Something mysterious has been going down in New Jersey this week…but it’s NOT drones. It’s that thousands of people are looking at airplanes in the night sky and thinking they see UFOs. What causes mass delusions like this wave of now mostly debunked drone sightings? In this concluding episode of How We Got Here, Max and Erin share four stories of famous mass hysterias and talk to William Bernstein, an author who writes about the science of mass delusions and why they happen.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Max Fisher: Erin, there’s something that’s been bugging me about the nighttime drone sightings popping up all over New Jersey this past week. 

 

Erin Ryan: Is it that nobody has brought up the fact that they could be viral marketing for the Aaron Rodgers documentary on Netflix? 

 

Max Fisher: So the mystery here isn’t what’s up in the skies. We know what’s up there. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, it’s it’s airplanes. 

 

Right. 

 

Max Fisher: By and large, nearly every viral video supposedly showing a drone swarm or a UFO has turned out to be just a normal passenger plane with its landing lights on. 

 

Erin Ryan: It’s odd because it’s not like this is happening in some remote corner of the Amazon where people have never seen overhead flights before. It’s New Jersey. Airplanes are practically the state bird. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. That is what’s so strange to me about so many people mistaking those planes for UFO drones. Like, let me play you this clip from a report by the Network News Nation. 

 

[clip of unidentified speaker 1] One, two, three, four. At least five lights. Six lights. 

 

[clip of Network News Nation reporter] I didn’t believe what I was seeing. But what was I seeing? We’re here in central Jersey. We’ve been looking for the past hour. I think we’ve seen about 40 or 50 of these drones. In fact, there’s one over my shoulder right there, one after another after another. These drones appeared in the night sky. If you look real close, they look like fixed wing aircraft about eight to ten ft wide, colorful, light blinking lights. 

 

[clip of unidentified speaker 2] That is not a plane. 

 

[clip of Network News Nation reporter] Definitely not an airplane. But what was it? 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. So for listeners, I cannot overstate the degree to which the footage in this report is definitely of an airplane. 

 

Erin Ryan: It’s not even blurry. That is the most normal video of an airplane taking off I have ever seen. What is he talking about? 

 

Max Fisher: So this is what I mean. There was a mysterious mass event in New Jersey this week, but it’s not drones or UFOs. It’s that one day, all of a sudden, thousands and thousands of people all looked up at airplanes in the night sky, a sight they’d seen countless times before and collectively had their brains tell them that those airplanes were UFOs. What? [music break] I’m Max Fisher. 

 

Erin Ryan: I’m Erin Ryan and this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week’s headlines and tell a story that answers that question. 

 

Max Fisher: Our question this week what causes mass delusions like the wave of now mostly debunked drone and UFO sightings around New Jersey? 

 

Erin Ryan: Before we get into it, though, a couple of quick notes. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. On last week’s show about Syria, we opened with a clip of a CNN reporter stumbling onto a man hiding in one of the country’s secret prisons. CNN now says it believes that man is a former military official and not, as he claimed, a freed political prisoner. 

 

Erin Ryan: And speaking of freed political prisoners, [laughter] just kidding. This will be the last episode of How We Got Here. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. Thank you to everyone who listened, wrote in or shared an episode with a friend. We hope you enjoyed the show as much as we enjoyed making it. 

 

Erin Ryan: You can still catch me every week on Hysteria and catch Max on Offline and look out for more from both of us next year. 

 

Max Fisher: Shout out to Emma Illick-Frank, the show’s producer, and to Evan Sutton, its audio engineer who made this show what it is. What a Day’s weekday episodes with Jane Coaston will continue as usual. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, so that’s out of the way. Should we get into it? 

 

Max Fisher: Yes. This week, we’re going to tell you four stories of famous mass delusions. We’ll also talk to the author of a book on the science of mass delusions about why and how they happen. 

 

Erin Ryan: Excited to learn about why my brain is so bad at braining. 

 

Max Fisher: That is a big takeaway. Yeah. You don’t have to be some kind of dummy to get swept up in one of these. They happen to smart, well-informed people all the time. 

 

Erin Ryan: Here’s a clip from one incident that helped trigger what’s still to this day, one of the largest mass delusions in American history. See if you can place it. 

