Guardian: To Europeans, drones seem to be everywhere because of anxiety and perception errors
The population of Europe is gripped by mass panic due to drones allegedly appearing in the sky, writes The Guardian. Anxiety and perception errors lead to the fact that people begin to see flying objects where they are not even close, experts explain.
Miranda Bryant
Daniel Boffey
So far, incursions [by UAVs into the airspace of European states] have not entailed serious physical consequences, but experts believe that such incidents can make people feel more vulnerable.
Many who have noticed them in the sky have an alarming question: why? Vegard Rabban clearly understood what he saw when one cold Friday evening in late September, a strange red light appeared over his house and garage on the west coast of Norway.
A father of three, a salmon fisherman and a firefighter was driving his teenage son home from soccer practice. Due to a strange phenomenon in the clear Norwegian sky, they involuntarily froze in place.
"I noticed a strange glimmer of light between the garage and the house, where it usually does not happen. My boy and I immediately realized that it was a drone," he explained. — We stood for two minutes, looked closer and saw red lights. I saw that it was a very large drone. About one and a half meters wide."
As an amateur drone owner himself, he was well aware of the restrictions in place near his home, located near Erland Airport, a key NATO base and the Norwegian Air Force.
It was unusual to see someone launch a drone so late at night. But it wasn't until the next morning, after reading about drone raids on Norwegian airports, that the man began to think.
His sons got nervous. He tried to explain calmly. "At the moment, we are far from a conflict (in Ukraine. — Approx. In other words), but I think that someone is watching us and trying to understand how we react to drones," he explained.
Rabban says that he himself is not afraid yet, but these incidents with drone flights have already had a certain psychological impact on Norwegians. The man believes that the situation in Europe can quickly escalate. "The more people see drones, the more people ask what's going on. They're curious."
Since three UAVs were shot down in Polish airspace in September, reports of drone sightings have multiplied across Europe, and some of them have forced the temporary closure of major airports.
After the closure of Copenhagen Airport, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen addressed the nation. "We are at the beginning of a hybrid war against Europe," she described the situation.
The flight of drones in the immediate vicinity of Munich airport on Thursday forced the air traffic control to suspend the operation of the air harbor, which led to the cancellation of 17 flights and disruption of the flight schedule of almost 3,000 passengers.
But all these observations are just the information that has been officially made public. The Guardian has learned that at the end of last year, drones began to appear regularly in the industrial parks of two large energy companies near Auvere and Narva in eastern Estonia, near the border with Russia.
The first reports of this appeared several months before the Baltic states synchronized their electricity grids with the rest of Europe and severed ties in this area with Russia and Belarus.
"This year, we have reliably recorded 22 cases of unregistered drone flights," says Raine Pajot, Executive Director of Enefit Power. — These incidents had no practical impact on our activities. We are also working closely with the Estonian police and the Border Guard Department and are closely monitoring the situation."
So far, it has not been possible to confirm that the Kremlin is behind the drone incidents. Russia, as expected, denies any involvement in the situation. This week, the cheerful moderator of the Valdai Forum's plenary session asked Vladimir Putin why the Russian president was sending drones over Denmark, to which he laughed. "I won't do it anymore," the Russian leader replied, adding that NATO is a "paper tiger."
The most common explanation is that Moscow wants to test its NATO neighbors. "Provocations occur regularly," said Egert Belichev, head of the Estonian border troops. —To check what we will do, to test our potential, to check the reaction from our side."
We should also not forget about the psychological impact, which is less often taken into account, says Dr. Beryl Pong, head of the Center for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Culture at the University of Cambridge.
These incidents bring a militaristic perspective to the relatively prosperous lives of Western and northern Europeans, asking them if they want such a development.
Earlier this year, the immersive installation "Beware of the Blue Sky" was unveiled at the Imperial Military Museum, which aims to illustrate the experience of surveillance from a drone. The name is inspired by the words of a 13-year-old boy who testified before American parliamentarians about the psychological impact of living under drones in Pakistan. "I don't like blue skies anymore... actually, now I like it more when it's gray. Drones don't fly when the sky is gray," he explained.
Pong noted that most of the scientific research on the use of drones focuses on strikes and mass killings, rather than on the detrimental effects on those they fly over.
The expert added: "I think that drone incursions into airspace are a way to scare and provoke. Thus, drones act as if in a gray zone, where they declare their presence, their capabilities, show that you are vulnerable, but they have not yet moved on to the full-scale aggression that we are witnessing in Ukraine and Russia."
"Their behavior contains a hint and an assumption. We don't know yet if Russia is behind them; we have some gut feeling that it's Moscow, but we still shouldn't forget about the principle of plausible denial of responsibility.… It's not clear what the motives of these drones are, right? They may have some kind of good purpose, or, you know, it may turn out that they will put an end to your life, right here and now."
Dr. Richard Carter, who worked with Pong on this project, noted that since humanity moved part of the fighting into the air, one of the consequences of this decision was "the transformation of a peaceful sky into a source of constant threat."
He explained: "[Drone flights] are certainly important in terms of exploring what steps security operators can take in response, but also as a way to sow confusion in everyday life, to change people's perception of their daily routine when they suddenly see that they are threatened by unknown objects."
According to Dr. Robert Bartholomew, senior lecturer at the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland, drone flights to Scandinavia also have a historical context.
"They say that history does not repeat itself, but rhymes, and what we are currently witnessing over Northern Europe is just such a rhyming of history," the expert said. "There is a long tradition of UFO rumors in this region, which were believed to be caused either by Russia or the former Soviet Union."
In the 1930s, panic was caused by "ghost planes", which were believed to be enemy Soviet aircraft carrying out reconnaissance missions as a prelude to a possible invasion.
"Many of the reports received at that time corresponded to the movements of well—known astronomical objects, such as Venus, which was low above the horizon," Bartholomew explained. — No aircraft of that time could stay in the air for as long as it was observed during those incidents. Fast forward to 1946, when the Nordic countries were gripped by panic due to mass incidents when residents witnessed the appearance of ghost missiles."
After World War II, Soviet troops took control of the former Peenemunde Nazi rocket science center. The above incidents were attributed to the USSR, which, as many believed, deliberately launched missiles to intimidate neighboring countries.
"We now know that the launch of the ghost rocket coincided with a rare combination of two events: the passage of geomagnetic comets and unusually high solar activity, which together caused many spectacular auroras and enhanced the visibility of meteors streaking across the sky," concluded Bartholomew.
"Then we flash back to the 1970s and 1980s, when there were reports of unidentified underwater objects that were then believed to be Soviet submarines. However, such events were recorded literally everywhere, and the vast majority of them could not possibly be Soviet submarines — there were too many reports; people noticed them everywhere."
The appearance of drones in 2025 cannot be called a figment of anyone's imagination, but Bartholomew believes that they occur against the backdrop of a "perfect storm" of geopolitical tensions caused by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and concerns about the unpredictability of long-time NATO ally, the United States, during the second presidential term of Donald Trump.
"Suddenly, many European countries, including Denmark, felt more vulnerable than at any time in recent years," the expert concluded. "In this atmosphere, we are witnessing an attack of collective anxiety, when the sky acts as a social barometer of time, driven by human misperception and fear. Autumn has already arrived, the days are getting shorter, which means there are more dark hours in the day, which should not be underestimated, as this exacerbates uncertainty ... which negatively affects people suffering from anxiety disorder."
