The Drone Crisis Will End With A Whimper

I'm not sure if the New Jersey drone frenzy is starting to die down or not. It looks as though sightings aren't oing viral, they're still focused mostly on New Jersey and neighboring states, even though airliners in landing patterns and helicopters are common all over the US. A quick web search brings up just a few sightings in exurbs well east of Los Angeles, but none in LA City or County. I think there may be a good reason for this.

Our house is located on a low hillside overlooking Hollywood and Downtown, and in particular, if we look out the windows at night, we see helicopters, lots of them, all over the city. There are police, medical, traffic, news, and private helicopters, all the time. They are mostly far enough away that we don't hear them. Everyone in LA knows about helicopters and is used to them. Nobody is going to take them for drones, and it looks as though nobody is calling them in as drone sightings.

The video I've linked at the top of this post is the best explanation I've seen so far of the phenomenon. The vast majority of drone sightings are airliners and helicopters, others of the planet Venus, and a certain small number of actual, registered drones on various prosaic missions, plus another group of prankster kids and hobbyists. The main problem is that the administration has destroyed its credibility, doesn't understand its audience when it tries to reassure the public, and insults people when it seems to be calling them stupid or unsophisticated.

Here's Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, best known for claiming illegal immigration isn't a problem:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas downplayed the recent wave of drone sightings in the tri-state area and emphatically argued the feds can’t just “shoot” them down amid calls by some lawmakers to do just that.

Mayorkas, appearing on CNN Friday night, insisted many people are simply seeing drones that can be purchased at “convenience stores” and most instances are “cases of mistaken identity.”

The Homeland honcho told CNN host Wolf Blizter that his agency has seen no evidence of anomalous activity.

“We haven’t seen anything unusual,” Mayorkas said. “We know of no threat. We believe that there are cases of mistaken identity where “drones” are actually small aircraft — that people are misidentifying them,” he said.

He's saying this with his usual self-satisfied smirk, which does nothing but reinforce the view his audience already has that they're being gaslighted.

Between them, the Biden and incoming Trump administrations have a dilemma. Biden simply has no figure he can name at this point as a potential James Kallstrom surrogate -- nobody, for instance, from the FBI, which had at least some residual credibility at the time of TWA 800. Nobody from DHS, the CIA, or any other agency, they're all compromised in the public mind. Beyond that, all those guys are going to be out of work in another month, they're scrambling for new gigs, why put themselves out now for a lost cause?

A potential Trump move could be to designate one of his nominees -- maybe Kash Patel, maybe Tulsi Gabbard, maybe Pete Hegseth -- to serve as an interim drone ombudsman, maybe getting an asurance from Biden that he's told his agencies to give the Trump ombudsman full access and cooperation, to get to the bottom of the drone mystery and calm things down.

But we have the Napoleonic principle, "Never interfere with an enemy while he's in the process of destroying himself”. Trump can simply wait until Joe finishes driving a stake into his own heart, then come in on January 20 and make it clear he's fixing the problem, even if the problem is nonexistent. He also risks losing his own credibility if his own ombudsman isn't persuasive.

I think the likeliest outcome is that the drone frenzy will simply die out as no new revelations emerge to contradict the clumsy official narrative of nothing-to-see-here. On Thursday and Friday, there were initial reports of crashed drones that either resulted in fruitless searches or simply finding the remains of a hobby drone. An actual crashed drone the size of an SUV or a school bus would be the sort of thing that reinforces the story, but so far, it isn't happening.

There are also saner voices beginning to emerge on YouTube and social media that will reinforce a growing public perception that no new evidence is emerging. But it's probably not in Trump's interest to do anything that might have the effect of boosting the Biden administration's faded credibility in any way at this late stage.