{"id":13821,"date":"2024-12-17T02:06:12","date_gmt":"2024-12-17T07:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=13821"},"modified":"2024-12-17T02:06:14","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T07:06:14","slug":"drone-ontology-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2024\/12\/17\/drone-ontology-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Drone ontology, part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I suspect I’m not the only one fascinated by the mystery #drone<\/a> sightings that have been reported in various parts of the eastern United States and occasionally near military installations in Europe and the UK over the last several weeks. There are three general hypotheses I can think of to account for them (and it could of course be a combination of two or more of them). My assessment of the likelihood of each follows below. (I welcome your votes — in the comments or by emailing me<\/a>.) A future post will delve into the ontological implications of this sort of question, though I’m not convinced the drone sightings are a strong enough instance of the case I want to make. They may just peter out (depending on which of the hypotheses turns out to be correct)… <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Three hypotheses\/scenarios<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hypothesis #1: They are made up of a variety of things, some of which are real and normal (actual drones, airplanes, stars, optical illusions), others are unreal and overhyped (hoaxes, disinformation, pranks or jokes mistaken for truth). Together they have produced a “collective phenomenon” (a kind of hysteria) that\u2019s taken root in people\u2019s excited imaginations. This encourages more and more looking for them, and therefore more and more “seeing” them, but also more and more people getting in on the act (pranksters flying their own drones to contribute to the story).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hypothesis #2: They are drones controlled by some as yet unidentified (a) foreign adversary (Chinese, Russian, Iranian), (b) domestic agency (“deep state” or some arm of it), or (c) shadowy cabal (e.g., a wealthy tech group) and are being coordinated either in preparation for something else — some deep state control program (testing our responses to it), warfare\/invasion, et al. — or as a “psyop” (to freak people out, to distract from something else significant that\u2019s happening right now).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hypothesis #3: They are being controlled by some “alien” or paranormal (“extradimensional”) intelligence, like that responsible for other UFO\/UAP sightings over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"May<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Likelihood of #1: Taken together, these categories could certainly account for a lot of the reports, but they don\u2019t seem to account well for the large number of reliable witnesses including elected political representatives, military and coast guard people, et al., for the seemingly coordinated nature of the phenomenon, or for its unusual features (such as the ability to render small civilian drones inoperable in their vicinity). There’s as yet been no finding of any media channels where drone controllers or pranksters communicate among themselves, no drone ships or launching pads, no one coming out to say they’re responsible for any of them, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likelihood of #2: The coastal location of the majority of sightings lends credibility to the “foreign adversary” scenario, but it seems unlikely because our governments\u2019 and institutions\u2019 abilities to monitor the movements of drone carrier ships from, say, China or the Persian Gulf are quite good, and so far intelligence agencies have expressed no hint of knowledge or concern over that. The “deep state” or “cabal” scenarios face the same hurdle most shadowy conspiracies face: that to carry this out requires a lot of people in a lot of places communicating in secret, but (1) so far no one has identified any group or place where that communication is occurring, and (2) the possibility of someone “snitching” or “leaking” seems too likely for it not to have occurred yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likelihood of #3: Since these sightings have transformed over time to suit and\/or play with people\u2019s expectations (saucers, benevolent motherships, invasive genetic experiment conducting “greys,” et al), their transformation into drones should not be surprising (but then what is?). The “extradimensionality” leaves open a lot of options: e.g., they are actual aliens from another star system, they\u2019re time travelers sent to prompt our sense of wonder, they\u2019re a weird material-perceptual projection of the collective unconscious, et al. This is of course the most interesting of the hypothetical scenarios, but it\u2019s also the one that has repeatedly surfaced without ever becoming a real, tangible, and knowable thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prognosis: Scenario #2 would seem to predict that the phenomenon will be uncovered, the culprit identified, and sensibilities returned to their baseline state (of everyday anxiety, everyday paranoia, everyday obliviousness, or whatever the case may be). Scenarios #1 and #3, on the other hand, both predict the phenomenon will go away, either explained or not fully, with interest in it fading soon enough (as has happened, for instance, with crop circles, the mystery monoliths that had appeared here and there for a while, and numerous other things over the years). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is, unless (in scenario #3) something genuinely <\/em>new is about<\/em> to happen — an alien landing or a revelation of some kind. But maybe that’s the point (as some supporters<\/a> of hypothesis\/scenario #3 believe): that it’s meant to keep us guessing, or hoping, or afraid, or something<\/em>… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where that “something” fits into our sense of reality is something I want to explore in a future post. For now, let’s leave the drones in the “hinterland” of “out-thereness” (as John Law<\/a> has called it), the unformatted “plasma<\/a>” (Bruno Latour’s<\/a> term) that has not yet been brought into our explanatory frameworks because we’re not quite sure what to make of it or how it’s relevant to anything else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question in the background can be: how large<\/em> is that hinterland? What is its capacity to overturn our “in-hereness,” our sense of everyday reality? And what if every<\/em> way of making reality — every explanatory framework — has its hinterlands, and none of them are fully encompassable or accommodatable within the others? That’s what Law, Latour, and, perhaps more radically, Paul Fereyabend would suggest. (I’ll get to Feyerabend in a follow-up post.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, then, I may be making too much of the drones… Drones are, after all, controlled by someone somewhere else, they’re not their own persons. They’re meant for some specific purpose, of course, whether it’s to gather information on us, to surreptitiously enter enemy terrain and strike intentional targets, or to mate with the queen bee (dictionary slippage, but maybe not)… And they stick around for longer periods than most people might want, droning on, like a piece of music by William Basinski or La Monte Young (which becomes its own form of beauty if you let it). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hmm, maybe the drones aren’t such a bad example, after all, of what I’m getting at. They are<\/em> the hinterland — always there, at the sidelines, reminding us we don’t quite have it all figured out, under control, and that it may not even be in our power to have that kind of control. They keep itching us no matter how we scratch at them. Like the buzz of a mosquito we can’t quite see. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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