E.T., drone home.
When it comes to the mysterious drones — said to be the size of SUVs — buzzing New Jersey and panicking residents, experts say there are only a few possible explanations:
1. A foreign adversary — possibly Iran, Russia or China — is launching them, from either the Atlantic ocean or bodies of water in New Jersey.
2. A private company like Amazon is testing out delivery drones — and is under no obligation to report the experiments to local authorities.
3. Eccentric hobbyists and/or copycats are trolling the state and the media with repeated fly-bys of the vehicles — one of which had the “wingspan of a 747,” a truck driver from Oxford, NJ told The Post.
4. The US government is behind the bizarre drone sightings, and is lying to everyone about not knowing what they are.
5. Or we’re all imagining it — at least according to what White House national security communications adviser John Kirby said Thursday.
“Upon review of available imagery, it appears many of the reports of sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully,” Kirby said.
Here’s what we know about the mysterious drones hovering over NJ
- The drones first made headlines after a helicopter trying to pick up a crash victim had to turn around
- New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said the drones do not pose a threat to the public
- Drones appeared in Staten Island days later as local pols want answers
- NJ Rep. Jeff Van Drew claims the drones are coming from Iran and should be shot down
- Drones appeared in NYC early Thursday morning
- White House officials claim people are mistaking drones for helicopters and airplanes in the sky
Do you have footage of drones over the skies of New Jersey or New York? Send it to The Post at [email protected].
Military? ‘Then someone should be fired’
What’s especially unusual, however, is that the drones are apparently able to avoid traditional methods of detection, leading both authorities on drones from the military as well as UAP experts to say they could pose a danger to the public.
Not good enough, says Brett Velicovich, a former US Army special operations intelligence analyst and former Delta Force soldier who has specialized in drones, drone warfare and counter-terrorism.
Velicovich said that when he was in the Army, they tested drones across the US but always coordinated with local law enforcement so there would not be any confusion.
“If the US government is behind this, then someone should be fired,” Velicovich told The Post Thursday. “The whole point is, you don’t want to cause public hysteria. You’ve got to wonder if someone is taking advantage of the security gap right now between the Biden and Trump administrations.”
Velicovich added that it’s illogical for anyone in our government to test drones above northern New Jersey.
“There is a reason why [the classified Nevada air base] Area 51 tests missile and spy planes —because it’s in the middle of nowhere in a controlled environment,” Velicovich added.
It’s a lot like a past mystery …
A congressional hearing on the mystery ended Tuesday with FBI officials throwing their hands up in the air and claiming they know nothing – in echoes of an eerily similar case of bizarre drone formations that plagued Northeastern Colorado and Western Nebraska between December 2019 and January 2020.
Witnesses at the time said the drones flew in grid formations in groups of up to 19 and were visible at night between 6 and 10 p.m. The Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI and local law enforcement investigated the sightings but, to this day, cannot say what they were.
“Nobody ever ‘fessed up,” Vic Moss, the Lakewood, Colorado-based CEO of Drone Service Providers Alliance and an FAA consultant, told The Post. “Something is very definitely going on but they didn’t solve the mystery out here, that’s for sure.”
The large drones here have been spotted hovering across the night skies across Jersey for weeks, baffling residents with mysterious arrays of flashing lights and seemingly aimless movements.
Sometimes numerous objects have been spotted flying in formation, and they’ve begun appearing across parts of New York, including Staten Island and South Brooklyn, too.
The first reported sightings started on November 18, and have continued every night since — often above facilities like the Picatinny Arsenal military base in Northwest New Jersey, as well as reservoirs and train stations.
Ron Nussbaum, 35, of Oxford, NJ, in Warren County, told The Post he saw a drone-like craft “with the wingspan of a 747 jet” Saturday night — just one of literally hundreds of sightings reported by New Jersey residents in the last few weeks.
“There were two white flashing lights on either wing and it made a hairpin turn at a 90-degree angle and basically stopped when it made the turn,” Nussbaum said. “The other drones we’ve seen were about the size of a SUV, some made a sound, some had no sound at all. There have been at least 100 sightings at the Merrill Creek reservoir near me alone and most of the drones seem to be out between 6 to 10 at night.”
Nussbaum said he is more curious than scared and admitted he and his friends are now going “drone-hunting” whenever they can.
“Everyone you run into has seen something, and a lot of people are concerned. We want answers. Having the government tell us they don’t know what it is is not reassuring us. We’ll keep seeking the truth.”
The new ‘drone army’
But what worries Velicovich is that these apparent drones are appearing over New Jersey at a time when sophisticated drone warfare between Russia and Ukraine is overtaking regular types of weapons and combat.
So-called “kamikaze” drones used by Russia against Ukraine are equipped with explosives in a warhead on its nose and designed to loiter over a target until instructed to attack.
The Shahed-136 has a wingspan of about 8.2 feet and can be hard to detect on radar. The Russian Orlan-10 drones — stealth craft that fly in packs of three to five — sound similar to some of the drones being observed above New Jersey.
Ukraine, for its part, spent $550 million on its own “drone army” in 2023 that include so-called suicide drones that can easily attack enemy soldiers or civilians.
“I go to Ukraine all the time and their battlefield tech is years ahead of ours,” Velicovich said. “If this is indeed a foreign adversary doing this they are also showing the entire world how vulnerable the US is. I’ve thought for years there could be a catastrophic event involving drones, but yet our entire counter-drone technology budget is $500,000. Are they out of their mind?”
Several unidentified drones were spotted over three US Air Force bases in Britain just last month, according to CNN. US officials are still investigating the origins of the drones — but tell CNN that they do not appear to be crafts operated by hobbyists. Last year, dozens of drones were seen flying over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
Could it be Iran or China?
US Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) has doubled down on his belief that the drones are being launched at sea by an Iranian “mothership” — even though the Pentagon hotly denied this Wednesday.
“They’ve been incredibly stupid and incredibly weak with this,” Van Drew said Thursday.
“We know they’re not backyard drones that some hobbyist is using because they’re much more sophisticated than that. We know that they’re not a commercial company within the United States because we don’t even have this level of sophistication yet. We are a full decade behind where China is with drones. The government claims it’s not them. They say it’s not them, so who is it?”
Iranians shot down US drones in 2011 and 2019 and have openly stated they reverse engineered them to make their own.
China is a possible culprit as well. In addition to the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the US for three weeks in 2023, Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese national, was arrested this week by the feds for flying a drone and taking photos of the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Zhou was nabbed just before boarding a China-bound flight.
Or is it a UFO?
John Greenewald, a respected UFO and UAP expert who has run the Black Vault archive for years, says the New Jersey drone mystery is being incorporated online into the UFO world — but shouldn’t be.
“This is something that resembles advanced earth-based technology which represents an alarming security threat for the US mainland,” Greenewald told The Post.
“We’re not talking about anything otherworldly here, like aliens in the pop-culture sense. The bottom line is, the FBI doesn’t have answers based on this week’s hearing — and you’d think in the US if something was happening in our land we would know about it. Yesterday showed that we don’t. Imagine how we look to the rest of the world.”
Additional reporting by Matt McDermott