More than just lonely truckers, tired pilots, and the town gadfly claim to see lights in the sky over New Jersey and other parts of the American eastern seaboard lately, the likes of former Maryland governor Larry Hogan and New Jersey senator Andy Kim are sharing footage of lights in the night sky over the east coast, and military officials have confirmed unauthorized drone incursions over their facilities. The question increasingly dominating the dinner tables, barstools, sheriff’s departments, and government offices of America is: Just what the heck is flying around up there? And with the federal government clinging to two contradictory statements — “No, we have no idea what they are,” and “there’s no reason to believe these represent a threat” — how concerned should we be?
The Best Explanations for the New Jersey Drones
Newly sworn-in New Jersey senator Andy Kim, in a series of posts on X, Friday:
Last night I went out with local police to spot drone flying over New Jersey, here’s what I saw. We drove to Round Valley Reservoir and the officer pointed to lights moving low over the tree line. Sometimes they were solid white light, others flashed of red and green.We oriented ourselves with a flight tracker app to help us distinguish from airplanes. We often saw about 5-7 lights at a time that were low and not associated with aircraft we could see on the tracker app. Some hovered while others moved across the horizon. We saw a few that looked like they were moving in small clusters of 2-4.We clearly saw several that would move horizontally and then immediately switch back in the opposite direction in maneuvers that plane can’t do.The police officer said they see them out every night. They only seem to start when it gets dark, and they disappear before dawn. They get reports that they sometimes fly low over homes, especially up in the hills. The officer said they’ve tried to get closer with use of a helicopter but that the drones would turn off the lights and go dark if approached. . . .
By Sunday night, Kim had changed his tune: “After more analysis and help from civilian pilots/experts and flight data, I’ve concluded the possible drone sightings pointed out to me were almost certainly planes.”
Keep in mind, different sightings may have different explanations.
Explanation One: What people are seeing are some of our drones.
A Reddit poster suggested that one flying object spotted and recorded on video resembled the “the stubby nose, straight side wings, and long tail with dual forking fins” of a PteroDynamics XP-4 Transwing drone:
The PteroDynamics XP-4 is being developed for the U.S. Navy as a recon and logistics drone, capable of picking up and dropping off packages between land and a moving ship, including in high seas and high winds.As the name suggests, it’s a transwing design, which transitions between quadcopter and fixed-wing modes for both long-range flight and VTOL [Vertical Take-Off and Landing] capabilities. So it can hover pretty much at will.Officially, it has a one-hour flight time at max payload but could have been upgraded. It’s about 13ft wide by 6ft long — about the dimensions of a compact SUV, consistent with witness statements.And it’s flight path leads directly from the coast up to northern [New Jersey]. And, wouldn’t you know it, right where it’s most commonly seen, we find Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, home of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), whose whole job is to research, test and support aircraft for navy combat operations.This also explains why it’s appearing every night, and how it’s sticking around so long: It literally has a home base to swap batteries at all night long.And why they’re not talking about them: it’s their drones, and they don’t want to advertise.
When I see something like this on a social-media site, my instinct is to see what can be verified. The company PteroDynamics, a U.S. military contractor, does indeed make car-sized drones with some odd-looking foldable wings that make it look like a hybrid of a helicopter and a plane. The P4 model is about seven feet long and four feet wide when on the ground with its wings folded in, and according to the company’s website, new model drones that can carry heavier payloads and operate for longer periods are “in development.”
Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is indeed one of three major operating locations of the Naval Air Warfare Center, with the others in Patuxent River, Md., and St. Inigoes, Md., with a separate Training Systems Division in Orlando, Fla. The joint base is located about 18 miles southeast of Trenton and about 36 miles east of Philadelphia International Airport. Most of the sightings in recent weeks have been a little further away in northern and central New Jersey, but some are by the Jersey Shore.
Other military installations in the state of New Jersey have reported drone incursions, but not Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, or at least not officially:
“No incursions to the installation have been identified,” a Joint Base spokesperson said Thursday in an email to Patch regarding sightings that have happened all over the state, including Ocean County. “The base remains prepared to respond to any potential risks, leveraging robust security measures to protect our service members and their families.”“Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is aware of the recent reports of drone sightings across New Jersey and continues to closely coordinate with federal and state agencies to ensure the safety of our personnel and operations,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile Picatinny Arsenal, about 35 miles west of New York City, “has had 11 confirmed sightings of unauthorized drones flying over in its airspace in recent weeks”:
“While the source and cause of these aircraft operating in our area remain unknown, we can confirm that they are not the result of any Picatinny Arsenal-related activities,” said Lt. Col. Craig A. Bonham II, Picatinny Arsenal Garrison Commander.
