it. They really believed it that night. And I think of the ones who were begging us to get connections to their families, to their husbands, to mothers and fathers before the world came to an end so they could just tell them they loved them.

[Max Fisher]

Man, AT&T produced the hell out of that clip.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah, they really did.

[Max Fisher]

Okay, but does this really qualify as a mass delusion, though? Like, sure, maybe some people got a little credulous about believing a radio report that did air, after all, in the day before Halloween. But still, that's not the same as straight up imagining something.

[Erin Ryan]

Oh, but they did. Here's a clip of Orson Welles, who directed and narrated the broadcast, being interviewed by the BBC about how Americans responded.

[William Bernstein]

A lot of people wanted to know.

[Erin Ryan]

As a matter of fact, they were phoning us from all over the place. Some of them reporting that they'd seen Martians landing in their backyards and asking for advice. There were others that claimed to have.

[Orson Welles]

Been attacked personally by Martians.

[Erin Ryan]

Whole experience was extremely intense. So it's not just that people got tricked into thinking the radio play was real. Something made them believe that they were seeing things that weren't actually there.

[Max Fisher]

This is a good place to bring in a conversation I had with a guy named William Bernstein. Bernstein is a financial theorist and former neurologist whose most recent book is titled the Delusions of why People Go Mad in Groups. Boy, do they. And Bill said that to understand why mass delusions happen, you have to get that we as a species evolved in a way that makes us instinctively imitate the people around us. Here's bill.

[William Bernstein]

Sometime around 10, 15,000 years ago, humankind colonized the Western Hemisphere. And within about 5,000 years, various tribes spread from the high Arctic all the way down through North America, Central America, into South America, down to the very tip of Tierra del Fuego. So it was this remarkably rapid migration. And along the way, in order to survive, humans had to learn how to variously make igloos and kayaks and hunt bison on the Great Plains and fashion poison dart guns, blowguns in the Amazon. And if you've never done any of those things, you're not going to be able to invent them yourself. So these things got invented, and then everybody else basically imitated what they did. And so what it boils down to is that our primary survival skill as a species is the ability to imitate.

[Erin Ryan]

And my husband Made fun of me for getting rid of my skinny jeans. I was like, this is a survival skill. We are wearing. We are wearing wider legs now. We are evolving.

[Max Fisher]

You're just clearly more evolved than that.

[Erin Ryan]

I am surviving as my human ancestors intended. So if this is an allegory for the mass drone delusion in New Jersey, then what? People saw a couple of reports of unidentified drones, and their fear of a mass drone invasion made their brains hallucinated out of normal airplane traffic.

[Max Fisher]

So the instinct to imitate people around us is so strong that it comes out in all sorts of ways, and it's usually unconscious, like yawning. Someone next to you yawns, Suddenly you need to yawn, too, even if you're not actually tired. Same goes for sneezing. Bill pointed out that we even imitate speech. If you move to Georgia, after a while, you will start speaking with a Georgia accent. So the thinking is that maybe our perception of reality can work this way, too. If we believe that everybody around us sees aliens because we heard them say so on the radio, and all of our neighbors are behaving like it's real, then we might trick ourselves into thinking that we saw aliens, too.

[Erin Ryan]

It's a nice theory, but is there any proof that this can make us really, straight up, see something that isn't actually there?

[Max Fisher]

So Bill writes about this famous experiment first conducted in the 1950s by the psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch would give people a test, very simple test. He'd show them a card with a line drawn on it. Then he would show them a second card with a few lines on it, and then have to pick out the line on the second card that matched the line on the first card.

[Erin Ryan]

So matching shapes sounds pretty easy.

[Max Fisher]

That was the idea. Here's Bill.

[William Bernstein]

What he would do is he would ask subjects to perform this test. Well, if they just performed the test on their own, they got a 99% accuracy rate. But then what he would do is he would put a subject in a room with what looked like other subjects, five other subjects, four or five other subjects, but they were actually ringers. And they would shout out wrong answers. Okay. And, of course, the error rate of the actual subjects went up dramatically. And the most interesting reactions were the 25% of people who still didn't make any errors. And they would be asked afterward about the experience. And they said, I thought I was going crazy because everybody else around me thought I was wrong. All right? And to me, that was the most salient result of that study.

