It’s Time For A Little Recreational Mental Illness In New Jersey

There's a kind of hush that is specific to old-growth suburbs, a quietness that is more vast and more inherent than any disturbance that kind of place can kick up. The place where I grew up is different in some ways than it was when I was growing up there, but that fundamental quiet is undisturbed. Things happen and make their various sounds—you'll hear a quick blurt of music when someone steps out of a bar to smoke or as people come and go from one of the restaurants downtown, cars go by and dogs get bossy on their walks and freight trains chug and honk over the New Jersey Transit lines when the commuter trains aren't running. People still live there, and people make noise. The part that is striking, and which is striking to me whenever I go back to see my parents in the house where I grew up, is how the totality of that suburban quiet swallows all this up. It's there and then it is gone, and there is maybe the wind in the trees or just nothing at all.

I have lived in noisy places for longer than I ever lived in all that quiet, but the appeal of it isn't lost on me. I like how dark it gets at night there, and I like walking back from the train station down those quiet sidewalks and through all the old extraneous shortcuts of my youth. The last few times I've done this I have startled some deer standing around in a parking lot, as aimless and wary as I was when I did the same thing as a teenager; they stared at me but did not run. I am aware that it is a nice place to live and it was on balance a perfectly fine place to grow up. I understand why people live there. I am also under no illusions about how quickly and how thoroughly I would go insane if I were to try to do it again.

While there is a great deal that isn't known about the stories of people, first in New Jersey and then elsewhere up and down the Eastern seaboard, reporting suspicious drones in the skies, it seems important to bear that last bit in mind. Whatever these sightings actually are, and they seem mostly to be people mistaking airplanes or stars for some scarier other thing TBD, they also feel symptomatic of this broader moment's and this particular milieu's combination of generalized unease and all-devouring boredom. "One thing we know is that humans, when they see something in the sky, they’re really bad at telling how far away it is," the communications director of the flight tracker Flightradar24 told NJ.com. "Our depth perception is awful, particularly at night." Another thing we know is that humans, when primed to believe that Something Is Going On Up There but also just in general, will get weird and stay weird about stuff more or less for yuks. Whether this is people acting out some wish to see the unease they feel inside reflected by a world that otherwise doesn't acknowledge them or just indulging in the classic suburban pastime of noticing something and then calling the police and/or doing some weird online posting about it, it all comes out more or less the same—people with garages giving themselves a few cheeky nibbles of schizophrenia, as a treat.

The response to this has been decently telling, without ever actually telling anyone anything new or useful. State and federal agencies have fielded and investigated reports of drone sightings for nearly a month—the first sightings in New Jersey were reported on November 18—and have found nothing of note. This has done nothing to stop people from wandering out into their yards and taking and posting (and posting, and posting) sub-Nightengaleian photos and video of the night sky. "Can you explain this?" these concerned citizens say, thrusting the absolute shittiest photo you've ever seen towards...well, just thrusting it outwards, mostly. At an unlucky neighbor, maybe, but more likely just at anyone scrolling past on some platform or other, and more generally in the direction of The Media, or The Government. The lack of response, or the type of response, or the actual substance of the response, is as one unemployed Maryland man baffled by these lights put it, "entirely unacceptable."

There is no response to this that would be sufficient or satisfying, and no response has been. On Thursday, FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said that "many of the sightings were manned aircraft, operating lawfully" and were unable to confirm any of the New Jersey sightings as anything more sinister. "We have no evidence at this time that these reported sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus," a White House National Security Council official told NBC News, which sounds both pretty definitive and exactly the sort of thing you'd expect the NSC to say if they wanted to throw you off the scent of whatever it was you'd discovered. Late last week, Senators and Members of Congress requested briefings from federal agencies "to address these incidents," and some have received them. The ones that have been briefed, like New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, "don’t think there are any immediate threats to public safety," although he added that "the public needs to know more."

In lieu of the sort of public briefing that Gottheimer called for, the public need to know more has been filled more or less how you'd expect. Newly elected New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim went on a ride along with local law enforcement and a NJ.com reporter in rural Hunterdon County last week. "It’s my responsibility to show the people of New Jersey that we’re being responsive," Kim said. "They have every right to know." Local police told Kim that they routinely see 10 or so drones per shift, although "unfortunately, by the time we get there, they’re already gone." Kim himself reported seeing some stuff—"these definitely don’t seem like the ones from Best Buy"—and promised to "stay on top of this and try to run this down."

Another New Jersey elected official, Rep. Scott Van Drew, took a different approach. Van Drew, who styles himself like an unusually unethical restaurateur and represents what is by wide acclaim the most deranged part of the state, went on Fox News on Wednesday to tell viewers concerned about the drones what they wanted to hear, which is that they were absolutely right to be concerned about those drones. "Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones," Van Drew told Fox host Harris Faulkner, not a little gleefully. "That mothership, I'm going to tell you the deal, it's off the East Coast of the United States of America. They've launched drones." When challenged, Van Drew put a video on YouTube reiterating his assertions. "We know there is an Iranian drone ship that went missing from its port," he said. "And the timing of the disappearance is circumstantially consistent with the beginning of the appearance of these drones." ("There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States," a Pentagon spokesperson said last Thursday, "and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.")

You can see, in these representatives' respective responses to this little flare-up of recreational mental illness, two divergent but not quite competing visions of government. Kim goes out of his way to show that he takes these concerns seriously and allows that there may be something there before promising to do his level best to find out what it is; Van Drew goes on TV and talks the wildest shit he can, and then goes on YouTube, puts on a somber face, says "fear has no place in responsible leadership," and keeps right on talking it. I probably don't need to tell you which political party either elected official belongs to, but it seems both more salient and more worrying that it is nearly impossible to imagine a way in which those two approaches to public service could be brought together in collaboration to address this problem or really any other. That doesn't preclude some sort of action in response—and frankly we are long overdue for a federal law making it legal for law enforcement officers to fire their guns at passing airplanes if they believe it's appropriate to do so—but it also doesn't augur well for any kind of solution.

There is a crushing abstraction to American life; institutions that are supposed to do one thing reliably and punitively do something like the opposite, and do harm so reliably and so effectively that it becomes difficult to imagine that they might ever have had any other purpose. In the absence of a knowable and shared common reality there is instead a fractured and burnt-over wilderness of scams and fantasies, and that is pretty much that. No one really even talks about trying to change that anymore, and the business of the country is increasingly in leveraging that unknowability, either through familiar smash-and-grab tactics or by staking out a homestead somewhere in that waste and seeing what might grow there. There are strange lights in the sky, and the cops chase them around; none of this is officially even happening, and while the likeliest explanation is that it is just business as usual—paths of commerce, or just the heavens—seen from far below, that doesn't feel sufficient, or much like an answer. Some politicians will come to flatter your unease, and others will come to feed it, and they will look into it until it goes away. It can get noisy inside, but outside, at night, it so impossibly quiet that all you want to do is scream.