The Great Drone Wave

In 1887, a story by famed French science fiction pioneer Jules Verne, titled "Robur the Conqueror" was released in English. The story concerned a wave of sightings of mysterious lights in the night sky and similar phenomenon, which turns out to be the work of aviator Robur and his extraordinary airship called the Albatross. In 1897, with the concept of dirigibles and manned flight burgeoning in the popular imagination, thanks to Verne's story, scores of people began reporting sightings of strange lights, dirigibles and all manner of flying contraptions in the skies over America. This was known as the Great Airship Flap.

Fifty years later, in 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold made the first sighting of UFOs over Mount Rainier in Wahington state and coined the term "flying saucer" to describe these mysterious flying discs. Hollywood took up this idea of mankind encountering alien visitors, in films such as The Man from Planet X, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing from Another World. Thus was inspired the first of the UFO Waves, as reports of daylight discs, nocturnal lights and similar ariel anomalies flooded switchboards and newspaper stories nationwide and around the civilized world. Though chiefly presumed to be aircraft of extraterrestrial origin, it's interesting that these early UFO sightings seem to coincide with the development and proliferation of the first jet aircraft.

Today in Denver, Colorado, air-traffic picked up an unidentified object which was endangering the flight paths of commercial aircraft. The identity of the flying object is still in question but it's believed to have been an errant law-enforcement drone. And so the latest arial technology once again gives rise to controversy and wonder. Welcome, my friends, to the official start of the Great Drone Wave.

Keep watching the skies!