[Erin Ryan]

That actually reminds me of an elementary school Halloween party when I was a kid, there was a game where we had to guess how many jelly beans were in a jar, and the winner got the jar of jelly beans. And I was looking at the jar, waiting for my turn and thinking, like, okay, probably like, 110 or whatever. Then the girl right in front of me, whose name is Jessica Nelson, I still remember, got to the front of the line and said, five. And I was like, there were clearly, like. I remember my thought process being like, there's way more than five in there. But I don't want to be. I don't want to be, like, a total outlier. So I said that there were 12.

[Max Fisher]

Wow.

[Erin Ryan]

And I obviously didn't win.

[Max Fisher]

That's amazing. And so really, just hearing her say five kind of convinced you maybe it's 12.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. I was like, yeah, I can't be that wrong. She's got to be sort of right. So I can. Yes, it's 12.

[Max Fisher]

Right. It's wild to see that. So psychologists have a name for this phenomenon. It's called common knowledge. If you believe that everybody around you thinks something, you become much likelier to believe it too. And you even start to see physical evidence of that where it doesn't exist. That is just how powerful our impulse is to conform and imitate.

[Erin Ryan]

Okay, so back to the drones. I feel like this explains how someone like that News Nation reporter could drop into New Jersey, hear all these people say they're seeing drones, and then trick himself into seeing a drone too. Sure, that explains how someone can join in on a mass delusion, but not how the mass delusion gets started in the first place.

[Max Fisher]

So for that, let's talk about a more recent mass delusion from just a few years ago known as Havana Syndrome. Here's an ABC News report summing it up.

[Erin Ryan]

In late 2016, US diplomats and their families at the US embassy in Havana.

[William Bernstein]

Cuba, started falling ill with symptoms of.

[Erin Ryan]

Sudden severe headaches, dizziness, nausea, loss of hearing, and more. Soon after, diplomats and other government workers stationed around the world began experiencing similar unexplained symptoms.

[Max Fisher]

Oh, yeah.

[Erin Ryan]

This became a whole thing. Some US Officials think that the victims had been targeted by a secret Russian weapon that was literally cooking their brains.

[Max Fisher]

So at first, people weren't quite sure what to make of this, because on the one hand, the victims show no evidence of injury, and scientists say that no such weapon exists or could even hypothetically exist with. Without leaving other traces like burn marks. Basically, there's no evidence of anything beyond 200 or so people suddenly coming down with similar symptoms. But on the other hand, it's weird that all those people work in overseas US Embassies and all came down sick like around the same time.

[Erin Ryan]

Unless it's not weird at all because all the symptoms are psychogenic.

[Max Fisher]

Psychogenic? What's that?

[Erin Ryan]

Generated by the brain. Not fake. I'm not saying it's not real. People experience a psychogenic illness when they think they've been exposed to grave threats to their physical health. So for whatever reason, under certain circumstances, their brain makes what they believe really happen to them so that it can produce genuine physical symptoms.

[Max Fisher]

So that is actually what a number of scientists and doctors increasingly think happened here. A few cases of mystery headaches popped up in Havana. For whatever reason, US Diplomats around the world came to believe that they were under attack and their brains manifested real symptoms out of that fear and remembering. This all happened as Trump was coming into office and purging US diplomats. So it was a stressful time.

[Erin Ryan]

So if this is an allegory for the mass drone delusion in New Jersey, then people saw a couple reports of unidentified drones and their fear of mass drone invasion made their brains hallucinated out of normal air traffic.

[Max Fisher]

We can actually go back and trace that happening. Yeah. So we don't know exactly which reports first sparked the panic, but this science journalist named Mick west has been writing for a long time about UFO sightings. And he says there are a couple of reasons that people typically mistake planes for UFOs or drones. First is that people have a notoriously hard time judging how far away airborne objects are. Just how our eyes work. When Frisbees were first popularized, people kept mistaking them for flying saucers because they thought it was much further away and therefore much larger than it really was. And west has said that this is why lots and lots of the New Jersey drone sightings describe a car sized drone floating nearby. But then it turns out to actually be a big jumbo jet that's much farther away.

[Erin Ryan]

You know what also vision insurance. Kind of, kind of bad in a lot of cases. I think that this is also a testament to the fact that people get your eyes checked, folks get your eyes. People need glasses, people need contacts, you know, otherwise you're going to think a Frisbee is a flying saucer and be terrified. Right. But that doesn't explain why people describe the drones as hovering in the air. Airplanes don't hover.

