Last week, The Free Press reported on the sightings of what appeared to be large drones flying over New Jersey, and the reactions from lawmakers and federal government officials. Members of the House of Representatives openly speculated that the drones are operated by Iran, China, and the U.S. government.
In the days since, public scrutiny has only increased. In the absence of a clear and convincing statement from federal government officials—telling the American people exactly what these flying objects are, and what they’re doing—theories have swirled online ranging from detecting an imminent radioactive threat to surveying military installations on behalf of foreign adversaries.
On Sunday, Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN that the federal government has not seen “anything unusual” and that they “know of no threat or of any nefarious activity.” Mayorkas said “it is very common for individuals who think they see drones to actually see small aircraft and we have a case of mistaken identity.”
But Americans aren’t buying it. Nor are some of our elected officials.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said at a news briefing that Mayorkas’ comments “insult our intelligence.” New Jerseyans, including law enforcement and military personnel, can plainly see there’s a “massive invasion of drones.”
After reports that federal lawmakers were set to receive a classified briefing from Mayorkas, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) told Ask a Pol, “I’m not supposed to talk about it.” President-elect Donald Trump told reporters that “our military knows, and our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense.”
New Jersey lawmakers tell The Free Press that downplaying the sightings without explanation has only further alarmed the public and allowed the information vacuum to be flooded with unsubstantiated claims.
And in this era—marked by low social trust in government—the lack of clear, coherent explanation has all but ensured that these claims proliferate.
The Leading Theories
The sightings are part of a mass hysteria:
“These things happen as a kind of a self-generating social phenomenon where most people don’t look up into the sky. They don’t really think much about it, until they hear stories and they start looking up and they start noticing things. And then, now we all have cell phones,” Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, told The Free Press.
“The vast majority of these are obviously airplanes. You can see them when you blow them up, big wings, small wings, blinking lights.”
But through their response, the government “did nothing but create a public panic,” says Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-NJ). It’s one thing to keep confidential classified information in the interest of national security. But “they bungled this so colossally,” such that Mayorkas is going on TV with excuses that are “unbelievably ridiculous.”
“If you listen to the White House, they have backtracked a bit on their initial statement that Admiral [John] Kirby kind of tried to pooh-pooh the whole thing,” Fantasia said. “They went from saying we really can’t corroborate to saying while we definitely do understand that there have been sightings.”
“We have these industry, military, law enforcement professionals that are directly conflicting the message that is coming from the White House,” she says. Speaking of Rep. Pallone’s comments after being briefed, Fantasia said: “Now, are we in a situation that our [federal] elected officials are in the know but the state of New Jersey is still not in the know? I mean, this is getting silly.”
The frustration crosses parties and state lines. “I find the message from the administration that everyone is hallucinating to be gaslighting,” says Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY). “There’s obviously a there there.”
The sightings are U.S. military drones:
Last Thursday, Fantasia told The Free Press that the foreign adversary theory was “plausible” but, like other lawmakers, she’s since shifted toward another explanation: “Most people do believe these drones do belong to the United States military. However, beyond that point is very difficult. You literally need a Magic 8 Ball to shake it to figure out what the actual purpose is.”
State senator Jon Bramnick (R-NJ) agrees. “I believe that some of them are drones controlled by the United States government,” he says.
“If you listen, they never say the American public is not in danger,” says Fantasia. “They say that these drones do not pose a danger, which I find very interesting.”
“The real fear now is if this was just a simple military training, why didn’t they just say we’re training?” says Fantasia. “The overwhelming theme that seems to be coming, and really disconcerting to many of us, is that the drones are actually sweeping for something that poses a danger to us here on American soil.”
Some online commentators speculated that the drones are detecting the threat of nuclear radiation. The drones are “collecting information on how the public will react (PsyOp) and testing their ability to sweep a port city like NY for dirty bombs,” wrote one theorist.
But a Senate source told The Free Press that this theory, among others, is “overblown.”
