A drone dropped a mysterious, glowing object over a Staten Island neighborhood — and the NYPD took the matter seriously enough to do four flybys over the area, according to a retired NYPD detective who reported the strange scene.
The alarming sight unfolded around 6:15 a.m. on Dec. 14 while John Scotto was having his morning cigarette, he told The Post.
“I said it was an object with a small white light,” said Scotto, 59, who was sitting on his Rossville porch when a 7-foot-long, 2-foot-wide rectangular drone popped up over the treetops of thick woods just across the street.
Scotto, who retired from the NYPD in 2006, said the drone had white, red, and green flashing lights, and moved slowly — “no faster than 20 miles an hour.”
Whatever dropped out of the drone, Scotto said, “had a white light on it,” and was gone in a flash.
“It dropped out of the drone, and went straight towards the ground really fast,” Scotto explained. “It just immediately dropped and was out of sight.”
The large drone then hovered above his home momentarily, clearing his roof “by just 20 feet,” before disappearing into the distance.
“Based on the size of it, I’m sure it was a military drone,” Scotto told The Post. “It was no toy.”
Scotto called 911 to report the fallen object, and within 15 minutes, the NYPD was on the scene — but unsure how to handle the matter. “They said there’s really no procedure on this.”
An NYPD helicopter soon arrived and passed over the woods four times, Scotto said.
The descending object spotted by Scotto added another layer of mystery to the recent drone sightings over New Jersey and New York, which federal officials have downplayed. Alarming drone sightings in both states began more than a month ago.
The federal government has insisted the drones are actually misidentified manned aircraft, like helicopters and Cessna single-engine planes.
They’ve also said they pose no threat to people on the ground.
On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily restricted drone flights over 21 cities in New Jersey and another 30 in New York.
“I was angry, more than anything else, because the government is lying,” said Scotto. “I was pissed. They’re telling people they didn’t see drones in the sky, and the lame excuses they were giving. It made me angry.”
Scotto said he spent 90 minutes “extensively searching” those woods, “determined” to find the fallen object, only to come away with scratches on his legs, a couple of golf balls, and “a bunch of baseballs kids had lost.”
Scotto said he suspects the drones that have been cluttering the night skies were busy scouring the region, looking for some potential threat. He said he believes the implementation of FAA restrictions is a good sign.
“Maybe they completed their objective,” wondered Scotto. “I’m hopeful this is the case and whatever the threat was is now addressed.”
Arthur Erickson, CEO of drone manufacturer Hylio, has two theories on what Scotto witnessed.
“I think we can safely rule out that it was a weapon or anything particularly dangerous that was dropped,” Erickson said, noting the FAA rarely permits payload drops.
“I think this was either some scientific instrumentation, like a weather balloon-like object that was dropped into the bay for example to measure something,” Erickson added. “It could have been simply a ‘dummy’ payload to simulate some sort of mission. Perhaps just some soft and light object to measure precision of a drop.”
He said he suspects the feds are “simulating how an adversarial actor would try to drop something dangerous from a drone and they’re simply observing how it would play out physically.”