 

[clip of 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds] A humped shape is rising out of the pit and they may got a small beam of light against a mirror. What’s that? There’s a jet of flames [?] in that mirror. And at least [?] men. He strikes him head on. Oh to tell you the flames. [someone screaming in agony] [?] to the automobiles. Spreading everywhere. Coming this way now about 20 yards to my right.

 

[clip of 1938 radio braodcaster] Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grover’s Mill. 

 

Erin Ryan: When did we stop talking like this as broadcasters, I have to say Max that one of the things we never got to do on How We Got Here was do an entire episode in North Atlantic accent. 

 

Max Fisher: In a mid Atlantic.

 

Erin Ryan: From the mid-century. 

 

Max Fisher: I’m challenging you to do the rest of this episode in a mid-Atlantic. 

 

Erin Ryan: That was from, no, that was from the 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds, which was recorded to sound like a news broadcast reporting on a genuine alien invasion. They got great scream footage. 

 

Max Fisher: They did. And it fooled a lot of people, right? Like they thought this was real. 

 

Erin Ryan: And they really acted like it. Emma, our producer, dug up this clip from a documentary that AT&T made interviewing its telephone operators on duty the night of the broadcast. 

 

[clip of AT&T documentary clip of War of the Worlds] The people believed it. They really believed it that night. And I think of the ones who were begging us to get connections to their families, to their husbands, to mothers and fathers before the world came to an end so they could just tell them they loved them. 

 

Max Fisher: Man AT&T produced the hell out of that clip. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, they really did. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay, but does this really qualify as a mass delusion, though? Like, sure, maybe some people got a little credulous about believing a radio report that did air after all, on the day before Halloween. But still, that’s not the same as straight up imagining something. 

 

Erin Ryan: Oh but they did. Here’s a clip of Orson Welles, who directed and narrated the broadcast being interviewed by the BBC about how Americans responded. 

 

[clip of Orson Welles] A lot of people wanted to know what to do. As a matter of fact, they were phoning us from all over the place, some of them reporting that they’d seen Martians landing in their back yards and asking for advice. And there were others that claimed to have been attacked personally by Martians. And the whole experience was extremely intense. 

 

Erin Ryan: So it’s not just that people got tricked into thinking the radio play was real. Something made them believe that they were seeing things that weren’t actually there. 

 

Max Fisher: This is a good place to bring in a conversation I had with a guy named William Bernstein. Bernstein is a financial theorist and former neurologist whose most recent book is titled The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups. Boy, do they. And Bill said that to understand why mass delusions happen, you have to get that we as a species evolved in a way that makes us instinctively imitate the people around us. Here’s Bill. 

 

[clip of William Bernstein] Sometime around ten, 15,000 years ago, humankind colonized the Western Hemisphere, and within about 5000 years, uh various tribes spread from the high Arctic all the way down through North America, Central America into South America, down to the very tip of Tierra del Fuego. So it was this remarkably rapid migration. And along the way, in order to survive, the humans had to learn how to variously uh make igloos and kayaks and hunt bison on the Great Plains uh and fashion uh poison dart guns blow guns in the Amazon. And if you’ve never done any of those things, you’re not going to be able to invent them yourself. All right. So these things got invented and then everybody else basically imitated what they did. And so what it boils down to is that our primary survival skill as a species is the ability to imitate. 

 

Erin Ryan: And my husband made fun of me for getting rid of my skinny jeans. I was like, this is a survival skill. We are wearing. We are wearing wider legs now. We are. We are evolving fashion.

 

Max Fisher: You’re just clearly more evolved than him. 

 

Erin Ryan: I am. I am surviving as my human ancestors intended. So if this is an allegory for the mass drone delusion in New Jersey than what? People saw a couple of reports of unidentified drones and their fear of a mass drone invasion made their brains hallucinate it out of normal airplane traffic? 

