It must be a slow news month. That's the obvious explanation. But then "obvious explanations" aren't exactly newsworthy, or maybe just not entertaining enough, perhaps. It's much more fun to present all kinds of wild theories, isn't it? Which, again, is the obvious explanation for why the mainstream media keeps (pun definitely intended) droning on and on.

The story began last month in New Jersey, which was rather famously the setting for the Orson Welles 1938 radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic The War Of The Worlds. Alien spaceships had landed in the Garden State, and mankind was only saved in the end by the seasonal flu. A great story, a chilling adaptation of it, and a whole lot of people totally freaked out when they heard it (many of whom missed the introduction where it was explained that this was a fictional broadcast). It probably didn't help that it aired on Hallowe'en.

In any case, almost nine decades later, a swarm of people began reporting unusual drone activity in the skies over New Jersey. Cellphone videos were posted to social media. And then the national media picked up the story and ran with it.

Which still hasn't abated, astonishingly enough, even though there really isn't much new to say about what's going on other than: "Nobody really knows what's going on." You'd think that would mean the story would eventually die down on its own as the media moved on to some other distraction, but this one seems to have some staying power.

As I said, it must be a slow month for news.

Now look -- I hate to be a spoilsport and rain all over everyone's drone excitement, I really do. I'd love to hear solid evidence that aliens are visiting humanity and that we're not alone in the universe, but somehow don't really expect this outburst of hysteria is apt to produce such a thing.

Think hysteria is too strong a word? Well, we've already had one Republican member of Congress state that he thinks there's an "Iranian mothership" somewhere off the coast launching drones at American soil. He appears to be basing this suspicion on... well... nothing more than his overactive imagination.

Panics about lights or objects in the sky are nothing new, of course. The flying saucer craze of the 1950s came and went, and pop culture sometimes revives the subject (and the reports of such objects) every so often (in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and E.T. had a big impact). Once the idea of unidentified flying objects (or as the military likes to now call them, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena") is planted in the public's consciousness, everyone starts looking up and every light in the sky is suspect.

That's not to say that something weird may be happening, of course. But the more-mundane explanation is that some drone activity (probably totally benign) in New Jersey was noticed by some people, they reported it (and/or took videos of it), and then the whole thing took on a life of its own. Whatever the original explanation was, what almost certainly happened next were two parallel things: (1) more people started looking up, and: (2) more people decided it was a dandy time to take their drone out for a jaunt, just to feed the panic and join in on the fun.

As with any eyewitness reports -- especially of objects in the sky -- much of it is likely explained by routine activity. A whole bunch of the drone sightings seem to have occurred on the flight paths to landing at nearby airports -- where you'd expect to see low-flying objects, even at night. Planes and helicopters have flashing lights on them, after all, and judging distance and size when observing from the ground is a tough thing for anyone without training to accurately do.

And then there's human nature. How many teenagers decided to freak their town out by flying their hobby drones at night? The answer to that is unknown, but I'd bet the farm it isn't "zero." Or how many mischief-minded adults decided to do the same thing? The copycat aspect is probably a powerful motivator, especially seeing as how the drone sightings quickly spread and have now been reported as far away as western Ohio. How many of these folks filmed their own drones and then uploaded the video to social media to get in on the fun?

We're now in full-blown panic mode over the whole thing. Government officials have even suggested that maybe shooting these objects down might be the solution. How long is it going to take before some trigger-happy sheriff's deputy starts blasting away at one? On the national level, politicians are either clamoring for answers or claiming the government already knows full well what is going on. This has now risen to the level of both Donald Trump and the sitting president commenting on the subject.

The more-likely answer is that the government and the military don't really have a clear picture of what is going on out there. For the most part, drones are not tracked by radar, since most of them are too small and fly too low and slow to be detected (radar systems also routinely ignore "blips" that mostly turn out to be birds or flocks of birds). Even if the public thinks it'd be an easy job to track every object in the skies (due to watching science-fiction shows where all it takes is a flick of a switch to get real-time satellite imagery of just about anything anywhere), it really isn't all that easy to do.

The media has gone along for the ride, so to speak. They've been hyping the story far beyond its actual news value -- most breathless updates now are of the "nobody really knows" type of commentary, with lots of hints of what it could be... maybe. In other words, most of the news coverage has been pure fact-free sensationalism, nothing more. Which we'll probably get some more of tonight, since President Joe Biden actually made an offhand comment or two about the whole frenzy.

I do realize it's a lot more fun to ignore Occam's razor and wildly speculate. Flying saucer crazes are cyclic -- there's always going to be another one sooner or later. As long as everyone doesn't get all trigger-happy out there, it's all mostly harmless good fun. Sooner or later, the media will get bored with the whole story and move on, and people will calm down a bit and come back out of panic mode.

Either that, or aliens will land on the National Mall and emerge to reveal themselves to humankind, of course. Hey, it could happen... right?

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant