The current drone panic on the eastern US seaboard – which started out in New Jersey about a month ago, but has spread to Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and even US bases in the UK and Germany – is, of course, hardly unprecedented. Not only does it bear obvious similarities to the 2019 drone panic in the US Midwest, and to the Gatwick drones panic in 2018, but also to a whole series of much earlier panics involving threatening objects in the sky which are at least partly imaginary. (Some of the drones may well be drones. But many, if not most, are nothing more unusual than civilian aircraft on routine flights. When they're not stars, that is.) I'm thinking less here of the post-1947 UFO phenomenon, which by and large was not initially viewed with suspicion or alarm, or even the mystery airships seen across the US in 1896 and 1897, which similarly were generally the object of curiosity, not fear, but the British phantom airship panics of 1909 and 1913, as well the mystery aeroplane panic in Australia and New Zealand in 1918. It's a whole new Scareship Age.
While the sociological mechanisms of the construction and transmission of the idea of mystery aircraft has probably remained fairly constant over the last 160-odd years, it has certainly accelerated with the coming of various modes of mass media, including, now, social media. More interestingly, their cultural form is greatly dependent on the technological context. Hence the progression from balloons to airships to aeroplanes to rockets to spaceships to helicopters and now to drones (which, although a retrograde step in terms of their lack of cosmic scope, are novel technologies in the way that the artefacts of the space age can no longer be). But even more interestingly is the way that the threat or promise of mystery aircraft shifts with (geo)political context. So the American mystery airships of the 1890s were generally supposed to be flown by American inventors; the British phantom airships before 1914 were German surveillance platforms; the Scandinavian mystery aeroplanes in the 1930s were Soviet infiltrators; after the Second World War, flying saucers were piloted by space brothers or nocturnal abductors (actually, that is something of a break: the UFO phenomenon became its own, much bigger thing to a large extent – one reason why I steer clear of it). And so on.
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