By Bob Gaydos

Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is watching for his children at his house when something strange is happening in the sky over the Bayonne Bridge. “War of the Worlds,” 2005.

 “We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin. The aliens have returned to New Jersey. … and, apparently, everywhere else.“

   Eighty-six years after Orson Welles created widespread panic with his Halloween radio broadcast of HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds,“ with spacecraft, piloted by non-humans launching attacks all over New Jersey, strange spacecraft are now being seen again, all over the skies of New Jersey. 

    Well, actually, this time they are real, not the center of a well-done radio drama that played on the imagination of listeners. But this time, there are no attacks. That we know of.

     However, the government, which is to say all the agencies responsible for policing and protecting the skies above the United States of America, are acting like this is a radio drama.

    Hear no evil, see no evil. Your eyes aren’t seeing what they’re seeing. Forget those video tapes. These objects, supposedly drones, represent no known threat. There are no foreign actors involved. But we don’t know what they are. Or, if we do, we’re not telling you. Trust us.

     Yeah, folks, it’s the wrong time for that trust us approach. Especially with large drone-like objects that first manifested over New Jersey now showing up in the skies over New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and even on the West Coast.

     For a month now, reports of unusual drone activity have been filling TV news reports with the same basic information: Average citizens see the drones, some take pictures, some take videos, and all wonder what’s going on. They contact public officials, who wonder what’s going on. They contact federal agencies who are supposed to know what’s going on and they tell us don’t worry, there’s no evidence of a threat. Period. Oh, yeah, also don’t shoot at whatever they are because it could be dangerous. So it sounds like they know what’s going on, but don’t want to tell us, which is frustrating, if not scary, or they don’t know what’s going on and don’t want to tell us which is scarier.

     So naturally, conspiracy theories crop up about aliens (most people I talked with felt aliens would be too smart to bother with us). One other theory I found interesting was that it was a “psyops” operation by the government or some group to either divert our attention from some real news (governments around the world are collapsing, the incoming Cabinet nominees are a disaster), or to frighten us into giving the incoming administration more powers to deal with perceived threats. 

  The latter would be accomplished by the likes of Elon, Jeff, and all the other Trump-happy billionaires and their tech savvy minions with their AI, driverless cars, super chips, spaceships and Metasphere. What’s a few big drones?

    Now, as usual, it may turn out to be something more down to earth and troublesome. I heard one of those New Jersey mayors talking on TV about a briefing in which some federal officials said something about radioactive material going missing at Newark Airport. Coincidentally, about a month ago. Nobody knows where it is. Federal government likes to keep track of where this stuff is. If you’re searching, you would start in New Jersey and spread out to New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. After that, wherever the clues lead you. That would include closing down runways at Stewart International Airport in the Hudson Valley for an hour.

    What this would mean is that our government has such mega drones, ready for use for such reconnaissance and search operations. Good to know. Not good to know is that some potentially hazardous material managed to somehow disappear from one of our airports. Maybe that’s what the government really doesn’t want us to know. 

   If that’s the case, I think someone made a bad decision in trying to act as if what we were seeing wasn’t happening. If you tell us what’s going on just maybe someone will have seen or heard something that could help find the stuff you’re looking for. Isn’t that how the FBI works?

   Then all the TV reporters could go back to pretending they’re covering the news.

    Apropos of nothing really, the New Jersey connection with aliens and “War of the Worlds” was repeated in 2005 when Tom Cruise starred in the movie version of the HG Wells novel. It was set in Bayonne, N.J., featuring shots of the beautiful Bayonne Bridge.

     Also, Orson Welles apologized to the nation after he scared the bejezus out of people with his Halloween broadcast. Whatever happens with the radioactive material, if that’s what’s going on, President Biden should do the same. Tell us what you know, Joe. Heck, at this point, aliens would be a welcome relief.

By Bob Gaydos

The lead pre-cog in “Minority Report.”

     Most recent lockdown movie watched was “Minority Report,“ starring Tom Cruise. Talk about synchronicity.

     Cruise plays a police officer in the mid-21st century who is part of a special unit that arrests people for “pre-crimes.“ That is, crimes they were about to commit. Usually, the “pre-crime“ is murder.

