Vernor Vinge called it Belief Circles. And in Rainbows End he tells a story of how to get them to stampede in one direction or another to suit anyones agenda. But on the flip side, once you create a herd of domesticated animals (side note: always useful to deeply understand how the process of animal domestication works), Stampedes can start from just one individual getting scared by their own shadow. To keep things from going out of control, the herd manager is then programmed (or "learns"), to get the herd to run in circles. They eventually get tired. And the story ends happily ever after.

Most of the coverage I saw online was from local affiliate stations. A deliberate attempt to alarm the public seems more likely than many of the theories offered.

When the Ukraine war started, there were drone sightings reported near the airport and some energy installations in Stockholm, Sweden. Then there suddenly were tons of sightings, everyone was talking about possible Russian drone operations. Many are still unexplained but a whole bunch turned out to be other things, birds, ambulance aircrafts. I think the consensus now is that there was just a few, non state, drone flights and the rest were just mass hysteria.

Traditional media is also involved, I've overheard Fox News hosts definitively state we're under invasion, blame Biden for it, and explain why Trump will fix it.