Fantasia says she’s received “tips from all across the country, from military personnel, from individuals who work in the drone industry, in the manufacturing industry,” which range in plausibility. But “what would be so much more helpful is receiving direct confirmation from the United States government saying, ‘This is what’s happening.’ ”
The sightings are drones belonging to a foreign adversary:
“I trust the military enough that they would take action” if the drones were a foreign adversary, Bramnick told The Free Press.
But U.S. defense experts say the U.S. drone defenses are dangerously lacking. The drone sightings have “exposed to the general public a vulnerability that has been there for a long time,” says Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Karako told The Free Press that even if every single drone hovering above the East Coast “turns out to be some hobbyist extravaganza, nevertheless, we ought assume that the potential for foreign attack or surveillance is absolutely there.”
He says the same “ ‘regional’ missile threats that have plagued our forces and plagued our allies and partners for many years,” for instance in Ukraine and the Middle East, “is coming home, and is already here.”
For one thing, U.S. sensors are designed to “tune out things that don’t look like a bomber or a missile, things that are low and slow-flying.” And not only are there not enough sensors to detect the drones, the U.S. is also not well-equipped to engage with them.
“This is the United States homeland. We have a lot of human beings, and the FAA owns the airspace in most respects, and so the rules of engagement are pretty limited,” Karako says. “And what I would say that this also exposes to the public is the need to think about and potentially change our posture toward noncooperative aerial threats.”
Mayorkas told ABC News on Sunday that “with respect to the ability to incapacitate those drones, we are limited in our authorities. We have certain agencies within the Department of Homeland Security that can do that, and outside our department, but we need those authorities expanded as well.”
Karako says that the U.S. military has more aggressive posture over sensitive areas like the White House or the Super Bowl, but this needs to be “the model for our military bases” as well. “It’s not reinventing the wheel. It’s applying the kind of rules and procedures and capabilities that we already have.”
“That means, frankly, giving the military the means and the authority to be looking for and engaging these kinds of things.” Yet doing so is controversial because it increases the risk to manned aircraft being shot accidentally, either in cross fire or through misidentification.
“Nobody wants to do that in the United States of America. And that’s why we need to get better at distinguishing manned aircraft from others.”
The sightings are a combination of planes, helicopters, civilian and U.S. military drones, and the constellation Orion:
“There are probably a lot of different things going on and frankly, the diversity of explanations and the likely diversity of phenomenon is a testament to the fact that there’s tons and tons of these things out there,” says Karako.
“This is the next chapter of air defense,” says Karako. “And it just so happens that this chapter has a lot of players.”
When it comes to the development of drones, “the sky is darkening with this burgeoning set of capabilities.”
Maryland’s former governor, Republican Larry Hogan, said he’d witnessed “dozens of large drones” above his home in Davidsonville, Maryland, but an atmospheric scientist, Matthew Cappucci, suggested he’d mistaken the constellation Orion for drone activity.
Though notwithstanding mistaken sightings, “The explosion of reported drone sightings should force a reckoning,” Rep. Torres told The Free Press. “You know, it’s an open secret that China’s capabilities, drone capabilities, are vastly superior to ours, which to me is a prohibitive national security risk.”
Shermer says that if you can “eliminate the alternative hypotheses of spy drones or whatever technologies that foreign assets supposedly have, all that’s left is the social hysteria phenomenon, which is, you know, very, very likely what it is. If it was something else, we’d probably know by now.”
We’re left with an information vacuum:
“If you want to avoid a public panic, have a press conference and answer every question you’ve been asked,” says state senator Jon Bramnick. “If the colonel and state police are frustrated, that’s an indication that it’s not just some panicked public.”
“So come and answer the questions and there won’t be any overreaction.”
The federal government appears to be attempting to walk a fine line between selectively omitting facts which it may believe could cause panic, and dismissing the reality of what’s visible in the sky and been reported by New Jersey law enforcement.
“There is a middle ground between panic and dismissiveness,” said Torres. “The federal government should be as transparent as they can be consistent with national security. But it feels like the American people, including members of Congress, are largely in the dark.”
For Bramnick, what needs to happen is simple enough: “Track the big drones and tell us where they came from, where they went, and what they did. How’s that? I don’t think that’s asking for too much.”
