It’s just a classic mass hysteria. It’s the same exact psychosocial dynamic that led to witch trials in previous eras.

Someone sees something strange in the sky, or one person flies an actual drone and someone sees it. Suddenly people start looking at the sky. People who have no experience in astronomy or sky watching, people who have no idea how cameras or lenses work, they all start looking up. They don’t know how their own tools work, so they try to take pictures of things their equipment isn’t capable of, and they produce weird-looking blurry images that appear otherworldly. A blurry light of a plane’s navigation lights now becomes an “interdimensional plasma vortex” or some other bullshit. They post these, and even more people start looking up. People don’t understand that astronomers have struggled for centuries with the problem of judging the size and distance of distant points of light. Even pilots naively think their training helps them magically overcome a core problem of observational astronomy. Soon you have people thinking there are UFOs flying around at Mach 100 and turning with an acceleration of thousands of g’s, all because they don’t realize how hard it is to judge the distance to pinpricks of light against a uniform background.

It’s literally witch hunt thinking. In past times, something weird would happen. A animal would get a rare disease and die. A child of an influential figure in town would get sick. Someone would suggest a witch might have done it. Suddenly people start thinking about witches, and they see signs of witchcraft everywhere. This grows until women are getting burned at the stake.

Thankfully at least our present version of this witch hunt mentality is being directed in a way that is unlikely to directly harm anyone. The recent panic is wasting government resources and the time of government officials, but thankfully it’s unlikely to end up with anyone being burned at the stake. Still, it is really depressing as an illustration of the state of our culture and communications systems. We’re literally falling for the exact same mental failings that our peasant ancestors centuries ago did. We think we’re smarter than them. But all our increased literacy rates and advanced technology have done is made it easier to spread these panics on a grand scale.