The New Jersey Drones Mass Delusion, Explained

新泽西无人机群体错觉的解释

What A Day

新闻

2024-12-21

32 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Something mysterious has been going down in New Jersey this week…but it’s NOT drones. It’s that thousands of people are looking at airplanes in the night sky and thinking they see UFOs. What causes mass delusions like this wave of now mostly debunked drone sightings? In this concluding episode of How We Got Here, Max and Erin share four stories of famous mass hysterias and talk to William Bernstein, an author who writes about the science of mass delusions and why they happen.
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  • Erin, there's something that's been bugging me about the nighttime drone sightings popping up all over New Jersey this past week.

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

  • So the mystery here isn't what's up in the skies.

  • We know what's up there.

  • Yeah.

  • It's airplanes, right?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 1, 2, 3, 4.

  • At least five lights.

  • Six lights.

  • 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.