New Jersey Drones Double Feature: War of the Worlds & The Battle of LA – REWIND

Starting on November 18 of 2024, people in New Jersey started reporting mysterious SUV-sized drones flying over. They were seen over Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club, NJ’s Picatinny Arsenal, Naval Weapons Station Earle, and city streets. In this episode, we update you on the latest about these drones and present a special DOUBLE FEATURE rewind from two past stories that the drone sightings have us thinking about. 

The Battle of Los Angeles: Real Bullets & Imaginary Targets
Episode Originally Released Jan 17, 2022

On February 25, 1942, the sky erupted with gunfire and anti-aircraft rounds. The ground-to-air assault went on for an hour, and the intended target was an invading Japanese air attack. But there was no enemy. The entire thing was a huge false alarm. It became known as the Battle of Los Angeles. In this episode, we tell the story about the air raid and then talk with Magicians Meadow Perry And Daniel Greenwolf!

Mass Hysteria and the War of the Worlds
Episode Originally Released July 24, 2022

Did a radio broadcast about Aliens cause mass Hysteria in America in 1938? The Internet Says…maybe. Orson Welles’s radio performance of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds has become infamous as causing panic throughout the U.S. when people thought it was a real news report. But is the story overblown? In this episode, we talk about the radio play and its reception. Then we play the quick quiz with Jethro and Matt from the Drunkard’s Walk Podcast!

The New Jersey Drones story started on November 18 of 2024. There were multiple eyewitness accounts in New Jersey all reporting the same thing: several large drones – approximately 6 feet in diameter – flying in the air after dark. The Asbury Park Press first reported it and it was even witnessed by Patrolmen from several local law enforcement agencies. The FAA was called and no one knew exactly what these were. Then, four days later, the FAA issued flight restrictions over Donald Trump’s Bedminster  Golf Club, also in New Jersey, prohibiting drone flights over the club. This was in response to these large drones being seen near the course. Then it was reported that they were seen flying over Picatinny Arsenal, which is a military research facility in New Jersey. The FAA extended their flight restriction over that base as well. These sightings continued throughout the rest of November, even causing a med-evac helicopter to divert its landing in one instance. 

As December of 2024 came, residents all over New Jersey started reported seeing the drones flying over their neighborhoods. Even the Governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, said that 49 had been spotted on the previous night alone. And that they were reported as being sophisticated, often going dark as soon as they were spotted. In Morris County, the Prosecutor’s Office told the public that the drones posed “no risk to public safety.” But they didn’t tell anyone how they knew that. By the 10th of December, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker urged the FAA, FBI and DHS to investigate the drone sightings. Many lawmakers and politicians were joining the call to investigate – some of them having seen the drones themselves. On the 11th, a closed-door meeting was held in the State Police Headquarters. State Lawmakers gathered to find out what was going on and many of them left frustrated because they had driven from all over the state only to be told very little information. They were told that investigators couldn’t detect any drones electronically and that no one knew anything other than what had been reported. 

There was even a Coast Guard vessel off the coast that reported being trailed by at least a dozen of these drones. 

That same day, December 11th the Pentagon’s Press Secretary Sabrina Singh acknowledged the reports saying that local and state officials could take action against the drones if they threatened military installations. But she also said some things that got everyone talking. She said the drones do NOT represent a threat from a foreign country. She also said they were not U.S. military drones. She gave enough information to suggest that the Pentagon has a clue as to what they are, but they’re only sharing what they AREN’T. And this has citizens and politicians angry at the lack of transparency. 

New Jersey Congressman Jeff VanDrew told the world that he had it good authority that the drones were being launched off a mothership by Iran – a claim that the Pentagon has denied. 

The internet is buzzing with theories that range from extraterrestrial visitors to government contractor drones to a government psyop. 

So-called whistleblowers are coming out of the woodwork saying they know what’s going on, but nothing has been corroborated. One person on the Internet claimed the drones are XP-4s, a model of drone built by Pterodynamics that has a trans-wing design that matches the size and shape of what’s being seen. Another person who claims to have inside knowledge says that these drones are the kind that the government uses to sniff for radioactive materials and they’re conducting a top secret drill to practice what would happen if a nuclear device were lost somewhere near the coast. To fortify this theory, people are pointing to the fact that the U.S. is supposedly transferring nukes to the UK and will be moving these types of materials for the first time at this scale. I can’t confirm any of this – no one can. And that’s why everyone is so frustrated. 

Is it a top-secret military operation? A classified training exercise? A legitimate threat? Aliens? Personally, I think if it were aliens, it’s kinda weird they’re using FAA compliant navigational lights, but that’s just me. To me, the classified training exercise makes the most sense. But we need to have a serious discussion about whether or not these things can happen over American cities without causing panic. 

There’s definitely something happening. The drones keep being spotted. Even over additional military bases like Naval Weapons Station Earle and reported by credible people on those installations.

Who knows – maybe by the time this episode comes out on December 16th, America will finally have found out what the drones are doing. But until then, people are talking all about it. 

And then there’s the paranoia and mass hysteria factor. A National Security spokesperson has said many of the reports that are coming in about drones are people who are just seeing normal manned aircraft. But since there’s already been so many stories about the drones, that’s what people are believing they’re seeing. Every social media site is full of claims of drone sightings accompanied by photos and videos of things that are NOT drones. There have been more than 5,000 calls to a national tip line and less than 100 of them have proven to be worthy of further investigation.

And that brings us to the first of our double-digest stories. On February 25, 1942, the sky erupted with gunfire and anti-aircraft rounds. The ground-to-air assault went on for an hour, and the intended target was an invading Japanese air attack. But there was no enemy. The entire thing was a huge false alarm. It became known as the Battle of Los Angeles and it all started in a period of time when tensions were high.

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In the height of the cold war in October of 1962, security cameras at the Duluth Air Defense Center of the Air Force picked up an intruder climbing a fence. It was midnight and no one should have been in that area. The guard on duty shot at the figure and activated the alarm. Bases in the entire region were put on high-alert that a soviet attack may be underway. There was an error with the alerting system and instead of the appropriate alarm for this type of event, a loud klaxon warning blared at every base. This was the sound that told them to scramble the fighter jets carrying nuclear warheads. The fighter pilots ran to their posts, and started their jet engines. But an officer appeared, racing his truck down the runway at the jets. He was flashing his lights and laying on the horn, keeping the jets from taking off. He had reviewed the security footage and investigated the area. The fence of the base DID have an intruder. It was a large black bear. 

There have been several close-calls and false alarms like this throughout history, where the military sprang to action later to find out that there was no enemy attack. This story is about one of these defensive actions that took place in a huge way during World War II. 

It happened on February 25th, 1942 in the city of Los Angeles. Just two days before, President Roosevelt had held his fireside chat with the nation about the progress of the war. In his address, he reassure the American people, but was blunt with them about the scope and seriousness of the war. Pearl Harbor had been attacked just two months prior. And while Americans gathered around their radios listening to their President, something else was happening in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. A Japanese Imperial Submarine, I-17, surfaced and began shooting 5.5” rounds into the Ellwood Oil Facility. Pearl Harbor had shocked the nation, but now the Japanese had began to attack the mainland United States. For 20 minutes, the submarine fired at the coast. Hardly anything was hit. No one was injured, and the damages totaled around $500. But the blow that was struck was a psychological one. The Japanese had seven submarines in the waters off the coast of California. And now the nation would know about it. Fear struck America. 

Cities on the West coast issued black-out orders to their citizens, mandating that all lights be extinguished at night time to prevent the Japanese from air attack. This was taken seriously by most, but not by all. In Seattle, for example, when a few businesses didn’t adhere to the blackout order, a mob of 2,000 citizens showed up to bust out their lights. People in California were scared for what they feared would be a land invasion by the Japanese. The state sent 500 United States Army troops to protect the film industry in Hollywood and nearby factories. 

It was 2:15 in the morning on February 25th when radar detected something in the air 25 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. Air raid sirens were triggered and a mandatory blackout was ordered from LA all the way South to the Mexican border. Panic set in when radar contact with the object was lost. 

The coastal defenses were already on high alert. For the entire day previous, the Office of Naval Intelligence had issued a warning that an attack was expected. Throughout the night, every flare, blinking light and sparkle was reported to the coastal defense. So when thousands of air raid sirens were now blaring, everyone thought – this was it. Mainland USA is under attack. 

Search lights scoured the sky looking for what had been seen on the radar. At 3:16am, the shelling began. The 37th Coast Artillery Brigade started shooting their 50 caliber machine guns into the night sky. This was followed by 12.8 lb anti-aircraft shells. Defensive stations in Inglewood, Santa Monica, and all throughout the Los Angeles area were firing into the sky. One report noted that the “air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.”

Finally, an hour later, the all-clear signal was given and shelling stopped. The American forces had fired 1,440 rounds of ammunition, but had hit nothing. No bombs were dropped. No planes were hit. None were even spotted. The entire thing was a false alarm.

