This conversation has been edited for length and clarity

Clayton:  Let's talk about the possibility that all, or most, of these sightings are just mass hysteria. Is that a possibility?

Combs: I think it's a possibility that many of them are. This is the type of thing that tends to happen when you have a lot of publicity and attention drawn to something that's up in the sky that's maybe unidentified. You have a lot of non-experts that are now just citing reports of regular commercial aircraft on approach to an airport, or just regular, commonplace drones or piloted aircraft, and citing those as drones or UAPs or foreign adversaries or something like that.

So, the vast majority of these, I think, are just confused and uninformed members of the public that are a little bit scared because of what they've been hearing on the news, and people who probably don't normally look up in the sky for things in the first place. And so, they're not used to identifying these things. If you see blinking red and green lights on one of these objects, that's a really good chance it's just a regular drone or airplane. So, I do encourage a lot of caution about seeing what you may consider to be an unknown object up in the sky.

Clayton: What about actual incursions of foreign drones? Is that a thing?

Combs: There's a really interesting article back from 2021 in a publication called The War Zone that a guy named Tyler Rogoway wrote where they laid out a case for a lot of the UFO and what they now call UAP sightings actually were probably foreign drones and balloons. This is something that our fighter pilots and our Navy have probably been dealing with for some time, and they've noticed some strange things around the coast that's naturally something that people wouldn't want to be publicized too much, and so there is some precedent for this. It's a very cheap technology. It's an easy way for somebody to get some intelligence.