Mystery drone sightings continue to baffle the US and beyond

It was a dry and cool Wednesday evening outside the US Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, a longtime military installation that once made the bombs and shells that led to victory in World War II. A contractor there knocked off work and decided to wait out rush-hour traffic. He picked up some takeout from Wawa, parked outside a nearby wildlife preserve and settled in to watch an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast on his phone. Then he saw a flash in the side mirror.

A light rising straight up from the tree line and towards the arsenal. He started recording. Could it have been a plane?

Or was it a drone?

Points of light appear in the evening sky near Lebanon Township, New Jersey.Credit: AP

And so began what seems to be the origin story of the ongoing drone saga. The contractor called in his sighting to his superiors on November 13, and others followed quickly, first throughout the county, then the rest of New Jersey, then into neighbouring states.

Countless people have reported mysterious hovering objects dotting the night skies and posted blurred images – a white light, a black background – on social media. Every day, for weeks. Drones. Drones?

Small drones. Drones as big as vans. Blinking, stationary, speeding and zipping and buzzing.

Jeffrey Parker first saw them outside his Vineland, New Jersey, apartment building. He was barefoot, checking the mail, and there they were: three lights flying low and slow.

“I was like damn, that’s not airplanes,” said Parker, 65.

Was it a foreign government? Our own government? Kids? Visitors from space?

The story grew to consume police departments, sheriffs, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, a former reality TV star with a supposed inside line to NASA, mayors, governors, the White House and the president-elect.

Officers operate a drone while surveilling for other drone activity in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, this month.Credit: Dave Sanders/The New York Times

But now it appears increasingly likely that if there were any drones at all, it was very few, and that most of the drones people did see — stay with this — were up there looking for the drones people thought they were seeing.

Mounting evidence, and lack thereof, suggests that perhaps the whole craze has been a sort of communal fever dream fuelled by crowd mentality, confirmation bias and a general distrust in all things official.

This explanation has been widely rejected by those sharing their personal drone experiences, leaving them feeling belittled and gaslit and creating the kind of hothouse where conspiracy theories take root, grow and thrive.

‘Out in the Ocean’

Five days after the arsenal sighting, on November 18, drones were reported, there and elsewhere in surrounding Morris County. A Facebook page called Live Storm Chasers with 1.3 million followers posted a five-drone sighting.

The Morris County Prosecutors Office issued a statement from sheriffs, police chiefs and emergency officials that simultaneously acknowledged and downplayed the sightings and urged people to “be mindful that what they read online may not be accurate”.

Scanning the night sky for drones at Island Beach State Park, in Lanoka Harbour, New Jersey.Credit: Dave Sanders/The New York Times

Still, a day later, the FBI quietly opened its own investigation into the drones. The agency would later announce a drone hotline and receive about 5000 tips.

And the Federal Aviation Administration posted temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over the arsenal and, shortly after, the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster.

The owner of that club would weigh in soon enough.

November turned to December, and without any new, proved evidence or data to frame what was happening, the story exploded. A lack of facts became pure oxygen on social media and, on its heels, mainstream media. Even people’s Ring doorbells, equipped to alert users with messages from other Ring users, began to ping out drone sightings.

Jessica Fiorentino, 33, a mother of two young children in Toms River, had heard about drones, but when she went to the beach one night, she couldn’t believe what she saw.

“All the way out in the ocean, drones,” she said on Friday in an interview. “Some would stay above the ocean, and some would come onto the land.” She alerted her followers on TikTok and kept going out, every night, sometimes to other beaches, always posting videos.

“They are very low in Seaside Heights right now,” she said in a video on a recent December night, pointing out two lights.

“Part of me is starting to maybe think that red drone is someone’s drone, like someone here, putting it up, like police,” she reported. “And the one above it is the unidentified drone.” The video was viewed more than 393,000 times.

The federal government was widely seen as being slow to react and confusing in its messaging, which was essentially “Don’t panic, but be vigilant.”

Then came December 8 at Island Beach State Park, a narrow stripe of coastline in southern New Jersey. A State Park Police officer contacted the local Ocean County Sheriff’s office with a frightening report right out of a summer blockbuster.

“Fifty drones were coming from the ocean toward the mainland,” Sheriff Michael Mastronardy told Fox News. He rushed to the beach and met the officer. “She had legitimate information she provided,” Mastronardy said in a recent interview.