That doesn’t mean the barrage, which came to be known as “The Battle of Los Angeles,” didn’t have tragic consequences. 5 civilians died in the attack. None of them died from the gunfire. 3 were killed in panicked car accidents on blacked out streets and 2 died of heart attacks. Property damage from the falling shell fragments was significant – perhaps worse than the damaged caused by the Japanese submarine the previous week.

There were many reports after the fact that attempted to justify the attack. Some said that there were enemy submarines with the capability to launch airplanes.  We didn’t know it for sure at the time, but this was a technology that Japan possessed and would used it later in the war to attempt an attack on Brookings Oregon. Some said it was a Japanese attack blimp. Others thought that Japan had secured secret air bases in the middle of a California Desert or perhaps in Mexico. Those who are inclined to believe in UFOs claimed that a huge flying saucer appeared in the sky that night. This was fueled by a famous photograph of the incident showing search lights illuminating a patch of sky. When it was retouched for the papers, the convergence of light appears to look like a floating blob being fired upon.

Paranoia was at an all-time high, and sadly, this is indicated by the internment of more than 110,000 Japanese American citizens in camps that followed shortly after. It’s understandable to imagine the fear that citizens were feeling at the time. But history is the judge of whether or not their ensuing actions were appropriate. And in the case of the Japanese internment camps, I think just about everyone agrees that it was a huge overstep and to put it simply, wrong. 

After the war, Japan came out and said unequivocally, that they did not launch an air attack on Los Angeles in February of 1942. And we know that because we now know the truth of what happened that night. 

In 1983 the Office of Air Force History released the official report of what occurred to set off the radar. It was never a Japanese airplane. The simple story is this. It was a weather balloon. The Internet Says the Government Says it’s True.

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The other story that I was reminded of was the purported mass hysteria that was caused by the War of the Worlds radio broadcast. This is a parallel that many have been making in the news. Now what I found out about this story was a surprise.

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It was the evening of October 30th, 1938 and Orson Welles had walked into the Columbia Broadcasting Building on Madison Avenue knowing it was going to be an interesting evening broadcast. He was scheduled to present the regular series “Mercury Theatre on the Air,” a weekly hour-long broadcast.

He had been inspired by a radio play he acted in the year before called “The Fall of the City.” It was a story about a conquerer that comes back from the dead to rule the city, but it was really an allegory on fascism. It made Orson Welles an overnight sensation in radio, and the style was something that was new. This new fad was taking hold that had been made popular by a radio program called “The March of Time”: the idea of telling a dramatized story as a live radio broadcast.

Welles experimented with the realistic-sounding radio broadcast storytelling format a couple more times the next year with an “As-it-happens” drama called “Air Raid” and a historical piece about Julius Caesar. But what he had planned for the Halloween Special was something bigger – something special and he knew it would be ground-breaking. He discussed the idea of adapting a piece of Sci-Fi for a radio broadcast with producers John Houseman and Paul Stewart and they decided on a 19th century piece of Sci-Fi set in England: H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.”

Howard Koch adapted the H.G. Wells work to a radio format for CBS by modernizing it. He took the setting from the original 19th century England to New Jersey in present day, choosing the tiny un-incorporated community of Grover’s Mill. The plot remained basically the same: Aliens from Mars invading Earth. 

The dramatic piece began with a monologue similar to the novel.

From then, the radio play took the form of an “as-it-happens” news radio program, even playing music and interrupting that music with news bulletins, first reporting scientists have noticed unusual gas explosions on the planet Mars, then getting more serious.

The first two thirds of the program went on like this. To anyone who just tuned in, it would sound like a real news broadcast. There were weather reports and a supposed live broadcast of a musical performance from a local hotel: Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra. In fact, it was Welles’s intention to make these musical interludes last an uncomfortably long amount of time in order to add realism to the live broadcast style. A little bit after talking about the gas explosions on Mars, we hear about a strange meteorite landing.

The broadcast was so realistic, we even go on to hear screams and a moment of dead-air, something that was a huge no-no in the conventional rules of radio.

Eventually in the radio drama, the Martians are attacking and the broadcast focuses on the military units that are trying and failing. Then the broadcast turns to a supposed reporter on the roof of a building in Manhattan watching giant alien machines attack the city. The drama intensifies and then we hear the reporter become desperate.

There are a few moments of silence and then we get the first indication since the program began that this isn’t real. “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air, in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”

There were only 4 instances throughout the entire broadcast to let listeners know it wasn’t real. The opening, before and after the middle commercial break, and at the very end. The commercial break itself was delayed 10 minutes later than usual to increase the realism of the piece. Later that night, three different times, disclaimers were read on the air to reiterate that the piece was merely fiction. 