 

Max Fisher: So the instinct to imitate people around us is so strong that it comes out in all sorts of ways and it’s usually unconscious, like yawning. Someone next to you yawns. Suddenly you need to yawn, too, even if you’re not actually tired. Same goes for sneezing. Bill pointed out that we even imitate speech. You move to Georgia. After a while you will start speaking with a Georgia accent. So the thinking is that maybe our perception of reality can work this way too. If we believe that everybody around us sees aliens because we heard them say so on the radio and all of our neighbors are behaving like it’s real, then we might trick ourselves into thinking that we saw aliens too. 

 

Erin Ryan: It’s a nice theory, but is there any proof that this can make us really straight up see something that isn’t actually there? 

 

Max Fisher: So Bill writes about this famous experiment first conducted in the 1950s by the psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch would give people a test. A very simple test. He’d show them a card with a line drawn on it. Then he would show them a second card with a few lines on it and then have to pick out the line on the second card that matched the line on the first card. 

 

Erin Ryan: So matching shapes sounds pretty easy. 

 

Max Fisher: That was the idea. Here’s Bill. 

 

[clip of William Bernstein] What he would do is he would ask subjects to perform this test. Well if they just performed the test on their own, they got a 99% accuracy rate. But then what he would do is he would put a subject in a room with what looked like other subjects, five other subjects, four or five other subjects, but they were actually ringers. And they would shout out wrong answers. Okay. Uh. And of course, the error rate of the actual subjects went up dramatically. And the most interesting reactions were the 25% of people who still didn’t make any errors. And they would be asked afterward about the experience. And they said, I thought I was going crazy because everybody else around me thought I was wrong. All right. And to me, that was the most salient result of that study. 

 

Erin Ryan: That actually reminds me of an elementary school Halloween party when I was a kid. There was a game where we had to guess how many jellybeans were in a jar, and the winner got the jar. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: Of jelly beans. And I was looking at the jar, waiting for my turn and thinking like, okay, probably like 100. You know, 110. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure. Yeah yeah.

 

Erin Ryan: Or whatever. Then the girl right in front of me, whose name was Jessica Nelson, I still remember, got to the front of the line and said five. And I was like, it was there were clearly more. Like, I remember my thought process being like, there’s way more than five in there, but I don’t want to be I don’t want to be like a total outlier. So I said that–

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: –there were 12. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. 

 

Erin Ryan: And I obviously didn’t win. 

 

Max Fisher: That’s amazing. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. 

 

Max Fisher: So that really just hearing her say five kind of convinced you maybe it’s 12. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. I was like, maybe yeah, I can’t be that wrong. She’s got to be sort of right. So I guess it’s 12. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. Right. That’s wild to see that so psychologists have a name for this phenomenon. It’s called common knowledge. If you believe that everybody around you thinks something. You become much likelier to believe it, too. And you even start to see physical evidence of that where it doesn’t exist. That is just how powerful our impulse is to conform and imitate. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, so back to the drones. I feel like this explains how someone like that News Nation reporter could drop into New Jersey. Hear all these people say they’re seeing drones and then trick himself into seeing a drone too. 

 

Max Fisher: Mm hmm. 

 

Erin Ryan: Sure. That explains how someone can join in on a mass delusion, but not how the mass delusion gets started in the first place. 

 

Max Fisher: So for that, let’s talk about a more recent mass delusion from just a few years ago known as Havana Syndrome. Here’s an ABC News report summing it up. 

 

[clip of unnamed ABC News reporter] In late 2016, U.S. diplomats and their families at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, started falling ill with symptoms of sudden severe headaches, dizziness, nausea, loss of hearing and more. Soon after, diplomats and other government workers stationed around the world began experiencing similar unexplained symptoms. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. This became a whole thing. Some U.S. officials think that the victims had been targeted by a secret Russian weapon that was literally cooking their brains. 

 

Max Fisher: So at first, people weren’t quite sure what to make of this, because on the one hand, the victims show no evidence of injury. And scientists say that no such weapon exists or could even hypothetically exist without leaving other traces like burn marks. Basically, there’s no evidence of anything beyond 200 or so people suddenly coming down with similar symptoms. But on the other hand, it’s weird that all those people work in overseas U.S. embassies and all came down sick, like around the same time. 

 

Erin Ryan: Unless it’s not weird at all because all the symptoms are psychogenic. 

 

Max Fisher: Psychogenic. What’s that?

