Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s — well, it’s been a year since the drone sightings over New Jersey, and we still don’t quite know what it was all about.
The sightings captured the country’s attention, causing a hysteria that had even sober-minded public officials warning of everything from hobbyists run amok to a nefarious Iranian “mother ship” sending them from off the coast.
And then, just like that, the frenzy ended.
Drones faded from the headlines without much explanation beyond what the new Trump White House said in January. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the objects were a mixture of misidentified aircraft and drones, including government research and private devices.
“This was not the enemy,” she said.
Trying to pry loose other information has been a fool’s errand.
Official sources have clammed up. New Jersey State Police referred questions to the FBI, which didn’t respond to multiple inquiries. Neither did the Federal Aviation Administration.
The government explanations didn’t sit well with people who saw something in the sky.
Among the doubters at the time was Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, a New Jersey Republican who made headlines by declaring he had heard on good authority that an Iranian mother ship was disgorging the flying menaces to surveil its enemy.
His office didn’t respond to multiple inquiries for this report.
Rep. Christopher Smith, another New Jersey Republican, got into a spat with the Biden administration at the time over his revelation that senior Coast Guard officers had reported a boat being trailed by a swarm of up to 30 drones flying in formation.
After White House spokesman John Kirby dismissed those drones as airplanes that the officers mistook for drones, Mr. Smith responded by saying Mr. Kirby was “intentionally trying to mislead the public.”
Mr. Smith’s office, contacted for this report, said he has written legislation that would give state and local law enforcement more authority to detect and take down questionable drones.
Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, has a similar bill in the Senate.
Bill Edwards, director of counter-unmanned aerial systems operations and training at ENSCO, said that sort of legislation is needed.
He said the U.S. is operating under a 2018 law that keeps drone mitigation responsibility in the hands of the federal government.
However, the threat environment has shifted significantly beyond 2018.
Drone capabilities have soared, even at the off-the-shelf consumer end of the market, and social media platforms are full of instructions on how to fly them. That, combined with an adversary intent on striking and the number of mass gathering spots, such as amusement parks or sporting events, is worrying.
“The law hasn’t kept up with developments,” Mr. Edwards said.
As for the New Jersey sightings, he said the lesson is that the government needs to be more forthcoming with what it shares.
“The bottom line is that what the country needed, and especially that part of the country, was just transparency on what’s happening,” Mr. Edwards said.
The federal government was subjected to several Freedom of Information Act requests seeking additional information.
Little appears to have come of those efforts, though Reason.com reported that documents it obtained from an open-records request showed the feds had debunked some of the most worrying drone sightings by mid-December 2024, yet allowed fears to fester.
Take one incident from Nov. 26, 2024, when a medical helicopter was flying in to evacuate victims of a car crash. Firefighters waved off the flight, citing the presence of worrisome drones in the area.
Federal authorities, citing flight logs and charts, quietly concluded that the objects were commercial aircraft approaching an airport and that their alignment had fooled ground observers.
The explanation was never publicized, Reason said.
Reason’s documents had an explanation for the Coast Guard sightings that Mr. Smith, the congressman, had highlighted. Airplanes landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport were making S-shaped approaches that made them appear to be hovering.
Reports of drones still pop up in online forums, where Ms. Leavitt’s explanation is often met with skepticism.
The New York Post added a wrinkle to the story this fall with an article saying a government contractor had claimed to be the source of the drone sightings.
The Post said the contractor took credit — or blame, as the case may be — during a drone conference at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in August.
“You remember that big UFO scare in New Jersey last year? Well, that was us,” the Post said an employee of a contractor told conferencegoers.
The Post didn’t name the contractor, but NJ Advance Media said it tracked down the firm and the contractor denied any involvement. It said it “has never conducted flights in New Jersey.”
Brett Feddersen, a former national security liaison at the FAA and now with D-Fend Solutions, a counterdrone firm that supplies the U.S. government, told The War Zone, an online outlet, that his best read was that some of the Jersey drones were regular aircraft, some were FAA-approved drone operations, including commercial drones, and some may even have been foreign adversaries using the chaos to slip in their own surveillance.
“I think what caused a lot of the — for lack of a better term — hysteria was a poor response by the government to address the public’s fear and considerations. Poor communication between inter-agencies,” he told The War Zone.
Mr. Feddersen said it was “highly unlikely” that the sightings were counter-drone tests because those would have been conducted in a more controlled manner.
One professor who studies drones told The Washington Times to look elsewhere for a story, “rather than rehashing failed experiments that should have been closed down before public attention” grew.
