LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyOne September night in 2025, the luminous face of Baby Jesus appeared in the sky over the Vatican—clearly, verifiably, witnessed by tens of thousands. It was some two millennia after the Book of Revelation prophesied, in John’s apocalyptic vision, that “he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him.” Soon, the image transfigured into the late Pope Francis. In a spectacle at once holy and cyberpunk, the papal face blazing across the Roman sky was pixelated—composed not of divine light, but of drones.
Accompanying the apparition wasn’t a seraphic choir but two earthbound mortals, hundreds of feet below, singing “Amazing Grace”: the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli and, bejeweled in gold chains and cross pendants, the face-tattooed American Teddy Swims. Later to appear above the basilica was a pointillistic rendering of a colossal Pietà, which soon reassembled into the two outstretched fingers of Michelangelo’s famous fresco. Some members of the crowd packed into St. Peter’s Square for “Grace for the World”—the first concert ever held on this holy ground—wept.
The “Grace for the World” show at the Vatican on September 13, 2025.
The drone show in the Vatican sky was produced by Nova Sky Stories, a company owned by Kimbal Musk, younger brother of Elon (who, in a sense, owns the rest of the sky with his rockets and satellites). One recent afternoon in San Francisco, Kimbal recounted that night to me. “In a world where all the religious people are fighting each other, it was really a powerful message,” he said. Kimbal is the folksier Musk, with his signature cowboy hat and air of a small-town mayor. He found it surreal to be in a WhatsApp thread where Vatican officials and representatives for Pharrell debated artistic direction.
You could say that the unlikely crossover between drones and the papacy has its origins, as these things do, at Burning Man. In 2021, when the event was canceled due to the pandemic, Kimbal convinced longtime burners to join him in Black Rock Desert for an unofficial gathering that became known as the Free Burn. Typically, Burning Man ends with the torching of a massive human-shaped effigy—the eponymous Man—but that year, the US Bureau of Land Management forbade desert-goers from lighting anything on fire.
Present at the Free Burn was Ralph Nauta, a Dutch artist who works with light and technology. Kimbal asked if he could perform a fireless spectacle for the final night, and Nauta obliged. A crowd gathered on the playa as Nauta released a swarm of drones that floated over the earth for a few minutes before snapping into the dotted contour of the Man. The crowd gasped, then roared. The figure slowly raised its arms, turned flame-red, and vanished. “Everyone, including me, we were just in tears, absolute tears,” Kimbal said. “It was one of the most emotionally powerful moments of my life.”
A year later, Kimbal founded Nova Sky Stories; investors in the company’s latest $50 million round included the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who joined the board after witnessing a drone show in 2022 at—where else?—Burning Man. A drone show has transformative properties, Kimbal said: “The cynic in you goes away. It’s like a mainline to the spiritual center.” He told me that Pope Leo, who watched the Vatican show from a nearby apartment, passed him a note afterward. “His words,” Kimbal said, “were that I made Michelangelo proud.”
Kimbal Musk, CEO and cofounder of Nova Sky Stories.
Although robotics researchers and independent artists had been playing with drones for years (Nauta started experimenting back in 2008), the drone show as we know it began in earnest in 2015. That’s when Intel, with 100 drones, set the first Guinness World Record for “Most Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Airborne Simultaneously,” upping the ante for performances to come. In 2017, hundreds of drones were flown as a backdrop to Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, and today they’re summoned by the thousands at theme parks and Netflix premieres. In 2025, the Rose Bowl replaced its long-running July Fourth fireworks show with a drone show, as Napa and Salt Lake City had done in years prior. It’s safe to say that this year’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday will feature more drone shows than ever.
I came to the medium as many do: in enscreened form, on my iPhone’s 6-inch display. In the summer of 2025, Steph Curry was in China, where he witnessed a Godzilla-sized version of himself and a panda do a slo-mo high five over the skyline of Chongqing. “That’s the wildest thing I’ve seen in a while,” Curry told the Daily Mail. “5,000 drones going crazy right now.” As I watched the video on YouTube, I was baffled by contradictory emotions washing over me. My instinct was to shrug off what seemed like a newfangled technological gimmick, but I could hardly contain my glee. Next, I saw a video of the characters from KPop Demon Hunters materializing above Seoul, the city I grew up in. I messaged my parents. Had they seen this? Yes, they said. Have you not seen a drone show?