 

Erin Ryan: Generated by the brain. Not fake. I’m not saying it’s not real. People experience a psychogenic illness when they think they’ve been exposed to grave threats to their physical health. So for whatever reason, under certain circumstances, their brain makes what they believe really happen to them so that it can produce genuine physical symptoms. 

 

Max Fisher: So that is actually what a number of scientists and doctors increasingly think happened here. A few cases of mystery headaches popped up in Havana for whatever reason. U.S. diplomats around the world came to believe that they were under attack and their brains manifested real symptoms out of that fear. And remembering this all happened as Trump was coming into office and purging U.S. diplomats en masse. So it was a stressful time. 

 

Erin Ryan: So if this is an allegory for the mass drone delusion in New Jersey then, people saw a couple reports of unidentified drones and their fear of mass drone invasion made their brains hallucinate it out of normal air traffic. 

 

Max Fisher: We can actually go back and trace that happening. Yeah. So we don’t know exactly which reports first sparked the panic, but this science journalist named Mick West has been writing for a long time about UFO sightings. And he says there are a couple of reasons that people typically mistake planes for UFOs or drones. First is that people have a notoriously hard time judging how far away airborne objects are, just how our eyes work. When Frisbees were first popularized, people kept mistaking them for flying saucers because they thought it was much further away and therefore much larger than it really was. And West has said that this is why lots and lots of the New Jersey drone sightings describe a car sized drone floating nearby. But then it turns out to actually be a big jumbo jet that’s much farther away. 

 

Erin Ryan: You know what? Also, vision insurance, kind of kind of bad in a lot of cases. I think that this is also a testament to the fact that people–

 

Max Fisher: Get your eyes checked folks. 

 

Erin Ryan: Get your eye, people need glasses. People need contacts. Um. You know, otherwise you’re going to think a Frisbee is a flying saucer. 

 

Max Fisher: And be terrified. 

 

Erin Ryan: Right. But that doesn’t explain why people describe the drones as hovering in the air. Airplanes don’t hover. 

 

Max Fisher: So that is the other trick that your eyes play on you. Planes that are flying at an angle away from you or toward you rather than directly across your field of view can look stationary. This is especially true of planes that are descending for landing when they’re slowing down and might be banking on a wide turn. That from the right angle can make them look like they’re holding in place. And this is what’s happening in some of the earliest viral videos that purported to show the drone invasion that science journalist Mick West went through a bunch of them and showed what was happening and even the specific flights that they corresponded to. 

 

Erin Ryan: Which promptly put everyone at ease and ended the panic? Right?

 

Max Fisher: By then, the drone videos had got shared to all sorts of local Facebook groups and Reddit boards. People read online that their neighbors had been seeing strange drones, so they went out and looked. Probably most of them saw nothing but people who believed they had seen a drone too, posted confirmation back to those groups, which over a few weeks started to feel like consensus. 

 

Erin Ryan: Common knowledge. Everybody knows that the skies are full of unidentified drones. God, what kind of an idiot doesn’t see unidentified drones. 

 

Max Fisher: [laugh] Which of course, cried out for an explanation. Any explanation to fill the void. Enter the grifters and attention seekers like here’s Republican Congressman Jeff Van Drew. 

 

[clip of unnamed ABC news reporter] A New Jersey congressman claims Iran is responsible. 

 

[clip of Congressman Jeff Van Drew] Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones. It’s off the east coast of the United States of America. 

 

[clip of unnamed ABC news reporter] But he’s refusing to reveal sources to back up his claim. 

 

[clip of Congressman Jeff Van Drew] They do work with the Air Force. They do work with national defense. They do work with drones. 

 

[clip of unnamed ABC news reporter] The Pentagon denying any so-called mothership. 

 

[clip of Parliament song] I am the mothership connection. 

 

Erin Ryan: Inshallah, we will elect less gullible members of Congress. 

 

Max Fisher: That clip was from a local ABC affiliate. There is also this guy claiming to be a drone manufacturer who posted this mega viral TikTok saying the drones were hunting for loose nuclear weapons. 

 

[clip of TikTok viral poster] So I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago who was trying to raise an alarm to the highest levels of our government, which they had their ears closed um about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on. He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine. 

