One 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.
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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 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
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 anythi
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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, ab
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 sai
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 thous
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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
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 ou
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.
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