Even with an untrained eye, I could tell that quality varied. Some animations were clumsy and unimaginative—corporate logos, assemblages of geometric primitives. Others, however, were transcendent visuals, rendered with precision and pomp. There was a Guinness World Record–setting video from China (7,598 drones) featuring a dragon with shining, tessellated scales large enough to encircle a skyscraper. In Dubai, sky divers flew into a Red Bull can made of drones. Stranger Things’ Vecna crawled out of the Las Vegas Strip’s sky. A phoenix whose wings were composed of “pyrodrones”—fireworks attached to drones—released a waterfall of sparks. In Saudi Arabia, drones coalesced into the face of Mohammed bin Salman. Tetris was being played in the heavens. Nyan Cat was flying in the sky.
A prudish reader might kvetch: But aren’t drones weapons of war? Well, weren’t fireworks born of gunpowder? Perhaps the menace of the medium is part of what gives it its charge. Here was a formidable technology—something that, if shown in medieval times, might have turned a raging infidel into the most ardent believer.
Modern man, it turns out, is just as susceptible.
Kimbal Musk’s Nova Sky Stories may be the only drone operator blessed by the Holy Father, but the biggest by show count in America is a company called Sky Elements. One Friday during the thick of March Madness, I headed to San Jose to watch Sky Elements prepare for one of its shows.
The number of drones flying that day was 1,000. (The cost of a drone show depends on the number of drones—currently $150 to $200 per drone.) I was greeted by Preston Ward, Sky Elements’ cofounder, whose face I recognized from a popular Instagram account he runs (@thatdroneshowguy) with close to a million followers. Ward was a commercial litigation lawyer in a former life. Underneath his disarming smile, I got the unmistakable sense that you’d not want to see his face across the negotiating table. After all, here was the man who convinced the Federal Aviation Administration, in 2024, to let him strap fireworks to drones—hence the advent of pyrodrones in American airspace.
Setting up a drone show is a labor-intensive, time-consuming affair. Preparation for the 9:15 pm show started at 2 pm, and by the time I’d arrived, the crew had already unloaded boxes of drones, plus metal-gray ammo cans storing lithium batteries, from an Enterprise semitruck. With the crew bustling about in reflective safety vests and radio headsets, the scene resembled a small airfield. Indeed, drones are classified as aircraft by the FAA, which requires that show operators get a “Part 107 license” for commercial use.
As the crew began unboxing drones—made by UVify, a South Korean company and major drone supplier to American operators—I bent to examine one. It had four carbon-fiber arms reaching to propellers colored in red and black, and its opaline plastic body encased the LEDs that would become an illuminated voxel in the sky. Resting there in its crustacean squat, it was oddly adorable.
Nearby stood a heavy-duty tripod with a disc-shaped sensor mounted at the top. Called an RTK base station, it’s a vital piece of equipment for any drone show. Standard GPS is accurate only to about 2 to 5 meters, so light-show drones rely on this real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning technology to broadcast correction signals that allow centimeter-level accuracy. I’d received a site plan in advance and noticed that the launch pad was encircled by the flight area, followed by a soft geofence (where drones would return if they drifted off course) and a hard geofence (where they’d shut down and abort).
By 6 pm, the drones were laid out in a 20-by-50 grid about a meter apart, batteries inserted into the body but cables not yet plugged in. After a break for dinner, the crew lined up on one side and marched down each row, connecting batteries one by one. I joined in and plugged the connectors into place. With each connection came a brief electronic trill as the drone came to life. The pilot and copilot hunched over their laptops, running final checks on the flight software. I glanced at the pilot checklist—over 60 items.
RTK base station at a Sky Elements show in San Jose, California.
A thousand drones in a field, waiting for takeoff.
Ward and I settled into picnic chairs to watch what had become my most anticipated part of a drone show: takeoff. A thousand opalescent orbs of LED light came on, and 4,000 propellers started spinning. The drones launched in four sequences of 25-by-10 rectangular formations, each planar unit rising in blue, red, green, yellow, like a colorful deck of cards fanning open into the sky. (Each drone, unlike the autonomous swarms often used by militaries, is not aware of any other drone’s existence. It simply follows its programmed path and comes back.)
A “San Jose 2026” logo was emblazoned in the sky, followed by a basketball hoop and various March Madness–themed shapes, intercut with the sponsor logos (Adobe, Waymo). Sharp at a distance, the formations, on closer look, showed a slight undulation and sway, perhaps from a night wind. I could occasionally see stragglers finding their way back into formation like klutzy soldiers. After about 10 minutes, the drones formed into a tight phalanx for the landing sequence. As they descended, the grass field rippled. They sent a gentle downwash over the ground, knocking over an empty water bottle.