Earlier this month, a spokesman for U.S. Naval Weapons Station Earle, a military base in Colts Neck in Monmouth County, N.J., confirmed they had two reports of drones in its airspace.
“We had one confirmed drone directly over the top of Earle,” Middletown mayor Tony Perry told NewsNation. “If anybody knows Naval Weapons Station Earle, if you come within 500 feet of Earle, they’re already authorized to fire upon you when you’re just a fishing boat. Unfortunately, it seems like we’re unable to take any action when a foreign, unauthorized drone is flying above.”
An unnamed Department of Defense official, on a White House background call, Saturday:
We have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle. They are — you know, I refer to them as sightings. They’re all visual, but they are by highly trained security personnel . . . to date, we have no intelligence or observations that would indicate that they were aligned with a foreign actor or that they had malicious intent. But I just got to simply tell you we don’t know. We have not been able to locate or identify the operators or the points of origin. We have very limited authorities when it comes to moving off base. We have to coordinate with local and as well as federal law enforcement to try and locate these persons and where they’re launching from, to either cite them or execute law enforcement activities that we’re restricted from doing off base.
All military bases, including Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, are “no drone zones,” banning all “back yard toys, radio controlled model aircraft, rockets, as well as the popular copter-style aircraft.”
So, one possibility is that the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center is testing advanced drones from PteroDynamics or some other contractor(s) and perhaps want to see if other U.S. military facilities can detect them and how quickly.
But there are at least three major problems with this theory. First, the U.S. military has a lot of much more remote locations to test aircraft — Skunk Works, the U.S. Air Force Test Center, the Nevada Test and Training Range that includes the so-called “Area 51,” etc. Northern New Jersey and the suburbs of New York City are some of the most densely packed spots in the entire country. If you wanted to keep this drone testing secret, you wouldn’t fly them over suburbs, much less near military bases.
The second major problem is that the sheer number of drones being sighted at one time makes one skeptical that this represents testing of some prototype.
The third major flaw with the “secret testing program” theory: as Ocean County sheriff Michael Mastronardy observed to the Asbury Park Press, “Obviously, they want us to know they’re there — they put their lights on.”
For what it’s worth, Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said Wednesday, “These are not U.S. military drones.”
Explanation Two: What people are seeing are some other country’s drones.
New Jersey Republican congressman Jeff Van Drew stirred up a kerfuffle when he told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner on Wednesday that this was an Iranian military operation in U.S. airspace:
Here’s the real deal, Harris . . . from very high sources, very qualified sources, very responsible sources, I’m going to give you the real deal: Iran launched a mothership, probably about a month ago, that contains these drones. That mothership is off- I’m going to tell you the deal! It’s off the east coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones. It’s everything that we can see or hear.And, again, these are from high sources. I don’t say this lightly. Now, you know, we know there was a probability, it could have been our own government. You know it wasn’t our own government, because they would have let us know. It could have been some really glorified hobbyist that were doing something unbelievable. They don’t have the technology. But let’s pretend that’s possible. A third possibility was somebody, an adversarial country doing this. Know that Iran made a deal with China, to purchase drones, motherships, and technology. The sources I have are good, I can’t reveal who they are, because they are speaking to me in confidentiality. These drones should be shot down.
By Friday, Van Drew backtracked a bit from his contention, apparently having seen compelling evidence that the three drone ships are too close to Iran to have launched the sighted drones:
“Almost a month has gone by, and we still have no answers from our government. The number of drones we are seeing is only increasing. While it has been verified that Iran does have three drone ships, new satellite images show they are currently stationed off the southern coast of Iran. This new information only brings us closer to figuring out what is really going on. It is unacceptable to hear the government contradict itself by saying they do not know who is operating these drones, while at the same time telling us there is no reason to be concerned.”
First, yes, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has at least three ships designed to deploy drones, the Shahid Roudaki, the Shahid Mahdavi, and the aircraft carrier-like Shahid Bagheri. In August, the website the War Zone published an undated photo of the Shahid Bagheri, which was converted from the container ship Perarin.