     The “pre-crimes“ are predicted by pre-cogs — three drugged human beings floating in a pool of warm water who are wired to a computer system that allows others (the police) to monitor what is going on in the pre-cogs‘ minds. Precognition. The three, one female and two males, can see the future. They predict pre-murder victim and pre-murderer, as well as date and time. Cruise has to figure out where and get there in time to stop the crime and make an arrest, even though no crime has been committed. The pre-cogs are supposed to be infallible. It turns out they’re not. Cruise finds this out when he himself is named as a pre-murderer and has to prove his innocence before any crime is committed. 

       By now, the police in the film have become pre-conditioned to believe in precognition: This is what the precogs say, so it must be true. You did intend to kill this person. You are under arrest for the pre-crime of homicide. It’s kind of like some police today have become preconditioned to believe that if a male is black, he must be guilty of something and is dangerous to boot, so use whatever force is necessary in making an arrest. And the system says it’s justified.

        Just as the pre-cogs’ reputation for accuracy was based on a lie, so the preconditioning of some of today’s real-life police officers is based on generations of lies. George Floyd’s death in the custody of police in Minneapolis is the latest in a dismal series of similar incidents that entered my consciousness in Middletown, N.Y., in 1986. That the country and, in fact, much of the world has risen up to protest Floyd’s death is encouraging, but tragically long overdue.

       I was writing editorials for The Times Herald-Record, the local paper, when Jimmy Lee Bruce, a 20-year-old black man, died in the back of a patrol car near Middletown on Dec. 13, 1986. He and a group of friends from Ellenville, N.Y., had gone to a movie theater in a mall outside Middletown. The group became rowdy. There was drinking involved. Two white, off-duty Middletown police officers, acting as security guards, escorted the group out of the theater. A scuffle ensued. An officer applied a chokehold to Bruce and tossed him in the back of a police car, which had brought two on-duty Town of Wallkill police officers to the scene.

       The police then drove around for 7½ minutes looking for Bruce’s friends. When they returned to the theater, a state trooper, who had also arrived on the scene, shined a flashlight in the back of the patrol car and noticed the young man was not responding to the light. Police rushed him to a nearby hospital, but attempts to revive him failed.

       In my previous experience as a reporter talking to plenty of lawyers I had been told that any district attorney worth his salt could indict a ham sandwich. Apparently this was baloney. A grand jury considering the case ruled that Bruce’s death was an accident because the officers had used a technique – the chokehold (they called it a “sleeper”) — for which they had not been trained and which actually was prohibited by their department.

        There have since been too many similar stories between Bruce and Floyd, including Eric Garner, a victim of a chokehold applied by police on Staten Island in 2015. Excessive force used by a police officer resulting in the death of a black male and, most of the time, no action taken against the officer. You could almost predict it. Preconditioning.

         Following Bruce’s death, I wrote an editorial (later read into The Congressional Record on March 25, 1987 by Rep. Matthew F. McHugh) that said the grand jury that cleared the four police officers had actually indicted a system that had failed to properly train its police in handling such situations and for being slow to investigate the case, “raising suspicions of bigotry.” Would that I had the pre-cogs available to me then.

         The same factors, predictably, applied to the Eric Garner case 18 years later. Precognition? No. Preconditioning. Little had happened in the ensuing years to change the way most police departments recruit, train and discipline police officers. In fact, the situation was worsened by the giveaway of all kinds of military grade weapons to police departments. Without the proper training and handling of civil disturbances, such weapons will be used. And they were.

          So now, in the face of massive demonstrations including in front of the White House where a cowering Donald Trump fled to the bunker in the basement, politicians and police officials are finally recognizing what needed to be done more than 30 years ago: Diversify police recruiting. Weed out applicants with sketchy records. Give recruits more training on how to talk to the public, how to de-escalate tense situations and how to use force properly. Make it their duty to speak out about improper use of force. Get rid of that military hardware. Stop dressing like storm troopers. Become involved in the community. Act swiftly and surely to punish officers who abuse their position. Reestablish justice department review of police departments whose behavior is challenged by the public. Educate all officers on the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly. Make the entire community part of this reconditioning process.

      It’s not impossible, not even difficult. It just needs a unified commitment to doing so. There have been moderately successful efforts in cities across the country to reform police departments in the wake of public outcry over the deaths, usually, of black males at the hands of police. Here in Middletown, police actually joined demonstrators recently in marching peacefully for reform. 

      “Black Lives Matter“ has now made this a national priority. In fact, the House of Representatives and the New York State Legislature have introduced legislation to ban the use of chokeholds by police — 34 years too late for Jimmy Lee Bruce, but perhaps just in time for future generations of black males.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.