 

Max Fisher: That got picked up by Joe Rogan. Who–

 

Erin Ryan: Of course it did. Of course it did. I was just like, I’m waiting. I’m waiting for the Rogan.

 

Max Fisher: The Joe Rogan appearance. 

 

Erin Ryan: You know it’s–

 

Max Fisher: Is unevitable. 

 

Erin Ryan: It’s like um it’s like one of those jack in the boxes where you just turn, you know? It’s like the longer you talk about UFOs, it’s like da da da da da. 

 

Max Fisher: The Joe Rogan gap?

 

Erin Ryan: Up comes the Rogan. Da da da. [laughter] So here we are. Rogan.

 

Max Fisher: Well you were right. And ever since has been sounding the alarm about UFOs to his 30 some million listeners. We won’t subject you to that, but I did enjoy this moment from his most recent interview with a UFO Believer. 

 

[clip of Joe Rogan] Wow. So they say they got a picture of it. 

 

[clip of UFO believer] That’s actually a picture from the pilot in the cockpit. 

 

[clip of Joe Rogan] It looks like a plane. 

 

[clip of UFO believer] Yeah, I have the one for the lady too. It looks the same except from the ground, but–

 

[clip of Joe Rogan] The same end? But doesn’t that look like a plane to you? Doesn’t it look like a plane Jamie? 

 

[clip of unspecified Jamie] Can’t tell. I mean. I don’t know. 

 

[clip of Joe Rogan] Doesn’t that look like the front. Like the nose. I mean, I’m looking at Bigfoot through the woods right now. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah, it’s a plane. 

 

Erin Ryan: Um okay. 

 

Max Fisher: That’s why it looks like a plane. Because it’s a plane. 

 

Erin Ryan: And then there are MAGA and QAnon grifter types like Charlie Kirk and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene making up stories about how the drones are controlled by the U.S. government. And let me just say this. Not to put on my own tinfoil hat, but all of this drone coverage comes on the heels of a moment of what felt like a lot of class solidarity in the US uh after the United Health care CEO was killed. There was a discussion about the divide between rich and poor that united people across the political spectrum against the rich. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. 

 

Erin Ryan: And now we’re talking about drones. 

 

Max Fisher: They don’t want you talking about health care. 

 

Erin Ryan: They don’t want you talking about health care. The mothership is the–

 

Max Fisher: Capitalism. 

 

Erin Ryan: Is capitalism. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. Well, that’s interesting. So– [laughter]

 

Erin Ryan: Prove me wrong.

 

Max Fisher: It’s a theory, and we love that. So what’s important here isn’t necessarily the content of the narratives around the drones, I would say, or even whether people believe them. Just the existence of a narrative, whether it’s UFOs, whatever makes each additional drone sighting more cognitively attractive because your brain has a story to fit it into, which is how you get stuff like this from a different local ABC News affiliate. 

 

[clip of unnamed ABC News reporter 2] You know when things like this are happening, it seems everyone starts to look up like my crew and I have been here in Mendham, recording this video that you’re looking at right now. We have no idea what it is. 

 

Erin Ryan: I’ve seen this uh this video is everywhere. For listeners it looks like a white glowing orb spinning at an impossible speed. 

 

Max Fisher: But we do know what it is. It’s Venus. The cameraman just zoomed way, way in until it got really blurry, which sort of looks like shaking. Anyone with a camera can get the same effect. 

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, calm down Robert Altman. Uh. I also saw Fox News ran a video of a mysterious drone flying at an impossible angle, but it turned out that the video had been taken by the reporter’s daughter, who’d forgotten to explain that she’d held the phone vertically. Fox played it horizontally. And if you flip the video back, it’s clearly just an airplane flying overhead. 

 

Max Fisher: Amazing, amazing. So we are not trying to goof on these reporters, even though they might deserve it. These people were just falling victim to the same mass delusion as everybody else like listen to this CNN report from New Jersey. 

 

Erin Ryan: As you’re hearing this, please know that the images that CNN is playing are of the most normal, everyday videos of airplanes I have ever seen. They are not blurry. They’re not hard to make out. They are literally just airplanes taking off and landing in full view. 