Also, in September, the Iranians revealed the newest version of its Shahed drone, which looks more like a manned airplane. From Jane’s Defense:
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) displayed a new type of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called the Shahed-136B during the Armed Forces Day parade in Tehran on 21 September. . . .While its name implies the new type is a development of the well-known Shahed-136 long-range one-way-attack (OWA) UAV, it looked very different, dispensing with the delta wing configuration in favor of a more conventional aircraft layout. It still had a propellor at the rear, but the engine exhausts were not visible, and it had air intakes both on top and along the sides of its fuselage.
China has developed a “mothership” drone — nicknamed the “jetank” — that can carry and deploy smaller drones, which it showcased at the Zhuhai airshow in November. From CNN’s coverage:
A massive mothership drone that can carry a payload of up to six tons, Jetank has a wingspan of 25 meters (82 feet) and a maximum takeoff weight of 16 tons, according to state media, making it among the largest such weapons in China’s arsenal.The jet-powered attack and reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), features eight external hardpoints to carry missiles and bombs, as well as a quickly replaceable mission module that can carry different types of smaller drones.“It takes the concept of an aircraft carrier from the sea to the air, enabling the deployment of numerous drones onto the battlefield by launching them in the air,” Chinese military expert Du Wenlong claimed, hailing it a “significant innovation.”
The Chinese military has a wide variety of drones in its arsenal — the GJ-11 “Sharp Sword,” the Mugin-4, the WZ-7 Xiang Long “Soaring Dragon,” the Wing Loong II, the ARK 40 Octocopter, the CR500 Golden Eagle, the CH-91, the Caihong-4, the CH series, the Wing Loong “Pterodactyl” series, and more.
Russia has its own intensive research into stealth drones, including the massive, fighter-jet sized S-70 Okhotnik. But there are some indications of serious problems in that program; according to British intelligence, in early October, the Russian deployed an S-70 Okhotnik hunter drone over the front lines in Ukraine. It appears the Russian operators lost control of the drone and shot it down in order to prevent it from being recovered by the enemy. (My favorite joke in a while: “Maybe the drone was trying to defect.”) Some wreckage survived, and the drone reportedly included dozens of Western-made components.
I suspect a major reason that many people are concerned about these drone sightings is the public’s experience of the Chinese spy balloon in early 2023. The Biden administration and military were content to not tell the American public they were tracking the Chinese spy balloon until the Billings Gazette published photos of it. On February 16, 2023, President Biden assured the nation, “We were able to protect sensitive sites against collection.” By April, NBC News reported the balloon was able “to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official.”
So when Singh says these are not U.S. military drones, or “our initial assessment here is that these are not drones or activities coming from a foreign entity or adversary,” many Americans assume they’re not hearing the full truth.
One counterargument to the idea that these are drones operated by a hostile foreign power: One would presume that the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard would have at least some ability to track a drone aircraft carrier off the east coast, and that NORAD and local air traffic control would have at least some ability to detect and track these craft while they’re in the air. If the U.S. had any reason to think that China, Iran, Russia, or any other hostile state was flying spy drones above our military bases, would they really just leave them unmolested and not make any effort to shoot them down? Forget ordinance; you can disable and take down a flying drone with an electronic pulse to disrupt the signals between a surveillance drone and its controller. (I was able to see a couple of these man-portable pulse weapons in Odesa, Ukraine.)
Explanation Three: What some people are seeing are not drones or aircraft at all.
Some cases are mundane phenomenon being mistaken for something abnormal; apparently Larry Hogan’s video features two stars from the Orion constellation.
For what it’s worth, an unidentified FBI official stated on that White House background press call, “In overlaying the visual sightings reported to the FBI with approach patterns for Newark-Liberty, JFK, and LaGuardia airports, the density of reported sightings matches the approach patterns of these very busy airports, with flights coming in throughout the night.”
An unidentified Department of Homeland Security official on the same call added, “We’re confident that many of the reported drone sightings are, in fact, manned aircraft being misidentified as drones . . . the U.S. Coast Guard and other partners determined that there is no evidence to date of any foreign-based involvement in sending drones ashore from marine vessels in the area.
And an unidentified “senior administration official” concluded: “At this point, we have not identified any basis for believing that there is — that these drones — that there’s any criminal activity involved, that there’s any national security threat, that there’s any particular public safety threat, or that there’s a malicious foreign actor involved in these drones.”
Explanation Four: What some people are seeing are alien spacecraft.
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