[Max Fisher]

So that is the other trick that your eyes play on you. Planes that are flying at an angle away from you or toward you, rather than directly across your field of view can look stationary. This is especially true of planes that are descending for landing when they're slowing down and might be banking on a wide turn that from the right angle can make them look like they're holding in place. And this is what's happening in some of the earliest viral videos that purported to show the drone invasion that science journalist Mick west went through a bunch of them and showed what was happening in even the specific flights that they corresponded to.

[Erin Ryan]

Which promptly put everyone at ease and ended the panic. Right.

[Max Fisher]

By then, the drone videos had got shared to all sorts of local Facebook groups and Reddit boards. People read online that their neighbors had been seeing strange drones. So they went out and looked. Probably most of them saw nothing. But people who believed they had seen a drone too, posted confirmation back to those groups, which over a few weeks started to feel like consensus, common knowledge.

[Erin Ryan]

Everybody knows that the skies are full of unidentified drones. God, what kind of an idiot doesn't see unidentified drones?

[Max Fisher]

Which of course cried out for an explanation, any explanation to fill the void. Enter the grifters and attention seekers like here's Republican Congressman Jeff Van Drew.

[Erin Ryan]

A New Jersey congressman claims Iran is responsible.

[William Bernstein]

Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones. It's off the east coast of the United States of America.

[Erin Ryan]

But he's refusing to reveal sources to back up his claim.

[William Bernstein]

They do work with the Air Force.

[Erin Ryan]

They do work with national defense, they.

[William Bernstein]

Do work with draft drones.

[Erin Ryan]

The Pentagon denying any so called mothership.

[Max Fisher]

I am the mothership connection.

[Erin Ryan]

Insha'Allah. We will elect less gullible members of Congress.

[Max Fisher]

That clip was from a local ABC affiliate. There was also this guy claiming to be a drone manufacturer who posted this mega viral TikTok saying the drones were hunting for loose nuclear weapons. So I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago who was trying to raise an alarm to the highest levels of our government, which they had their ears closed about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on. He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine that got picked up by Joe Rogan.

[Erin Ryan]

Of course it did. Of course it did. I was just like, I'm waiting, I'm waiting for Joe Rogan appearance. You know, it's like, it's like one of those Jack in the boxes where you just turn, you know, it's like the longer you talk about UFOs, it's like, comes the Rogan. So here we are, Rogan.

[Max Fisher]

Well, you were right. And ever since has been sounding the alarm about UFOs to his 30/some million listeners. We won't subject you to that. But I did enjoy this moment from his most recent interview with a UFO believer.

[Erin Ryan]

Wow.

[William Bernstein]

So this lady got a picture of it.

[Max Fisher]

That's actually a picture from the pilot in the cockpit.

[William Bernstein]

Looks like a plane.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, I have the one for the lady, too. It looks same. Except from the ground, but the same.

[William Bernstein]

It doesn't look like a plane.

[Erin Ryan]

Doesn't that look like a plane, Jamie? You can't tell?

[William Bernstein]

I mean, I don't know. Doesn't it look like the front, like the nose? I mean, I'm looking at Bigfoot through.

[Erin Ryan]

The woods right now.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, it's a plane. That's why it looks like a plane, because it's a plane.

[Erin Ryan]

And then there are MAGA and QAnon grifter types like Charlie Kirk and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene making up stories about how the drones are controlled by the US government. And let me just say this, not to put on my own tinfoil hat, but all of this drone coverage comes on the heels of a moment of what felt like a lot of class solidarity in the US after the United Healthcare CEO was killed. There was a discussion about the divide between rich and poor that united people across the political spectrum against the rich. And now we're talking about drones.

[Max Fisher]

They don't want you talking about drones.

[Erin Ryan]

They don't want you talking about healthcare. The mothership is capitalism. Is capitalism.

[Max Fisher]

Okay, well, that's interesting.

[Erin Ryan]

Prove me wrong.

[Max Fisher]

It's a theory and we love that. So what's important here isn't necessarily the content of the narratives around the drones, I would say, or even whether people believe them. Just the existence of a narrative, whether it's UFOs, whatever, makes each additional drone sighting more cognitively attractive. Because your brain has a story to fit it into, which is how you get stuff like this from a different local ABC News affiliate.