 

[clip of unnamed CNN reporter] What they appear to be are drones, clusters of unidentified drones flying much lower than a plane would. 

 

[clip of unnamed person interviewed by CNN] I think the creepy part is not that it’s just a drone that they’re so large. 

 

[clip of unnamed CNN reporter] In New Jersey’s Ocean County, sheriff’s deputies took their own video of the drones. 

 

Erin Ryan: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, talks like a duck. 

 

Max Fisher: It’s just a duck. 

 

Erin Ryan: It’s a drone. [laughter]

 

Max Fisher: So I think this clip is so telling. Look, I’m sure all of these people are perfectly smart and reasonable in any other context, but mass delusions really are that contagious. It’s how you get an entire production crew talking themselves into broadcasting footage of obvious airplanes that, no offense to them, make them sound delusional. 

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Erin Ryan: Okay, now it’s time to talk about my personal favorite mass panic from 2016. Here’s a CBS News clip. 

 

[clip of unnamed CBS news reporter] Many have turned out to be hoaxes. Others more serious as threats on social media. We’re talking about the wave of creepy clown sightings across the United States. 

 

[clip of unnamed CBS news reporter 2] Going back to late August. There have been dozens of reports of threatening clowns, largely centered around schools and colleges. Many have been dismissed by law enforcement as pranks, but more than a dozen people have been arrested in connection with the sightings. 

 

Max Fisher: I remember this, but I never actually caught up on it. Were the clown sightings real or was it just all made up? 

 

Erin Ryan: It seems like it was mostly delusion. The first spooky clown sighting turned out to be a viral marketing stunt for a horror film, which got to hand it to him. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure it worked.

 

Erin Ryan: Pretty good. 

 

Max Fisher: Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: Then people started spotting more spooky clowns, mostly at night. Oof, don’t like a night clown. The vast majority of these never got confirmed, but they did get reported, which triggered more sightings. It snowballed until people convinced themselves the clowns were attacking kids at bus stops across America. 

 

Max Fisher: I mean, that does sound scary. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, but a lot of the supposed clown related arrests, which people took as police confirmation of the clown threat, turned out to be misreported. Do you remember the clown murder from that year? 

 

Max Fisher: As in a person in a clown costume killed someone? 

 

Erin Ryan: Well, that was how it got reported. But it turned out that the victim was a 16 year old kid wearing a clown mask. 

 

Max Fisher: Oof. Okay. That is darkly ironic. People got so worked up about the supposed threat from clowns that those fear stricken people became the actual real threat. 

 

Erin Ryan: It got so bad that actual normal clowns talked about not being able to work. Here’s an interview from a local ABC affiliate. 

 

[clip of unnamed ABC News reporter 3] The women say the most frustrating thing about the hysteria is that it tarnishes the image of professional clowns, which affects business. They wanted to speak out in hopes of suppressing the fear. 

 

[clip of local clown interviewed] It’s not fair to the clowns that are trying to make a living or the clowns that are trying to volunteer at different events. You know, when people are scared. We have to back off from them. 

 

[clip of unnamed ABC News reporter 3] Reporting in Benita, Candace Crown ten News. 

 

[clip of unnamed person] I’ll take grandma hugs and [?] her any day. 

 

Erin Ryan: You know what, I just want to say, remember a few years ago and it was like, learn to code if you don’t get a whatever. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: I feel like if you’re a clown, just learn to Spider-Man. There’s there is not that much of a difference between a clown and a Spider-Man. 

 

Max Fisher: Uh huh. 

 

Erin Ryan: Except Spider-Man’s not always making those faces. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. 

 

Erin Ryan: You know you get to wear a full mask. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: But kids love Spiderman. 

 

Max Fisher: It’s true. 

 

Erin Ryan: So. 

 

Max Fisher: They’re not as scary. 

 

Erin Ryan: Transition your clowning skills to another costumed entertainer. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. 

 

Erin Ryan: That’s all I have to say.

 

Max Fisher: It’s good advice. 

 

Erin Ryan: Thank you. 

 

Max Fisher: There’s a lot of good advice on this show for people. Um.

