The growing panic over mysterious drones flooding the skies of the Mid-Atlantic states reminds us that, in the centuries-old hunt for UFOs, humans are often the weakest link.

America faces real national security challenges in the new age of drone warfare. But the drone invasion over New Jersey is not one of them.

As it turns out, just as eyewitnesses often get the details of, say, a car accident wrong, we’re also unreliable about UFO information.

A huge percentage of the “reports” turn out, after investigation, to be about the planet Venus or other astronomical phenomena. People on the ground routinely misjudge distances in the sky, so that they perceive objects miles away as close.

The problem of false reports of UFOs is a big reason why the military and scientists now label these sightings as UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – to point out that many reports of strange sightings may not be “ objects’, but for known or unknown astronomical and atmospheric phenomena.

Even pilots make mistakes. On October 1, 1948, Lt. George Gorman, a World War II veteran and North Dakota Air National Guard pilot, gave chase in his P-51 fighter after spotting a bright light, a UFO in the sky over Fargo. At speeds in excess of 400 miles per hour he engaged in a chase for nearly 30 minutes, with the UFO circling him as it made turns that he himself considered aerodynamically impossible. Finally, he broke off the engagement without ever identifying the enemy.’ “Just as we were about to collide, I guess I got scared,” he told investigators, later adding, “It’s hard to believe your eyes when something without wings just flies off and leaves you still.”

Investigators later determined that Gorman was chasing a weather balloon that was launched about 10 minutes before he spotted it. The balloon was just floating in the night sky, and he was running around it.

J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer and godfather of “ufology,” who for 25 years worked with the Air Force on UFO studies and coined the phrase “close encounters of the third kind,” told a reporter late in his career, “Pilots have been known to make violent maneuvers with their planes when suddenly encountering a very bright meteor they thought was in orbit collision, but which later turned out to be 50 to 100 miles away.”

There’s a reason that people who are serious about studying UAP try to inform people who are obsessed with the existence of UFOs: At a congressional hearing last summer, Ryan Graves – a former Navy aviator who had the his own UAP experiences and now heads an organization called Americans for Safe Aerospace – proposed a more credible alternative to black and white, supposedly revealing, dot photos on the web: special sensor system. Likewise, Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb, one of the leaders in the UAP studies, argues that we need to understand much better what a “normal” sky looks like before trying to determine what is “abnormal.” Loeb said last year: “Trust in data. Human reports are a waste of time.”

I’ve always been fascinated by the self-centeredness of people who characterize so many UFO reports, who instead of assuming the obvious believe that an alien craft traveled thousands of light years into interstellar space to visit Earth and the aliens chose that time on a random Tuesday night to reveal themselves to someone on a dark, rural road or in a suburban yard.

In part, this stems from something fundamental. The question “Are we alone?” is one of the three most basic questions that have fascinated humans since the first fires lit by cavemen, a question that goes hand in hand with “what happens after death?” and “is there a God?” Who wouldn’t want to find an answer to one of the Big Three questions while taking out the trash late at night?

Beyond that, UFOs fascinate us because they refer to a rarefied realm where we can all search the deepest frontiers of knowledge. As a mere human, I cannot add much to the already advanced scientific and mathematical questions of our time: I am not in a position to interpret string theory over a weekend barbecue, nor am I likely to reveal from my garage to humanity the secret of nuclear fusion.

And yet, as the New Jersey drone mystery reminds us, every time one of us looks out the kitchen window, glances at the sky from the backyard, or drives down an empty highway, we may believe that we can to see that bright light that will change everything.

Garrett M. Graff, a leadership columnist for The Washington Post, is a journalist, historian and author of nine books, including “Watergate: A New History,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.