If you’re seeing and hearing drones or other such flying things flashing in the sky, it’s absolutely certain that you are not imagining it and you are not alone. However, what remains troublingly uncertain is what is actually going on and it’s a question that government has done a lousy job answering.

The future head of that government, Donald Trump, said: “The government knows what is happening. For some reason, they don’t want to comment. And I think they’d be better off saying what it is our military knows and our president knows.”

We often disagree with Trump, but his call for transparency is sound.

What do the sightings mean? Hopefully not a real life “The War of the Worlds” invasion copying Orson Welles’ 1938 fictional radio show Martian attack, also in New Jersey. The unsatisfying answer is we don’t know yet. We’ll venture that it’s unlikely that this is some sort of sophisticated foreign intelligence operation that federal officials are somehow unaware of.

Maybe it’s some kind of undisclosed military program that Trump mentioned, or coordinated pranks or, as is may be the case with these things, a phenomenon that’s taken a life of its own when there’s no there there.

A few experts and officials have already pointed out that at least some of the sightings seem to be commercial planes. One Jersey resident claimed to have shined a laser pointer at a “drone” that seems to have really been a FedEx plane. Needless to say, do not do this; risking plane crashes is the opposite of helpful as we try to figure out what’s going on.

This is all representative of a broader and more acute reality than whatever is going on with these particular sightings: we have more or less lost the ability to contend with and clarify things like this as a society. Conspiracy theories are nothing new, and neither is distrusting official sources of information. Some of our greatest advances as a society and moments of public accountability and reform have come from people going against and questioning narratives.

Instead, we’re faced with something like a choose-your-own-adventure for reality, where every amateur sleuth and social media voice gets a chance to run wild and potentially cause significant damage with their laser pointer exploits.

The culture of secrecy at the nation’s law enforcement and military entities has left them tight-lipped in a way that the public just takes as confirmation that there’s something nefarious going on, as Trump suggests, and the news media’s cautious reporting, responsive to what we know to be true, is seen as evasive and dismissive.

People want there to be clear-cut answers, now. The idea that this could be a series of misidentifications of commercial planes, faraway planets and hobbyists drones (or probably all of the above) even if that turns out to be the correct answer, may not be welcomed by a public that seems hungry for something else.

So, let’s just go through each sighting, one by one, and determine its cause. The Martians patiently planned their attack in “The War of the Worlds;” will Americans have the same level of patience?

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