Uh oh, now the drones are flying close to Hill Air Force Base.
It was one thing when we had the luxury of watching the drone story unfold from a distance — in far-away New Jersey. But now, like that mysterious monolith that appeared out of nowhere in Southeastern Utah four years ago, this is our problem, too.
“We can confirm that unmanned aerial systems were spotted in the vicinity of (Hill Air Force Base) recently,” spokesperson Kendahl Johnson said, according to KSL. “To date, unmanned aerial systems have not impacted (Hill Air Force Base) operations, and all appropriate measures are being taken to safeguard (Hill) personnel, assets and infrastructure.”
Well, I’m here to tell you to relax and watch the show. If it’s like some recent things that captured public attention (think clowns eight years ago or shark attacks 20 years ago), it’s likely to be over soon — overtaken by the next crisis.
Shoot ‘em down?
Or maybe the people of Deer Trail, Colorado, population 700, were right 10 years ago. That’s when they put a referendum on the ballot that would have let people shoot drones out of the sky after obtaining a sort of modified hunting license.
The referendum failed — probably because the only thing worse than a bunch of drones flying through the air would be a bunch of bullets flying through the air.
Crowded sky
The inescapable truth is that the only sure prediction this New Year’s Eve is that skies are bound to become more crowded in the future. Once driverless air taxis and freight-bearing drones come onboard (serious efforts are underway to make this a reality by the 2034 Olympics), we may find it quaint that people once worried about things hovering in the air.
But until then, it is interesting watching the military and law enforcement react to repeated sightings of mysterious drones along the eastern seaboard. The FBI has now banned drones for a month from certain cities in New Jersey and elsewhere in the East. Politicians are demanding answers.
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, said about a million drones currently are legally registered in the U.S., and about 8,000 of them take to the skies every day. The drones people see are not from the military, he said. They likely belong to “hobbyists for recreational purposes.” Also, they aren’t shooting at people, which is a good sign.
Just as virtually every other American, except the ones who suspect conspiracies everywhere, I don’t know what’s really going on. But my guess is that this is another case in which people ought to engage in slow thought.
Thinking slowly
Several years ago, when people reported clowns everywhere, I wrote about a book called “Thinking Fast and Slow,” by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. As he described it, fast thinking comes to us automatically and quickly. It’s a necessary thing to have when we hear the screeching tires of an approaching car or need to understand a simple sentence.
But slow thinking requires more work. He illustrated this by asking the reader to multiply 17x24. That takes real effort, requiring concentration and certain steps. It’s not the kind of thing you should do while trying to turn left on a crowded road, he said.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans right now are using fast thinking to react to drones. That’s a misapplication. It’s why the Guardian, looking for opinions, reported, “Some say they’re aliens, invading Iranian drones, emanating from a mothership off of the coast in the Atlantic. Maybe top-secret weapons testing.”
And one off-duty firefighter told the paper, “I heard it was al-Qaeda.”
We need to slow down. Literally.
The virtue of slow thought is that it always has the last word, and often it can keep us from saying inappropriate things or appearing shallow, self-centered or blind to reality.
I tend to agree with Garrett M. Graff, who wrote in The Washington Post recently, “America has real national security challenges in the new era of unmanned aerial vehicles in warfare. But an invasion of mystery drones over New Jersey isn’t one of them.”
A mere illusion?
Maybe this is all a form of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also called the frequency illusion, in which people suddenly seem to see, all over the place, something they only recently heard about.
Maybe the folks in Deer Trail, Colorado, are laughing and saying they told us so, as the skies get more crowded each day.
Or maybe the drones near Hill Air Force Base have been in the sky elsewhere in Utah for a while, and no one cared.
I don’t know. But what I do know is that we all are better served by tossing aside our suspicions and theories and thinking slowly and calmly — no matter how dull that may seem.