And the popular story about this broadcast – the reason anyone remembers it from the thousands of other radio plays in history – came about because of the many newspaper headlines that talked about it afterward. Headlines like “RADIO FAKE SCARES NATION,” “FAKE RADIO WAR STIRS TERROR THROUGH U.S.” and a lighted bulletin in Times Square reading “ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC.”

The broadcast had started at 8pm that night. By 8:32pm, the CBS Executive Davidson Taylor was on the phone taking a frantic phone call. Producer John Houseman said he returned to the studio “looking white as a ghost.” He had been ordered by the higher ups at CBS to immediately interrupt the broadcast to announce that it was a dramatic work of fiction. Luckily for Welles and Houseman, there was a scheduled commercial break less than a minute away. That commercial break carried disclaimers about the program before and after.

But as the show continued on, a few policemen entered the room outside the studio. Then a few more. CBS pages and executives stood in front of the police, begging them to just wait. The police wanted to barge into the studio and stop the broadcast immediately. They, of course, weren’t allowed into the room. The program continued.

The final third of the show was a more standard radio drama format without the realism of the news report break-ins and weather bulletins. We learn the rest of the story – that the Aliens have taken New York City and eventually have died of human pathogenic germs.

The broadcast ended with Orson Welles once again telling the listeners that they’ve been listening to a radio play and that it was merely a holiday offering for Halloween.

According to Houseman, the next few hours were crazy. Here’s a quote from his 1980 memoir: “The building was suddenly full of people and dark-blue uniforms. Hustled out of the studio, we were locked into a small back office on another floor. Here we sat incommunicado while network employees were busily collecting, destroying, or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast.”

They apparently fielded a call from a small-town mayor who complained that his citizens were rioting in the streets.

One of the reasons that is often given for the panic is that people were listening to another program on the radio, and switched to The War of the Worlds after the opening disclaimer. Another reason for the panic that’s cited is that radio broadcasts for weeks had been updating America on the growing war between Germany and Czechoslovakia, so people were already on edge. They were used to hearing important news bulletins interrupting radio shows.

The newspaper headlines followed and the rest became a lasting legacy. Most people today know the story about how this radio broadcast sent Americans into a panic. But there are more than a couple reasons to doubt that it actually caused any sort of widespread panic. Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist who is an expert on mass panic outbreaks, has said that “there’s a growing consensus among sociologists that the extent of the panic was greatly exaggerated.”

First, there simply weren’t enough people listening. One of the pieces of evidence of panic is this treasure trove of 2,000 letters mailed to CBS and Orson Welles complaining about the broadcast. But when they were scrutinized, only about 27% of those letters came from people who were listening. It was originally reported that 12 million – or 1 out of 12 homes were listening to The War of the Worlds. But a survey was actually conducted that night during the broadcast. They had a sample size of only 5,000. But out of that 5,000, only 2% said they were listening to it. After all, it was up against the most popular radio show of the time, Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour Variety Show. Mercury Theater on the Air had horrible ratings.

Another survey which was conducted later at Princeton estimated the real number listening was closer to 6 million. When those people were asked if they were “frightened or disturbed” by the show. 1.2 million said they were. But there’s sort of inherent problem with that question. In that era, radio had the power to move people. It had the ability to shock, to frighten and disturb. It would be like asking you about the scariest movie you’ve ever seen and ask if it frightened or disturbed you.

So this brings us to what is the most likely reason for the overblowing of the panic. Newspapers. Newspapers, whose existence was threatened by social media, and before that by online news, and before that by television news, were threatened by radio. It was in their best interest to get the public to have a healthy distrust of what they hear on the radio. So these many newspapers stories talking about the mass chaos and public panic caused by the broadcast could have had a motive, whether conscious or unconscious, of telling the public – “look at this new medium and take it with a grain of salt, because unlike a trusty newspaper, the radio can mislead the public!” Take the New York Times, for instance, who said “Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses.”

So while the cultural lore about The War of the Worlds is one of groundbreaking realism and a story about not trusting everything you hear, the truth is probably a story that gives much more credit to the public at large. And proving that nothing is new under the sun, and proving history always repeats itself, the same thing happens today on Social Media. Celebrity death hoaxes are a weekly occurrence on Twitter. Fake News gets spread on Facebook by people who don’t take the time to find out whether or not it’s a true story. And certain news stations don’t cover major news events because of their own political interests. So in that way, what Orson Welles was doing really was groundbreaking. It was one of the first instances of nationwide trolling.

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