There is perhaps no more quintessentially American phenomenon than widespread panic over strange lights in the sky and the unknown implications thereof. From Orson Welles’ panic-inducing broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” to popular culture’s obsession with flying saucers outside of Roswell, New Mexico, ours is a country that seemingly cannot help but look up and wonder: “What the heck is that?”
For the past several days, that has been the question on the minds of New Jersey residents baffled and unnerved by a sudden proliferation of supposed drones hovering over the Garden State without warning or explanation. The mysterious lights have prompted demands for federal investigation as speculation about the unmanned aerial vehicles runs rampant throughout the state and across the eastern seaboard. As theories abound and lawmakers urge calm, here’s what people know about the unexplained drone swarms, and why some officials are ringing the alarms about what they might mean.
The Biden administration has worked to preempt panic over the drone swarms. There is “no evidence at this time” that they “pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said last week. Nevertheless, “something’s going on,” Washington Township Mayor Matthew Murello said on “Good Morning America.” “I’m not trying to stir anything up, but we all know — if you just turn on the television — that drones can be used in an aggressive fashion.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
With recent unexplained drone sightings in “at least eight states,” there remains “significant confusion about the exact nature of the sightings,” CNN said. “There’s a lot of us that are pretty frustrated right now,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said on “Fox News Sunday.” For officials to say “‘We don’t know’ is not a good enough answer,” Himes said, demanding the government “put more information out there” to ease public concern. “More federal resources are needed to understand what is behind this activity,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) said in a letter to the Biden administration requesting aid in investigating the drones. “Existing laws limit the ability of state and local law enforcement” to conduct their own inquiries and counter-operations effectively.
Those limitations haven’t stopped some New Jersey officials from engaging in their own examinations. Over the weekend, Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) documented his own excursion with local police across Hunterdon County to get “different vantage points” on suspected drone activity.
Ultimately, “most of the possible drone sightings that were pointed out to me were almost certainly planes,” Kim said. Even so, Kim said, it’s “hard to understand how with the technology we have we aren’t able to track these devices to determine origin” — a challenge that made the senator “much more concerned about our capabilities more broadly when it comes to drone detection and countermeasures.”
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) has been even more aggressive, accusing defense officials of “hiding the truth” about the drones’ origins from an Iranian “mothership,” Politico said. Drew’s allegation, at which officials “balked,” only serves to highlight “how drones, once the play toy of amateur photographers, are fast becoming a national security concern.”
What next?
Biden administration officials have begun acting on requests from local lawmakers, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). Her “calls for additional resources” prompted “our federal partners” to send a “drone detection system to New York,” Hochul said on X. Still, “Congress must pass a law that will give us the power to deal directly with the drones,” Hochul said. Accordingly, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is “working to pass a bill in the Senate to give local law enforcement more tools for drone detection,” he said on X.
The incidents have also become partisan fodder in the waning days of the Biden administration. The White House’s lack of transparency on the sightings is a “reminder that the general attitude of this White House towards the American people has been, ‘you don’t need to know that,'” said Fox News’ David Marcus. And while President-elect Donald Trump “can’t imagine it’s the enemy,” the Biden administration would be “better off saying what it is our military knows and our president knows,” Trump said on Monday.
