I'm sure that 'drone' is the new buzzword for unidentified aerial phenomenon, which we used to call UFO. These sightings occurred in mist (relatively poor visibility of around a mile). There were a few bright stars and planets around, including Arcturus, Vega and Jupiter, as well as the Moon. It is possible that the mist reduced the visibility of celestial objects to a small number of bright stars and planets, which may then have been misidentified; with no other stars to provide guidance, these isolated stars could have been mistaken even by people familiar with the stars. Misty moonlight would have made this worse.
I've mistaken Arcturus myself on occasion- it is fairly isolated, and you have to be able to see the somewhat dimmer stars in the Plough to make a good identification.
Alternately the misty conditions may have caused the witnesses to misidentify distant planes as nearby drones. This seems to have happened several times, in the Colorado flap and the Gatwick flap. I'd like to see the results of the SNOOPIE team observations - when these 'drones' were first observed, special teams of observers on board these ships were deployed, equipped with commercially-available cameras, in order to record these events.
Of course these teams may have been unsuccessful in recording the 'drones' in detail, just as the various news reporters in Colorado and Gatwick were unsuccessful in capturing any drone footage. So I don't have a lot of hope for the evidence in this case.