Drones, drones, everywhere drones. For a few weeks, clusters of drones of unknown provenance were recently seen flying in the skies above New Jersey. Local, state, and federal authorities claimed that they did not know whose drones they were. The expression “baseless conspiracy theory” saw an uptick in usage once again as some in the media scoffed at the proliferating hypotheses about what was going on. Incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump, opined that the machines should be shot down, but the Joe Biden administration did not agree, lending significant support to the simplest hypothesis of them all: that the drones have been used by the government itself for whatever its purposes may be. Having once recognized this very real possibility, Trump cryptically intoned, “Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don’t want to tell the people.”
State officials, spurred by their constituents, got to work attempting to find ways to halt the drones overhead, suggesting that, if the executive branch would not itself prevent certain unnameable rogue government departments from violating the Posse Comitatus Act, then at least by asserting the sub-federal authority enjoyed by states, it would be possible to stop whoever was behind whatever the operation may have been. New Jersey is not Nordstream, which U.S. citizens were quite willing to forget about and pretend never happened, despite in all likelihood having paid for the terrorist act of sabotage.
On December 19, 2024, the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) issued a one-month ban on the flying of UAVs over swaths of New Jersey, declaring the areas to be “national defense airspace,” and oddly claiming that “deadly force” could be deployed in response to violations of the ban. It is unclear what the use of “deadly force” against inanimate machines might mean, but it ominously suggests that the persons behind the drones might be subject to summary execution. Or perhaps the reference to “deadly force” was just part of a cover story composed in order to dispel the most plausible available hypothesis, undoubtedly made even more popular by Trump’s pronouncement that, “The government knows what is happening.” Having himself been the object of attempted assassinations by figures with rather bizarre back stories and curious connections, Trump understandably canceled a planned trip to New Jersey. The terrifying truth is that, with the advent of clusters of weaponized drones the size of insects, there really is nowhere and no way to hide from a determined killer with access to the latest and greatest lethal technologies developed by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—fully funded by U.S. taxpayers).
Regardless of who may have launched the mysterious drones, the implication for U.S. citizens is that at long last they have been subjected to the specter of insecurity and danger posed by the hovering overhead of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which may or may not bear lethal payloads, and which may or may not be monitoring the movements of specific targets, whose names may or may not be found on government “kill don’t capture” lists.
Hellbound and Down 