After talking to a number of drone operators—small and large, regional and national—I became attuned to a certain drama among them, which is to say, the industry is not exactly suffused with bonhomie. Some dismissed their rivals’ work as “clip art,” others as just good marketing. I heard the word “litigious” now and again.
Business models also vary widely. Some make drones, some make drone show software, some put on shows and sell software, some sell software but don’t make drones—every permutation is represented. Some position themselves as artists, while others are more utilitarian. As one executive at Pixis Drones told me, “We’re a marketing agency first, and we just happen to have a fleet of drones.” Some think “drone show” is an undignified name for such a futuristic medium. Kimbal Musk’s company prefers “sky stories,” and UVify prefers “cyber physical content.”
One Wednesday afternoon, at a coffee shop in Palo Alto that was being circled by a Tesla Cybercab every 15 minutes, I met Nils Thorjussen, a cofounder of Verge Aero, the second-largest drone operator in America—an occasional show provider that also sells drone software and hardware. Thorjussen, whose ruddy face reflects a lifelong affection for skiing (he had just come back from Tahoe), has been in the business of illumination for decades. After graduating from Stanford’s business school, he started a control systems business for large concerts and soon found himself touring with the Grateful Dead. One day he saw a TED talk showcasing drone light shows and was mesmerized.
When he got his FAA waiver in 2017, the number of drone operators was in the single digits. But as much as the industry has developed, Thorjussen said, it is still in a “carnival operator phase,” a “Wild West sort of environment” with “hustlers.” One recent scandal involved a guy named David Oneal and his company Wildly Creative Marketing. True to its name, Oneal’s company defrauded SeaWorld by agreeing to perform a drone show, collecting payment, and then never showing. After a joint investigation by the Department of Transportation and the US Secret Service, Oneal was convicted and sentenced to 32 months in prison.
Thorjussen has spent the past year working to establish a safety standard for drone shows, lest a major accident torpedo the young industry the way the Hindenburg did airships. The community is still rattled by an accident in December 2024, when, during a holiday show in Orlando operated by Sky Elements, drones fell from the sky and, according to a lawsuit, struck a 7-year-old boy, who needed open-heart surgery. (The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board, released in early 2025, attributed the cause to a combination of errors.) Thorjussen has enlisted the help of ASTM International, the organization behind standards for everything from bungee jumping to paint viscosity.
Another sore subject for the industry: China. The new Guinness records for most drones flown—the record that matters most—are now all set and broken and set again, often in a matter of weeks, by China. (At this writing, it’s 33,615 drones.) American reactions to this fact range from dismissal to resignation to admiration. Hayes Walsh of Sky Elements told me, “They’re pretty much light-years ahead of us in terms of scale.” One of the Chinese companies he’s talking about is Damoda, whose drones don’t require manually inserting batteries or laying them out in a grid. Instead, like worker bees coming in and out of their hexagonal hive, they launch from a charging case and return to it.
China also seems to stir concerns about industrial espionage. At least one executive I talked to confessed he had asked around about me because my surname also exists in Chinese. I started dropping hints early in conversations that I’m Korean.
A week after Sky Elements’ March Madness show, I paid a visit to the company’s Texas headquarters, a low, beige building in an office park. Preston Ward, the cofounder I’d first met in San Jose, was waiting near the entrance, where a wall celebrated the company’s 16 Guinness World Records (it’s now 17). Though China dominates the numbers game, Guinness—ever generous with categories—still leaves room for niche entries: “Largest aerial display of a currency symbol.” “Of a cowboy hat.” “Of a gingerbread village.”
Drones stacked at Sky Elements HQ in Texas.
Past the front office, which looked like an ordinary workplace, a back door opened to a warehouse that was half Costco, half Boeing hangar: stacks of drone cases reaching the ceiling, workbenches with soldering equipment and drone components, a forklift and a commercial lawnmower parked nearby.
In a hardware room that looked like a robotics lab, I was greeted by Cameron Ellis, the youthful head of engineering. He had the quick wit and breeziness of Ben Whishaw’s Q in the recent Bond franchise. “I’m an electrical engineer by trade,” said Ellis, who had researched drone swarm technology in graduate school. “This is my first real big-boy job, if you want to call it that.”
Ward seemed to be in a buoyant mood about something he and others had been working on since the day before, which was an attempt to answer “everybody’s big question”: Can AI replace a lot of what they do? In less than 24 hours, Ward explained, an AI agent had already researched what software to use, designed a show, and emailed the head designer for review. Does it have a name? “Mavrick,” Ellis said. “It’s our ace pilot. Top Gun.” I was introduced to its physical embodiment: a mini rack the size of a rice cooker—Mac Mini, network switch, video recorder—with neon-pink tape reading “MAVRICK.” (The name is also a nod to MAVLink, a communication protocol for drones.)