Many reported sightings are from people seeing the official drones up looking for supposed drones.Credit: Dave Sanders/The New York Times

The next night, Mastronardy was joined by a Republican member of Congress, Chris Smith, who wanted a firsthand look.

He said the drones “have so far evaded identification, origin, mission or potential threat to Americans” and criticised the Biden administration for not taking them seriously.

Senator Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, was frustrated by a lack of information, so he accompanied police officers on December 12 to three sites that had been flooded with drone calls.

“They were kind of pointing out things that were flying,” he said. “Some, they were like, ‘That’s a drone.’ These are police officers. They’ve been out there for weeks now.”

He took videos and showed them to aviation experts, who convinced him the objects were actually manned aircraft.

“It kind of highlighted to me: This is the information that people need,” he said.

Other lawmakers have suggested that the drones should be shot out of the sky. Some people may have tried to heed that call, in a way. Plane and helicopter pilots reported dozens of incidents of lasers being pointed at them over New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in early December. Shining a laser at an aircraft can injure or blind the pilot, and is a federal crime. The FBI responded and urged people to stop.

Fiorentino, her once-MomTok now a full-time DroneTok, was still recording every night, and growing more alarmed at what she was seeing.

“There’s stuff spraying out of them – this is new to me,” she said in a video on December 15. That video was viewed 485,000 times, and another she posted about spraying got 2.8 million views.

Jennifer McDonald, 48, taking her 15-minute break outside a Walmart in Pennsville, still hadn’t seen a drone well into December. Her husband kept asking her. Then she went outside and looked up.

“Hot damn,” she said. She called her husband on FaceTime and they spent her whole break watching the little lights in the sky together.

Aircraft and stars

By mid-December, after weeks of shrugs, the federal government stepped up its attempt to explain what was going on. In short, officials said: They’re not drones.

An FBI representative told reporters that of the 5000 hotline tips it received, fewer than 100 leads had been generated and deemed worthy of further investigation.

Four federal agencies quickly echoed that analysis, saying the bright lights floating or flying in the night sky above New Jersey were planes, helicopters, stars or drones that were not suspicious.

The messaging did not appear to resonate among the people looking up. Kim, out shopping with his two sons at a Lego store recently, was approached with one question.

“What is happening with the drones?”

Bethenny Frankel, formerly of The Real Housewives of New York City, became another regular drone reporter on TikTok.

“I know this guy whose father worked with the Pentagon and NASA and secret projects, and he has been messaging me that he will never forgive himself if he doesn’t tell the people he knows,” she began in a post last week. “These drones are ours and quite possibly could be sniffing out something dangerous.”

The next morning, the Good Day New York program on Fox reported her claim, “and that it has something to do with radioactive material in New Jersey,” Rosanna Scotto, the host, said on air.

At a news conference on December 16, the same day the federal agencies said most reported drone sightings were not drones, President-elect Donald Trump was asked about the situation, and he chuckled.

“The government knows what is happening,” he said. “For some reason, they don’t want to comment.” He seemed to allude to the airspace restrictions over his club in Bedminster, where he said he had planned to go the next weekend.

“I think maybe I won’t spend the weekend in Bedminster,” he said. “I decided to cancel my trip.”

By the end of the week, looking to literally clear the air, the FAA announced a ban on drone use in airspace above critical infrastructure in more than 90 communities in New Jersey and New York.

And Kim said on Friday that federal drone detecting devices that had been put in place in hot spots in recent weeks had not detected any drones.

This will probably do little to calm a jittery public.

In Toms River, Fiorentino said she’ll keep posting TikTok videos. “We have no answers,” she said. “They’re still here. I hear more counties are getting them. More states are getting them.”

And, if she’s being honest, it’s a nice diversion after a long day of work and kids. “People are relying on me to go out there,” she said. “For me it was like, OK, I can take a break from the chaos inside.”

At Picatinny Arsenal, where it all began weeks ago, the contractor who reported what he saw in his car’s mirror has otherwise stayed quiet about the incident, telling just a few colleagues and an old college classmate. He is speaking out now on the condition that his name be withheld because he is not authorised to address the matter. As he has watched the drone frenzy spread across the country, he said he can’t help but worry he’s to blame.

“I feel,” he said, “like I’ve caused mass hysteria.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.