 

Erin Ryan: Thank you. 

 

Max Fisher: Well, I mean, my takeaway here is that it is wild how something so laughably fake is a nationwide evil clown uprising can, if it gets reported enough, spread on the rumor mill enough terrify people so thoroughly that they get violent? 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. And that brings us to our fourth and final story of mass delusion. The most famous of them all, at least in the U.S., the Salem Witch Trials. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh. This is actually kind of a shameful gap in my history knowledge. Erin, can you fill us in? 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. So quick and dirty. Between 1692 and 1693, more than 200 people in colonial Massachusetts were accused of witchcraft. Most of them were in and around Salem. The evidence presented during the trials was spectral evidence. So it was stuff that was only being experienced by the accusers that no one else could see. 

 

Max Fisher: Wow. 

 

Erin Ryan: 30 people were eventually found guilty. 19 people were hanged. One man was crushed to death and five died in jail. 

 

Max Fisher: So the mass delusion element here was people. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. 

 

Max Fisher: Experiencing the quote unquote, “spectral evidence” of a thing that was not actually happening, because as they were hearing more stories about witchcraft, they started to experience [?] themselves. 

 

Erin Ryan: Right well and then in the years later, many of the accusers, who were mostly teenage girls, admitted that they’d faked being hexed. So the spectral evidence that they were presenting in the trials. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh I see. 

 

Erin Ryan: Was being faked. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. 

 

Erin Ryan: It was a real whoopsie of justice. 

 

Max Fisher: [laugh] What you really see over and over in these incidents how once some community reaches a critical mass of buy in to the delusion, people start genuinely believing that they are seeing or hearing things that just aren’t there. 

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, and what’s really interesting about the witch trials is that there was relevant backdrop at this at the time, there was a lot of property disputes in Salem. There were kind of a tug of war happening between like churches and individual people and the first girls to have fits allegedly at the hands of witches were the daughter and niece of the village reverend, um which is convenient since the church was involved in so many feuds over property and and church rights. 

 

Max Fisher: Oh I see. 

 

Erin Ryan: And the trials kind of allowed all of this wacky, faith based evidence to be used against the accused. And and really was a good example of why, like, religion should not be driving the justice system. 

 

Max Fisher: Right. And that, I can see how that would help to trigger the mass delusion–

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah. 

 

Max Fisher: –aspect of it, too. So this is a good segue back to the drones. Um. A big, big part of what has allowed the delusion to spread despite all the evidence that these were obviously airplanes is how much buy in there has been from sometimes quite prominent elected officials. 

 

Erin Ryan: Like Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, who claimed to have, quote, “personally witnessed and videoed what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence.” But his video turned out to show the constellation Orion. 

 

Max Fisher: Yup. 

 

Erin Ryan: Sorry, Governor, those are stars, not drones. Oh my God. Everyone needs to go outside. 

 

Max Fisher: I know. There was also New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, who also posted a video claiming to show drones. And he later conceded those were actually just airplanes and he’d gotten fooled. 

 

Erin Ryan: At least he admitted he’d gotten fooled. 

 

Max Fisher: He did, good for him. 

 

Erin Ryan: Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano posted a photo supposedly of a downed drone, implying it belonged to a hostile foreign country. Except it was a Star Wars prop. 

 

Max Fisher: Whoopsie doodle. Uh. Then you got the many officials, including Trump, demanding authority for police to shoot down the drones, which, remember, most of those drones are, in fact, passenger airliners. Here’s New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith promising legislation to for some reason encourage cops to take pot shots at your next flight into Newark. 

 

[clip of Congressman Chris Smith] Sheriff Golden wrote me a few days ago requesting legislation to empower the state police to seriously protect at risk persons and infrastructure and, if necessary, bring down a dangerous drone or drones. I am now drafting that bill and will soon introduce it. 

 

Erin Ryan: What a fun thing to hear in the middle of holiday travel. 

 

Max Fisher: So in fairness, lots of authorities like the State Department, Defense Department, House Intel Committee and so on are all trying very hard to convince people there is no drone invasion, there aren’t a UFO, this is just normal airplane traffic getting distorted into an unwarranted panic. But people really don’t want to hear it. There’s a lot of resistance to being corrected. 