[Orson Welles]

You know, when things like this are happening, it seems everyone starts to look up.

[William Bernstein]

Like, my crew and I have been.

[Erin Ryan]

Here in Mendham recording this video that you're looking at right now. We have no idea what it is. I've seen this. This video's everywhere. For listeners, it looks like a white glowing orb spinning at an impossible speed.

[Max Fisher]

But we do know what it is. It's Venus. The cameraman just zoomed way, way in until it got really blurry, which sort of looks like shaking. Anyone with a camera can get the same effect.

[Erin Ryan]

Okay, calm down, Robert Altman. I also saw Fox News ran a video of a mysterious Drone flying at an impossible angle. But it turned out that the video had been taken by the reporter's daughter, who'd forgotten to explain that she'd held the phone vertically. Fox played it horizontally, and if you flip the video back, it's clearly just an airplane flying overhead.

[Max Fisher]

Amazing. Amazing. So we are not trying to goof on these reporters, even though they might deserve it. These people were just falling victim to the same mass delusion as everybody else. Like, listen to this CNN report from New Jersey.

[Erin Ryan]

As you're hearing this, please know that the images that CNN is playing are of the most normal, everyday videos of airplanes ever seen. They are not blurry. They're not hard to make out. They are literally just airplanes taking off and landing in full view.

[William Bernstein]

What they appear to be are drones, clusters of unidentified drones flying much lower than a plane would.

[Erin Ryan]

I think the creepy part is not that it's just a drone, that they're so large.

[William Bernstein]

In New Jersey's Ocean county, sheriff's deputies took their own video of the drones.

[Erin Ryan]

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, talks like a duck.

[Max Fisher]

It'S just a duck.

[Erin Ryan]

It's a drone.

[Max Fisher]

So I think this clip is so telling. Look, I'm sure all of these people are perfectly smart and reasonable in any other context, but mass delusions really are that contagious. It's how you get an entire production crew talking themselves into broadcasting footage of obvious airplanes that, no offense to them, make them sound delusional.

[Orson Welles]

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[Erin Ryan]

Okay, now it's time to talk about my personal favorite mass panic from 2016. Here's a CBS News clip.

[Orson Welles]

Many have turned out to be hoaxes.

[Erin Ryan]

Others more serious as threats on social media. We're talking about the wave of creepy clown sightings across the United States going back to late August. There have been dozens of reports of threatening clowns, largely centered around schools and colleges. Many have been dismissed by law enforcement as pranks, but more than a dozen people have been arrested in connection with the sightings.

[Max Fisher]

I remember this, but I never actually caught up on it. Were the clown sightings real or was it just all made up?

[Erin Ryan]

It seems like it was mostly delusion. The first spooky clown sighting turned out to be a viral marketing stunt for a horror film, which, gotta hand it to him, sure, it worked pretty good. Then people started spotting more spooky clowns, mostly at night. Oof. Don't like a night clown. The vast majority of these never got confirmed, but they did get reported. Which triggered more sightings. It snowballed until people convinced themselves the clowns were attacking kids at bus stops across America.

[Max Fisher]

I mean, that does sound scary.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah, but a lot of the supposed clown related arrests which people took as police confirmation of the clown threat turned out to be misreported. Do you remember the clown murder from that year?

[Max Fisher]

As in a person in a clown costume killed someone?

[Erin Ryan]

Well, that was how it got reported. But it turned out that the Victim was a 16 year old kid wearing a clown mask.

[Max Fisher]

Oh, okay, that is darkly ironic. People got so worked up about the supposed threat from clowns that those fear stricken people became the actual real threat.

[Erin Ryan]

It got so bad that actual normal clowns talked about not being able to work. Here's an interview from a local ABC affiliate.

[Orson Welles]

The woman say the most frustrating thing.

[William Bernstein]

About the hysteria is that it tarnishes.

[Orson Welles]

The image of professional clowns which affects business. They wanted to speak out in hopes.

[Max Fisher]

Of suppressing the fear.

[Erin Ryan]

It's not fair to the clowns that are trying to make a living or the clowns that are trying to volunteer at different events. You know, when people are scared, we have to back off from them.

[Orson Welles]

Reporting in Bonita, Candace Crone, ten news.

