>conspiracy theorist

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the idea of conspiracy theories was subject to a multiple decade long attack by certain government groups to make conspiracy theory equate in popular culture to crack pot theory. Governments benefits when theories like the CIA bringing in drugs or the military doing non-consensual human experimentation on soldiers are classified under the same moniker as the theory that lizard people control the government and aliens exist but the governments of the world cover for them.

But that is just a conspiracy theory.

That's one explanation, but I don't believe in stuff, so it doesn't apply. I've seen time and again how opinions are made via complicated and hidden propaganda. Most of it is subtle and not in your face and the world trained me to be a skeptic, is all.

It's not a conspiracy theory to think that laws are propagandized by tickling authoritarian tendencies. Planes hit birds because they intersect with flocks of birds, because birds have nearly 100% overlap in altitude with all phases of operation of airliners, over land and over water, and because there are hundreds of billions of birds.

To calculate the odds of hitting a drone, you have to divide the odds of a bird strike by population, altitude overlap and by spatial density when a flock of birds vs a single drone is encountered. This is why betting on a drone strike is, currently, a sucker-bet. Anyone who thinks a report of a drone strike is real is way way too credulous and/or biased.