 

Erin Ryan: Which is maybe why it’s the elected officials who are stoking the conspiracies rather than dispelling them. 

 

Max Fisher: Mm hmm. Sort of like in Salem. Right. People will reward you for validating their mass delusion and punish you for challenging it. I asked Bill Bernstein, the guy who wrote that book on mass delusions, why that is?

 

[clip of William Bernstein] When you present someone who has a definite view of a given subject with this confirmatory evidence, uh most of the time they will ignore that evidence. That’s what confirmation bias [?]. Confirmation bias, most of the time it’s not about confirming what you believe. What it really is about is ignoring contrary or disconfirming uh evidence. And then, you know, there’s something which is very controversial among neuropsychologists, which is the boomerang effect, which is there are a fair amount of data that suggests that when you present people with this confirmatory data, it actually hardens their their views. 

 

Max Fisher: Bill said that there are a few reasons that we might be getting more prone to mass delusions. There’s social media, rising distrust of institutions, worsening social fragmentation. But he emphasized that this goes back basically as far as recorded history. He raised many, many more examples, some from centuries ago, some present day. You can read his book for more, but here’s his big takeaway. 

 

[clip of William Bernstein] Your friends see drones. You start seeing drones because you’re an imitative creature. There’s nothing unusual about it. I mean, this is this is behavior that’s hardwired into all human beings. And we’ve been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years and we’ll probably uh continue to exhibit this behavior, you know, until we blow ourselves up. 

 

Erin Ryan: Well let’s hope that’s not anytime soon, though. I suppose it depends on how far Trump takes his suggestion that we start shooting at anything we think might be a drone. 

 

Max Fisher: I asked Bill how he thought the drones thing would play out based on past delusions. His answer was pretty simple. He said probably everyone would just quietly move on pretty soon and just never, ever admit that they had been wrong. 

 

Erin Ryan: You know, we’re having a good time with this drones episode. 

 

Max Fisher: We are. 

 

Erin Ryan: This mass delusions episode. But I do think that there is something wider and more sinister that we need to talk about when we talk about mass delusions. And I think it goes along with some of the work that you’ve done in the past, Max, which is the role that mass delusions play in spreading disinformation. 

 

Max Fisher: Sure. 

 

Erin Ryan: And misinformation. 

 

Yeah. 

 

Erin Ryan: Any time people fall for something like a QAnon or something, a deliberate seed of disinfo or mis info, it is an attempt to kind of start the ball rolling on a mass delusion in a in a way. When we talk about mass delusions like this, sometimes what it does is it shuts down conversations around like other things. Like I, um I was recently on a walk before the New Jersey drones thing even happened, and I actually saw a drone. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. 

 

Erin Ryan: In Los Angeles. But I don’t know. I think it was a police drone. 

 

Max Fisher: Are you sure it was a drone? 

 

Erin Ryan: I’m positive it was a drone. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. 

 

Erin Ryan: I was walking down the sidewalk. Another woman was walking like the other way. And we saw this drone hovering over a building at a nearby college. And she looked at me and she goes, that was a drone, right? And I was like, yeah, that was a drone. And she goes, I’m not crazy. And I was like, No, I don’t think so. But now I’m like, am I? So that’s my concluding thought. 

 

Max Fisher: Okay. [laughter] Well, Erin, perfect way to go out. 

 

Erin Ryan: Thank you. 

 

Max Fisher: On our last episode. Um.

 

Erin Ryan: Thank you thank you so much. 

 

Max Fisher: I cannot tell you what a pleasure it’s been to uh write and host this show with you. And I understand you have one final clip to play us out. 

 

Erin Ryan: Oh. Yeah. It’s got everything. New Jersey, Journey, and uh it implores you to continue believing. 

 

Max Fisher: Beautiful. [music break]. [clip of Don’t Stop Beliving by Journey plays] [music break]

 

Max Fisher: How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher and Erin Ryan. 

 

Erin Ryan: Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank.

 

Max Fisher: Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. 

 

Erin Ryan: Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show, audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landes and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

 

Max Fisher: Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adriene Hill. [music break]

 

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