New Jersey

There were and still are the same drones. But yes, absolutely, reports are just a population heat map now with the coincidence of denser populations having more airports and more planes. This is in addition to the regular celestial objects (venus out of focus or literally never identifying Orion's belt on the horizon) and probably a higher incidence of personal hobbyist drone use.

The recent comet was a hell of a breifer on the gen pop's unfamiliarity with the sky. Thousands of pictures of contrail were cited as the comet just in my own little astro bubble. Many accepted that their viewpoint could be "a little off" from the known pictures regarding time, altitude, and rotation. People posted groups of contrails not knowing what they were.

I beleive I saw the drones once. It was before the hysteria. As an amateur astronomer and astrophotography, I've spent a lot of time looking at the night sky. Planes really do look weird 40+ miles out, but assuming it's something logical has always turned out to be correct for me. The one time it went relatively unexplained was sometime over the summer. I was scouting locations for aurora sightings. Somewhere in nearby farm land, I spotted 4 aircraft. They seemed to be relatively low altitude (hard to explain, but I just had that feeling), definitely flew in some kind of line, turned relatively sharply, and had bluish forward lighting - like modern 6500K temperature car headlights. While normal airlines have a mix of yellowish (3800K) incandescent landing lights and 6500K-ish LEDs, these seemed to be more like taxi lights in intensity and sideways reach of the beam. I haven't seen bluish taxi lights. I tried to follow them but I beleive I was on the outer side of a group turnaround, so they faded in visibility and I couldn't find suitable roads to follow them.

Meanwhile, I've gone to a couple local "hotspots" with binoculars and cameras. There's nothing in ordinary there except spooked people questioning every light in the sky. It's a dense metro area. It's almost entirely commercial air traffic. There's a couple small airports and cessnas make some funny paths. People bring drones to these places, too.

The hysteria has drowned out the data.