An AI-powered drone pilot at Sky Elements.
We went out the back door to the lot behind the office. Ten drones were lined up like first graders about to put on a talent show. Mavrick had designed the choreography and had a name for each stage—“Ignition,” “Gathering,” “The Shift,” “Pulse Ascent,” “The Bloom,” “Return.” The music it chose was “Virtutes Instrumenti,” by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons (good bot). Mavrick had chosen SkyBrush, the open-source software (very good bot) and set the show’s origin latitude and longitude values, configured the geofence and safety margins, uploaded show data, and run through all preflight checks. Mavrick reported via Telegram that “all steps are complete. The only thing left is authorization. I’m not touching that button. That’s your call. 🛸”
Ward hadn’t actually planned to put on a show in front of me. But another Telegram message came through, reminding us that it needed human authorization. “It’s all on you, Preston,” Mavrick wrote. How could we resist? Ward authorized it.
One by one, drones launched into the sky to perform what was quite possibly the first show ever designed by AI. It was a bit hard to decipher what they were doing, which had something touchingly endearing about it. The formation took a spiral shape, spread outward and floated like glowing pollen, then nucleated into a circular crown and landed.
“I’m just blown away,” Ward said. “I started yesterday with a computer that had no configuration. It had nothing. And none of the drones hit each other. Nothing crashed. Everything worked. We’re going to be replaced now by AI.”
“I can see literally no scenario where that goes wrong,” Ellis said.
Witnessing humanity inch yet closer to annihilation by drone swarm was a worthy sight. But I wasn’t in Texas just for that. Weeks earlier, I had called up America’s drone evangelist nonpareil, Sally French, aka the Drone Girl. (She had a drone show at her wedding covered by The New York Times.) French had tipped me off that a company called Aerial Illuminations would be attempting to break a Guinness World Record—for the most drones flown simultaneously over the North American sky—in a small city south of Houston called Manvel. The city’s motto, “City on the Rise,” had a biblical ring to it, and the Guinness attempt was to take place over Easter weekend. I felt, you could say, compelled to make the pilgrimage.
As of the 2020 census, Manvel counted 9,992 people. Since then, it’s become the sixth-fastest-growing city in America. As of yet, it has no liquor store but has at least 15 churches. A number of them had organized a Christian event called “JJJ” timed to the world-record attempt. Starting with 5,000 drones and gradually building to 10,000, the event would depict the story of Easter over nine days.
On Good Friday, I flew to Houston and headed to Manvel. When I saw a giant white cross, 30-plus-feet tall, dangling inexplicably from a construction crane, I knew I’d arrived at the site for JJJ. Clearer still were the vinyl banners that spelled out the event’s full name: Jesus Jesus Jesus. Behind the church, drones stretched on, row after row, all 10,000 of them, almost to a vanishing point. The security was robust—an armed guard stood watch—and the crew seemed tense, serious, unexcited by my presence. With its tents and shipping containers serving as a command center, the site looked like a rebel outpost preparing a guerrilla operation.
Manvel, Texas, prepares for its record-breaking drone show.
Inside the church, I met Pastor Jason, who told me it was a single anonymous donor who paid for this year’s event. The idea for the Guinness attempt came last Christmas, when the church put on a 1,000-drone show. “Whether you were 5 or 95,” Pastor Jason told me, “everybody listened and it was quiet and it was captivating. And I was like, wow, this is really a tool to get the message out.” That night, he walked over to Niro Senanayake of Aerial Illuminations, who was running the show, and said, “Niro, listen. We have Jesus Jesus Jesus coming up. What’s the record?” The North American record was 4,900 drones. Pastor Jason knew he wanted to break it.
He and other pastors had moments of doubt: Is this spectacle really all necessary? “And I think those are good questions to ask. But sometimes God does things on scale. When he separated the waters for them to walk through, he could have done a puddle,” Pastor Jason said with a laugh. “But it wouldn’t have had the same effect.” Trying to break a drone record during JJJ seemed, to Pastor Jason, “just giving the story the scale that it deserves.”
5:30 pm. The eighth day of JJJ was about to begin, and I headed to the event grounds. Standing in what I took to be the registration line, I saw people wearing T-shirts reading “Heaven is my home. I’m just here recruiting” or “Jesus Jesus Jesus” or “Pray Pray Pray.” When I reached the end, I realized it was a line to receive a T-shirt. I was handed a Jesus Jesus Jesus in a medium.
