I had just taken a right to cross the Androscoggin River, just beyond the old Worumbo mill in Lisbon Falls, when I saw them. 

Drones, my friend! A whole armada of them, just like the fleet that’s been haunting New Jersey for weeks now. 

The invasion was underway. 

“Contact NORAD at once!” I cried to nobody in particular. “Get them on Defcon 1! Or possibly Defcon 5, I can never remember which is the most severe!” 

The drones — I call them this for lack of a better term — were adorned with a multitude of lights. Some were red, some were blue, some were both red and blue with green lights flashing among them.  

In those early seconds, judging by the number of lights flashing up there in the winter sky, I calculated there must have been at least two dozen unidentified craft moving in on Durham. 

Mark LaFlamme

Halfway across the bridge, my nose smooshed against the windshield in high excitement, I got an even closer view of the invading force. The ships were magnificent!  

Some were adorned with lights arranged in rigid lines, others were more elaborate. Here was a ship with lights in the shape of a house! Here was another formed in a rectangle that almost looked like a doorway! Why, if you looked really close, you could plainly see that one of these “drones” took on the shape of a Christmas tree! 

The illusion fell apart before I reached the end of the bridge. What I’d seen hovering in the sky over Lisbon Falls wasn’t a legion of New Jersey drones, but a rather splendid Christmas display at a house high up on the hill. 

It’s a good thing, too, because NORAD never showed up. If this had been a real drone invasion, Durham and possibly Pownal would have been obliterated. 

A week ago, I was just another guy distantly interested in the ongoing reports of drone swarms down in the Garden State. 

You know what I’m talking about; don’t pretend you haven’t heard of this.

Since late November, thousands of New Jersians have reported swarms of van-sized drones prowling quietly but vividly overhead. There are videos of the drones all over the place. There is wild speculation about what their purpose might be. Turn on the TV at any given hour and you’ll probably see a report on the mystery drones.

The skies along the nation’s eastern shore have been invaded by an unknown force and the official line from our fearless government leaders has been basically disingenuous head-scratching. 

“Gosh,” is the thrust of what they have to say about the matter. “We have no IDEA what those things could be.” 

The FBI? Nope. They have no idea. 

Pentagon? Golly, they’re stymied, too. 

Same with Homeland Security, same with every other government agency to address the matter. Somehow, they manage to keep straight faces as they claim ignorance. 

It’s all very interesting and yet, I only kept one foot in that fray because it was, after all, only happening in New Jersey. The last time I went to Jersey, I busted an ankle outside a seedy bar. I want nothing to do with that place.

And then Friday night came and someone came screeching at me with the developments. 

“Waterboro!” they cried. “The drones have been spotted in Waterboro!” 

Being an investigative journalist, sort of, I took prompt action, mainly by joining the “What’s Up In Waterboro?” Facebook page. 

Sure enough, there were plenty of people in Waterboro ranting about the drones but, by then, drone fever had spread to other parts of the state. 

“They’re everywhere here in Bangor!” a lady named Lisa told me. 

“I saw about 30 of them around my house last night in Sanford,” related a lady named Joyce. 

I was actually in Walmart, talking to a stranger about cat food, when the topic of the drones came up. 

“You ought to check the Oxford Hills Facebook group,” the woman told me, her eyes downright sparkling with excitement. “They’re seeing drones all over the place.” 

Being that shrewd investigative reporter, kind of, I quickly went to join the “Oxford Hills Community Page” where drone reports were said to be coming in one after another. 

Sadly (hint hint) the Oxford Hills Community Page administrator has not approved my request to join so I had to do actual work to come up with the latest in drone hysteria. 

As it happens, there were reports of drone clusters seen in Turner, Poland, Mechanic Falls, Fayette and a handful of other nearby towns. I heard these reports while muttering “please say Lewiston, please say Lewiston” under my bated breath. 

Nope. No Lewiston. The closest I got was the very report that led me to the dark back roads out Lisbon Falls way. 

“We just drove around in Durham,” wrote a lady named Jocelyn, “and saw a whole bunch of drones (I guess) scattered around the sky. Mostly just sort of hovering, moving around a little bit. Different colors on some of them.” 

Jocelyn got to see drones, I got to see a Christmas display. My investigation was not going well at all. 

Over the weekend, I talked to a whole bunch of people about the matter of the drones. I watched breathless YouTube videos and scoured the news for the latest reports. 

Theories about the drone swarms are many. 

Some believe that the whole spectacle is nothing more than a distraction provided by — you guessed it — our own government. One theory suggests that government leaders are so spooked by people uniting behind the recent killing of a health insurance CEO that they threw up a bunch of oversized drones to get folks talking about something else. 

Others believe the appearance of the drones is the start of Project Bluebeam, a super secret plan by global elites to fake an alien invasion — get the population scared enough and they’ll welcome any measures proposed to keep them safe, no matter how many freedoms those measures trample upon.

Still others, including at least one New Jersey politician, insist that the drones were sent by Iran as an act of war. Others say its Russia. A few think the craft in the skies over New Jersey are actually extraterrestrial in origin. 

More prevalent still is the notion that the drones are being used to sniff out radioactive material, from a gas leak or perhaps a dirty bomb, and gubmint leaders aren’t saying so because they don’t want a panic.

Whatever their favorite theory happens to be, the people of Maine, at least, are not convinced at all by claims of ignorance from a government that is legally entitled to use propaganda on its own people. 

“The real story is why are they gaslighting us and telling us they don’t know what is going on,” fumes a former Sabattus man named Matt. “Or are they really so incompetent they have lost control of our airspace and national security?” 

“They can see the hair on a gnat’s butt with a satellite,” offers a fellow named Arthur, “but can’t ID these drones? The government really thinks Americans are that stupid?” 

One of the people I talked to about the drone phenomenon was Toby McAllister, a local musician who started the Unexplained Maine Facebook page in 2021. With around 67,000 members, chatter about the drones has been almost non-stop on the page over the past few weeks. 

McAllister has his own thoughts on the matter of what might be behind this sudden appearance of unidentified aircraft swarming up the East coast. 

“Personally, I feel like it could be anything,” he says. “I think our government knows what they are and what they are doing. The fact that they are playing dumb tells me they don’t want to incite a panic, which leads to some interesting theories. How would the public respond to an invasion? Are they looking for a weapon of mass destruction? Is Project Blue Beam happening? Either way I feel like we are on the precipice of something wild.” 

‘Something wild’ sounds about right to me. Yet as of this writing, I still haven’t seen any of these things with my own eyes and I haven’t heard a single report of a drone fleet in Lewiston. 

That doesn’t stop me from walking out into my cold backyard and looking up every 15 minutes, though. 

The truth is out there, my friends. 

The truth and a whole bunch of crazy lights shaped like Christmas trees. 

Mark LaFlamme is the crime reporter and resident alien watcher for the Sun Journal, and can be reached at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.