[Erin Ryan]

I'll take grandma. Hugs and wows her any day. You know what I just wanna say, remember a few years ago when it was like, learn to code if you don't get a job. Whatever. I feel like if you're a clown, just learn to Spider man. There is not that much of a difference between a clown and a spider man. Except spider man's not always making those faces. You know, you get to wear a full mask. But kids love spider men.

[Max Fisher]

It's true. So they're not as scary.

[Erin Ryan]

Transition your clowning skills to another costumed entertainer.

[Max Fisher]

Okay.

[Erin Ryan]

That's all I have to say.

[Max Fisher]

It's good advice. There's a lot of good advice on this show for people.

[Erin Ryan]

Thank you.

[Max Fisher]

Well, I mean, my takeaway here is that it is wild how something so laughably fake as a nationwide evil clown uprising can, if it gets reported enough, spread on the rumor mill enough, terrify people so thoroughly that they get violent.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. And that brings us to our fourth and final story of mass delusion. The most most famous of them all, at least in the US The Salem witch trials.

[Max Fisher]

Oh, this is actually kind of a shameful gap in my history knowledge. Erin, can you fill us in?

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. So quick and dirty. Between 1692 and 1693, more than 200 people in colonial Massachusetts were accused of witchcraft. Most of Them were in and around Salem. The evidence presented during the trials was spectral evidence. So it was stuff that was only being experienced by the accusers that no one else could see.

[Max Fisher]

Wow.

[Erin Ryan]

30 people were eventually found guilty, 19 people were hanged. One man was crushed to death, and five died in jail.

[Max Fisher]

So the mass delusion element here was people experiencing the quote, unquote, spectral evidence of a thing that was not actually happening. Because as they were hearing more stories about witchcraft, they started to experience themselves.

[Erin Ryan]

And then in the years later, many of the accusers, who were mostly teenage girls, admitted that they'd faked being hexed. So the spectral evidence that they were presenting in the trials was being faked.

[Max Fisher]

Right.

[Erin Ryan]

It was a real whoopsie of justice.

[Max Fisher]

Well, you really see over and over in these incidents how once some community reaches a critical mass of buy in to the delusion, people start genuinely believing that they are seeing or hearing things that just aren't there.

[Erin Ryan]

Yeah. And what's really interesting about the witch trials is that there was relevant backdrop at the time. There was a lot of property disputes in Salem. There were kind of a tug of war happening between like churches and individual people. And the first girls to have fits allegedly at the hands of witches were the daughter and niece of the village reverend, which is convenient since the church was involved in so many feuds over property and church rights.

[Max Fisher]

Oh, I see.

[Erin Ryan]

And the trials kind of allowed all of this wacky faith based evidence to be used against the accused and really is a good example of why, like religion should not be driving the justice system.

[Max Fisher]

Right. And I can see how that would help to trigger the mass delusion aspect of it too. So this is a good segue back to the drones. A big, big part of what has allowed the delusion to spread, despite all the evidence that these are obviously airplanes, is how much buy in there has been from sometimes quite prominent elected officials.

[Erin Ryan]

Like Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, who claimed to have, quote, personally witnessed and videoed what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence. But his video turned out to show the constellation Orion. Sorry, Governor, those are stars, not drones. Oh my God. Everyone needs to go outside.

[Max Fisher]

I know. There was also New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, who also posted a video claiming to show drones. And he later conceded those were actually just airplanes and he'd gotten fooled.

[Erin Ryan]

At least he admitted he'd gotten fooled.

[Max Fisher]

He did. Good for him.

[Erin Ryan]

Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano posted a photo supposedly of a downed drone, implying it belonged to a hostile foreign country. Except it was a Star Wars Prop.

[Max Fisher]

Whoopsie doodle. Then you've got the many officials, including Trump, demanding authority for police to shoot down the drones, which, remember, most of those drones are in fact passenger airliners. Here's New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith promising legislation to, for some reason, encourage cops to take potshots at your next flight into Newark.

[William Bernstein]

Sheriff golden wrote me a few days ago requesting legislation to empower the state police to seriously protect at risk persons and infrastructure and if necessary, bring down a dangerous drone or drones. I am now drafting that bill and will soon introduce it.

[Erin Ryan]

What a fun thing to hear in the middle of holiday travel.