PHOTOGRAPH: Sheon HanAt 6 pm, the jumbotrons lit up and bands played songs. Between sets, baptisms took place in two inflatable pools. As I stood there, it dawned on me that I didn’t want to be alone when perhaps the largest reification of Jesus Christ ever rendered on this continent would appear in the sky.
Truth to tell, there was a man who kept catching my eye, someone who, as I watched from afar, seemed to have a nimbus of authority around him. He was a stout Black man of average height, with a cowboy hat, aviators, and—here’s what spiritually beckoned me—a wooden cane, like Moses. I introduced myself and asked if he’d seen the show the previous nights. He had. “Immaculate,” he said. “Very great storytelling. Sometimes it even looks like you’re watching a television.”
He said his name was Patrick but people called him Patty G. He was a local pastor, so I wasn’t surprised when he asked the question I’d been hoping to avoid: “Are you a believer yourself?” I mumbled something about a Catholic upbringing but added that I’d gradually, undramatically become nonreligious. “Amen. I’ll tell you this one thing,” Patty G said. “Can you tell me your name again, brother?” Sheon. “Brother Sheon,” Patty G said, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. “No matter what faith you have or don’t have, I’m still supposed to treat you as your brother. So, at the end of the day, you’re Brother Sheon.”
The show was about to start. Patty G offered to take me to the best view, where a friend he’d met the day before would be joining us. He commandingly led the way with his cane. Soon, a white man in a Jesus Jesus Jesus T-shirt introduced himself as Chase. He was 27 and made a living assembling utility vehicles at a nearby shop.
Ten thousand drones in Manvel for the Jesus Jesus Jesus show.
Around 9:15, the crowd waited with an expectant hush. Five minutes passed. No drones. “We’re experiencing some delays,” someone said from the stage. “But there’s nothing that surprises the Lord. So we’re going to continue worshipping.” After several more songs, silence again fell over the field. Another announcement from the stage: “I never thought I’d pray for drones”—the audience laughed—“but let’s pray for them.” There were prayers.
9:50. Still no drones. People started leaving. It was announced that the next launch attempt would be at 10:15. As Patty G, Chase, and I stood there swapping stories about our hometowns, 10:15 came and went. Then a buzz of excitement rippled through the crowd. The show was ready. A miracle. Over the speakers: “The largest drone show in the history of North America is happening tonight right here in Manvel, Texas, at Jesus Jesus Jesus!”
Rarely in life do we see something truly new for the first time. Is this what Parisians felt when the Eiffel Tower’s 10,000 gas lights lit up in 1889? What Chicagoans felt when the White City’s 100,000 bulbs blazed into life at the 1893 World’s Fair? Heaven knows how many drone shows I’ve watched online, but never before had I felt a visceral, almost cellular response to one.
In the sky over yonder where darkness had pooled, a single, immense layer of a thousand drones—spanning the length of a football stadium—ascended, and the field was bathed in light. Then another layer rose, and another, until nine layers hovered in the sky like a shimmering celestial mille-feuille. It dissolved into a tremulous cloud that resembled a nebula, then re-formed into monolithic letters: “Repent” in lavish cursive, and below it, in stern block capitals, “FOR THE KINGDOM IS AT HAND.” Next, the letters spread out into what became a rectangular television screen, rendering biblical animation in dot-matrix style, each drone a single pixel of heaven’s jumbotron.
Then, in an instant: Titanic, godlike hands, each large enough to close around a jetliner, materialized out of the dark. “Oh my god,” I blurted out. Chase glanced sideways and gave me a satisfied look. Patty G nodded. I tried to describe what I saw, but eloquence escaped me. People had stopped recording the show and lowered their phones. The surrender was total.
Next, the drones assembled into a hazy, cross-like shape, at least seven stories tall, which soon crystallized into a figure of the crucified Christ. I had seen a good number of iconographies of the crucifixion throughout my life, including some at the Vatican. But for the first time, I felt it. For real. They really nailed a guy my age to a wooden beam and left him to die. His pain, embodied in the sky, became palpable. There I was—a man from California in Texas watching drones built in Korea bring a story from Jerusalem to life.
Courtesy of Aerial IlluminationsA few weeks later, I learned that Jesus Jesus Jesus officially broke five Guinness World Records: world’s largest logo, LED screen, QR code, and word formed of drones, plus the most drones (66,123) launched in one week. For all the awe I felt that night, my time in Manvel didn’t make me a believer. But it did leave me anticipating this Fourth of July, when skies will light up to mark the semiquincentennial of this divided and imperiled republic. It may be the one day when everyone in America looks, for once, in the same direction: up.
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