Fine, Let’s Talk About These New Jersey Drone Sightings

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The story won’t go away, so here we are. Let’s talk about these unidentified drones hovering over New Jersey and seven other states.

What’s real and what isn’t? Are these from a foreign government? Are they from our government? Are they from a private enterprise performing the greatest publicity stunt ever to sell drones at Christmas? Take your pick, they all have merit to an extent.

There’s also a distinct possibility that someone saw drones for a day or two and now the story blew up into everyone seeing drones all the time because they’re all looking. For a short time, it seemed like this explanation was perhaps the most obvious and the phenomena was one of contagion and not actual drone sightings:

Kidding aside, there are too many reports from reputable individuals and actual videos of some weird stuff happening. None of it seems extraterrestrial since, after all, they seem to be more stealthy, right?

Here’s Harris Faulkner, a journalist from Fox News, with her own personal video of drones visible from her residence:

Even New Jersey’s favorite Trump-hating former governor has had a close encounter of the drone kind:

Christie said during an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” he believes he saw a drone over his house last week.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I’ve been living at that house for 30 years,” Christie said.“You can see why people are concerned, and it’s a lack of communication from the government at the federal and state level that’s at fault here,” Christie said.

Christie said he wants the state police to have authority to “bring those drones down and find out why they’re doing what they’re doing.” He said he understood why people are concerned.

New York Governor Kathy “Lockdown Queen” Hochul wants Congress to pass something called the “Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act,” according to The Hill:

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) joined the growing number of figures calling on the Biden administration and lawmakers to act on the mysterious drone sightings in New Jersey and other parts of the country.

“In order to allow state law enforcement to work on this issue, I am now calling on Congress to pass the Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act,” Hochul wrote Saturday in a statement, referring to legislation that would expand the authority of the Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) departments to address threats from unmanned aerial systems, as well as additional oversight power to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Anytime elected officials try to use a crisis to expand power, it’s probably a bad idea. Just the fact that a politician is even pushing expanded authority as a response to the drones is enough to make any liberty-loving American suspicious of what’s going on. The Counter-UAS legislation might be a good idea, but maybe it should stand on its own and not be rammed through Congress because people saw some weird stuff in the sky.

Could it be an Iranian mothership off the East Coast sending them in? Well, maybe. Iranian drone ships are floating around, according to the New York Post:

A newly minted and massive Iranian drone carrier was captured in new satellite images sailing in the Persian Gulf this week — the ship’s first reported sighting since leaving its home port for the first time in mid-November.

The satellite images taken Thursday by commercial operator Maxar Technologies shows three Iranian drone ships in the waters off the country’s coast as theories have swirled in the US that Iran could be behind the mysterious drone sightings across the tri-state area, according to Business Insider.

Iran’s new carrier — the Shahid Bagheri — is a converted shipping container that was outfitted to support drone operations and was last seen on Nov. 12, when it was captured by satellite imagery sitting in Bandar Abbas, the report said.

On the other hand, is this a narrative to be believed? Seems like the ship would have to be pretty close and pretty detectable by our defenses to go this long without notice. Elon Musk amusingly posted that the Iranian drone ship theory sounds like fake news:

When asked about the drones, the federal government has no answer but fully vows there’s no harm, according to Forbes:

Officials say there’s no indication of security threats. The FBI and DHS released a statement on Dec. 12 saying investigators have “no evidence at this time” of “malicious activity” in New Jersey or a “national security or public safety threat.” The statement adds they have not identified “a foreign nexus” for the drones and will continue the investigation. It also said many of the drone sightings have been “cases of mistaken identity,” confusing drones for lawful, identified aircraft. John Kirby, the White House’s national security communications advisor, reiterated the FBI’s statement at a briefing Dec. 12 and said officials “have not been able to…corroborate any of the reported visual sightings.”

As if the government would tell us anything even if they knew anything, and they most certainly do. If American air space was being penetrated this often and to this extent by a foreign power and the government doesn’t know, what does that say about military readiness?

According to a former CIA official, the drones could be a classified government operation, reports Fox News:

“Deducing the statements from [National Security spokesman] John Kirby that these drones are not operating illegally, coupled with several op-eds that have been out there in the last 24 hours about the need to look at our detection systems, makes me think perhaps this is actually a classified exercise to test either evasion technology or detection technology in urban areas,” Ballman said.

Ballman went on to say she would be “shocked” if the drones were related to the CIA, saying it is “not their mandate to operate in the United States.” She added that she is “troubled” by why the U.S. government has not been forthcoming with information regarding the drones.

As noted, the CIA doesn’t operate on American soil (or does it?) so it wouldn’t seem the drones should be CIA-related. There are plenty of other three-letter agencies that could operate the Jersey drones or even the U.S. military itself for defense purposes.

According to multiple reports, the Biden administration says the drones are still being investigated. It’s been weeks which means the “under investigation” claim is bogus or the Pentagon is incompetent. Again, take your pick. It’s more comforting to think the government knows and is intentionally keeping secrets rather than think they’re just as stumped as everyone with a phone pointed at the sky.

At least one airport in New Jersey was closed due to drone activity and an Air Force base in Ohio enacted restricted air space:

Reported drone activity prompted at least one airport – New York’s Stewart International Airport – to temporarily close its runways for about an hour on Friday night.

At around the same time, airspace above Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio was restricted because of drone activity while authorities monitored the situation, base spokesperson Bob Purtiman told CNN affiliate WHIO.

Something is flying around, but what is it and where did it originate?

The prevailing wisdom on X is that the drones are part of a federal government response or test searching for gamma radiation. Newsweek even reported on this possibility and mentioned the video embedded below from John Ferguson, CEO of a company that makes drones for the U.S. government:

A lot of interesting stuff there. His main point is that there are few if any reasons for drones to be flying at night if they’re looking at the ground in the traditional sense. They can’t see much without thermal imaging. Even then, thermal would only be good for specific scenarios. So, what are these things looking for or trying to detect?

The big problem right now is that everyone is looking at the sky and they’re pre-conditioned to see drones almost everywhere they look. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to an extent. Someone reports seeing drones, other people look, they report seeing drones, so more people look, and so on.

They’re not all wrong but they’re not all correct, either. Some sightings are likely aircraft being misreported as drones, to be sure.

Actually, forget everything you just read. President-elect Trump has the best working theory so far:

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Nate Ashworth

The Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Election Central. He's been blogging elections and politics for over a decade. He started covering the 2008 Presidential Election which turned into a full-time political blog in 2012 and 2016 that continues today.

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