[Max Fisher]

So, in fairness, lots of authorities like the State Department, Defense Department, House Intel Committee, and so on are all trying very hard to convince people there is no drone invasion. There are no UFOs. It's just normal airplane traffic getting distorted into an unwarranted panic. But people really don't want to hear it. There's a lot of resistance to being.

[Erin Ryan]

Corrected, which is maybe why it's the elected officials who are stoking the conspiracies rather than dispelling them.

[Max Fisher]

Sort of like in Salem, right? People will reward you for validating their mass delusion and punish you for challenging it. I asked Bill Bernstein, the guy who wrote that book on mass delusions, why that is.

[William Bernstein]

When you present someone who has a definite view of a given subject with disconfirmatory evidence, most of the time they will ignore that evidence. That's what confirmation bias really is. Confirmation bias most of the time is not about confirming what you believe. What it really is about is ignoring contrary or disconfirming evidence. And then there's something which is very controversial among neuropsychologists, which is the boomerang effect, which is there are a fair amount of data that suggests that when you present people with this confirmatory data, it actually hardens their views.

[Max Fisher]

Bill said that there are a few reasons that we might be getting more prone to mass delusions. There's social media, rising distrust of institutions, worsening social fragmentation. But he emphasized that this goes back basically as far as recorded history. He raised many, many more examples, some from centuries ago, some present day. You can read his book for more. But here's his big takeaway.

[William Bernstein]

Your friends see drones, you start seeing drones because you're an imitative creature. There's nothing unusual about it. I mean, this is behavior that's hardwired into all human beings. And we've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. And we'll probably continue to exhibit this behavior until we blow ourselves up.

[Erin Ryan]

Let's hope that's not anytime soon, though. I suppose it depends on how Trump takes his suggestion that we start shooting at anything we think might be a drone.

[Max Fisher]

I asked Bill how he thought the drones thing would play out based on past delusions. His answer was pretty simple. He said probably everyone would just quietly move on pretty soon and just never, ever admit that they had been wrong.

[Erin Ryan]

You know, we're having a good time with this drones episode. We are this mass delusions episode. But I do think that there's something wider and more sinister that we need to talk about when we talk about mass delusions. And I think it goes along with some of the work that you've done in the past, Max, which is the role that mass delusions play in spreading disinformation and misinformation. Anytime people fall for something like a QAnon or something, a deliberate seed of disinfo or misinfo, it is an attempt to kind of start the ball rolling on a mass delusion in a way. When we talk about mass delusions like this, sometimes what it does is it shuts down conversations around other things. I was recently on a walk before the New Jersey drones thing even happened, and I actually saw a drone in Los Angeles, but I don't know. I think it was a police drone.

[Max Fisher]

Are you sure it was a drone?

[Erin Ryan]

I'm positive it was a drone. I was walking down the sidewalk, another woman was walking, like, the other way, and we saw this drone hovering over a building at a nearby college. And she looked at me and she goes, that was a drone, right? And I was like, yeah, that was a drone. And she goes, I'm not crazy. And I was like, no, I don't think so. But now I'm like, am I? So that's my concluding thought.

[Max Fisher]

Well, Erin, perfect way to go out on our last episode. Thank you.

[Erin Ryan]

Thank you so much.

[Max Fisher]

I cannot tell you what a pleasure it's been to write and host this show with you. And I understand you have one final clip to play us out.

[Erin Ryan]

Oh, yeah. It's got everything. New Jersey Journey. And it implores you to continue believing.

[Max Fisher]

Beautiful. Don't stop. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher and Erin Ryan.

[Erin Ryan]

Our producer is Emma Ilick Frank.

[Max Fisher]

Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show.

[Erin Ryan]

Jordan Kanter, sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Lance, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

[Max Fisher]

Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adrian Hill.

[Erin Ryan]

Netcredit is here to say yes to a personal loan or line of credit when other lenders say no, apply in minutes and get a decision as soon as the same day. Loans offered by NetCredit or lending partner back banks and serviced by NetCredit.

[Max Fisher]

Applications subject to review and approval. Learn more at netcredit.com partners NetCredit Credit to the People if you're ready to.

[William Bernstein]

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[Orson Welles]

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[William Bernstein]

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[Max Fisher]

Learn more at kia.com.

[William Bernstein]

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