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Drone experts have little idea what the dozens of drone sightings have been up to New Jersey it could be, but they have ruled out the possibility that it could be the work of a classified government program.
They say the lack of a clear image or any residual hardware makes it difficult to guess.
“Until something is found, it’s really hard to say,” said Brett Velicovich, Fox News contributor and CEO of Expert Drones. “We haven’t seen a clear picture.”
The drone sightings were first reported almost a month ago on November 18, and have been spotted every night from dusk until around 11pm.
The drones are “six feet in diameter,” fly in a coordinated manner with the lights off, and “appear to avoid detection by traditional methods,” he explains. New Jersey state Rep. Dawn Fantasia, who relayed a briefing given by law enforcement. Reports have ranged from four to 180 sightings per night, in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
With little information about his origin from law enforcement, public speculation has run wild.
Velicovich poured cold water on the idea that the drones could be part of classified government evidence: A theory circulated to explain the lack of information shared with the public.
A social media user said he filmed several drones hovering over Fairfield, Connecticut on Thursday night. (Lucy Biggers)
“I find it hard to believe,” Velicovich said. “Maybe it started like that, and now people think that everything they see is a drone… I’ve seen a lot of images that look like airplanes.
But he said when he worked on classified drone projects, the protocol was always to inform the local police.
“There’s a reason we test things at Area 51 or all these remote locations, so you don’t have to cause public hysteria. And then when we test things in cities, we would always do that, whenever we do secret exercises in the cities. , we would always notify the local police.”
Stacie Pettyjohn, a drone expert at the Center for New American Security, agreed. “They would do it at a military base or a test facility. And you know, they’re not flying over sensitive industrial sites, like they’ve been in New Jersey.”
Both experts agreed that what might have started as drones can now turn into public panic, where everything in the air is assumed to be a drone. They said it could also be photo drones looking to collect footage of the drone phenomenon, adding to the panic.
Photos taken on the Bay Shore section of Toms River – Sunday, December 8, 2024 (Doug Hood/Asbury Park Press)
“People are going to start seeing what they expect to see,” Pettyjohn said.
“No one has shown me a clear photograph of a drone,” Velicovich said.
“Either it’s overkill right now, and everything in the air is a drone, or you’ve got a lot of planes in the area that are probably trying to collect and take pictures and detect things and see what’s really going on.”
The FBI, in a statement, suggested that many of the drone sightings had turned out to be false be planes
“At this time we have no evidence that the reported drone sightings amount to a national securityor a threat to public safety or having a foreign nexus,” a joint statement from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday.
“We are supporting local law enforcement in New Jersey with numerous detection methods, but we have not corroborated any of the reported visual sightings with electronic detection. Rather, after reviewing the available footage, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating legally There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace.”
Photos taken in the Bay Shore section of Toms River of what appear to be large drones hovering at high altitude in New Jersey on Sunday, December 8, 2024. (Doug Hood/Asbury Park Press)
The FBI revealed this week that its budget for anti-drone technology is just $500,000 a year.
Earlier this week, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, RN.J., said the drones could be linked to an Iranian “mother ship,” a theory that prompted the Pentagon to say it had seen no evidence that the drones could come from a US adversary.
Velicovich said it is “not sold” that the drones are of foreign origin, but US adversaries would have the ability to be behind them.
“If we go with the theory that it is foreign, China, Russia Iran, they all have systems that can travel over large amounts of terrain, oceans and carry other drones with it. So that’s not the hard thing that’s happening every day right now in countries like Ukraine.”
Pettyjohn assumed the drones would have to be operated by someone in the US
“I would assume it’s someone who’s here locally, who might be a spy, who might be a nefarious actor, but they’re individuals on the ground, and it’s easier to blend in and harder to identify who they are and where they are with these fairly innocuous systems,” he said.
“They can be on the air probably on the order of five hours or so, or less, and a lot of them, it’s a lot less than that. And that just means it probably has to be somebody physically here, ( who ) is robbing them.”
China expertGordon Chang thought the drones might be an adversary just looking to provide a form of distraction.
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If it was intended as an attack, “you wouldn’t put up this big screen over the course of days … with these really big objects and flashing lights. You wouldn’t announce a drone strike in the US.” Chang said.
“I think they’re trying to get our attention, distract us from something that’s going on somewhere else,” he said. “So I’m concerned about what’s happening that we’re not paying attention to because of the drones.”
