There is one big mystery behind the 'drones' story—why is it a story?

For more than a week, the media has been overrun with stories about drones. First it was drones in the nighttime skies over New Jersey. Then it was more drones in other Northeastern states. Now it seems to be full-bore hysteria in which people are demanding the White House provide answers and every member of Congress seems to be standing in front of a microphone to fume over this big Sky Mystery.

And the only answer seems to be — WTF are you all talking about?

Drones are available everywhere. They sell them at Costco. They sell them at Walmart. You can pick one up cheaper than the latest Barbie Dream House, steer it with nothing more than your phone, and fly it with zero training. There are over a million drones in the U.S. currently licensed by the FAA, but the number of unlicensed drones being operated by kids and hobbyists is certain to be many times that number. They've been one of the most popular Christmas gifts for several years.

In addition, there are drones used for a variety of commercial services — surveying land, measuring traffic, observing construction and mining sites, and generally playing the role that used to be played by guard dogs. Go look at any house listing on a real estate site and you'll find that it almost certainly includes many photographs taken from a drone. Farmers use them to monitor fields and track herds. Hunters use them to spot deer.

Drones are everywhere. How is that everyone is just noticing?

And yes, many people have claimed that these drones are somehow larger, or more menacing, or not behaving like a "normal" drone. But then, people are miserable at discerning the size of flying objects. Just a month before people began complaining about "drones big enough to carry a person" in New Jersey, there were reports of birds "as big as a small aircraft" in Pennsylvania.

There are no yardsticks in the sky. People, especially people who rarely study the sky, are extremely poor and determining how large the thing they're observing may be. That's especially true at night when a six-inch drone hovering at 100' feet can look larger than a jumbo jet at 30,000 feet.

Naturally, the furor over the "mystery drones" is being fed by the usual sources on the right who are encouraging people to start Second Amendment-ing the skies.

Donald Trump has joined in to insist that the military and White House are covering something up. Something so sinister that ... it will be completely forgotten by the time he puts his hand on an available-on-his-website souvenir Bible.

In addition, now that people are looking up, they're spotting everything from stars to planets to planes flying into their local airport. All of which just look like lights to those who rarely tilt their heads back.

There are really only two things of interest about the drone story.

One is how quickly major media outlets are running to embrace a story that's complete nonsense whipped up by social media sites and right-wing conspiracists. More than anything else, it's probably a signal of their willingness to join any scam to prove their loyalty to the new regime.

But the second thing is that, only a few years ago, this whole "lights in the sky over New Jersey" thing would have certainly been a UFO story. An alien story. What the swap from UFOs to drones means isn't clear ... but it's probably a sign that we fear ourselves more than we do aliens.

On that point, at least, the reasoning seems pretty sound.