For a month now, you’ve either seen them in the sky or on the news: drones seem to be everywhere. Clearly, allegations of drone sightings are growing exponentially, with more than 5,000 reported in the past few weeks alone.
But of those 5,000, only about 100 generated actual leads for law enforcement.
Missy Cummings, an engineering professor at George Mason University who has been researching drones for 25 years, says that what most people actually see are probably planes, stars, or reflections on objects, like towers. “Of all these options, the drone is the least likely, because it’s actually quite difficult to spot them from the sky,” she said.
We heard a similarly ordinary explanation for these extraordinary lights in the sky when we visited Monmouth County Sheriff Shaun Golden in New Jersey last week. “The majority of these sightings are likely to be of piloted commercial or recreational aircraft types,” he said.
In other words, no imminent threat. As a joint declaration of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the FAA and the FBI, said Tuesday: “[We] We do not assess the activity to date as posing a risk to national security or public safety.
Cummings said: “If you’re actually looking at the lights of a drone, that means you’re definitely not looking at a foreign adversary, because they’re sophisticated enough to turn off the lights.”
And yet, some of the American public is a little nervous.
The best approach at the moment, according to Cummings, is that we should all try to keep our feet on the ground: “If I go on the news and say to you, ‘You have something to worry about,’ SO you have reason to worry,” she said. “But in this case, right now, really, it’s business as usual.”
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Story produced by Amiel Weisfogel. Publisher: Joseph Frandino.
