Q: Who is flying the drones that are appearing over the East Coast?
A: On Dec. 17, four federal agencies said they followed up more than 5,000 reported drone sightings and determined that they were lawful private and law enforcement drones and other aircraft “mistakenly reported as drones.” The agencies said the drones do not pose a security threat.
FULL QUESTION
Are there currently drones from China in Atlanta, GA?
FULL ANSWER
Over the past month, beginning Nov. 18, New Jersey residents have reported a number of drone sightings in at least 10 counties. The sightings initially sparked concern over their proximity to Picatinny Arsenal, a military research facility in Morris County.
Timothy Rider, a spokesperson for Picatinny Arsenal, confirmed in a Nov. 21 email to the War Zone, a military news site, that the drones were not theirs. “We remind everyone that it is unlawful to fly UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] over Picatinny Arsenal and any other federal military installation without prior authorization,” Rider said.
Rider told us in a phone interview that while it was difficult to pinpoint the location of the drones, they had been seen “over or near” Picatinny.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary flight restriction on Nov. 25, expanding the no-fly zone to areas within two nautical miles of Picatinny Arsenal, effective until Dec. 26. On Dec. 4, the FAA issued an additional temporary flight restriction, effective until Dec. 20, for Bedminster, New Jersey, where one of President-elect Donald Trump’s golf courses is located.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy posted on X about the drones on Dec. 5, saying, “We are actively monitoring the situation and in close coordination with our federal and law enforcement partners on this matter. There is no known threat to the public at this time.”
On Dec. 18 and 19, the FAA added flight restrictions on unmanned aerial vehicles over 22 other cities and towns in New Jersey until Jan. 17, referring to the locations as “national defense airspace” and “critical New Jersey infrastructure.”
Drone sightings have raised concerns and prompted actions in other states — including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia and Georgia.
In New York, runways at the New York Stewart Airport were closed for about an hour because of drone activity near the airport.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, closed its airspace for about four hours on Dec. 13 to 14 when “small unmanned aerial systems” were seen in the base’s restricted airspace, an Air Force spokesperson told a local news station. Authorities “determined none of the incursions impacted base residents, facilities, or assets,” the spokesperson said.
In Boston, two men were arrested on Dec. 14 and faced trespassing charges for flying a drone too close to Logan International Airport’s airspace, police told NBC10 Boston. An officer was able to determine the drone operators’ location on Long Island in Boston Harbor.
Drones also were reportedly seen over neighborhoods in Cobb County in the Atlanta metro area. FBI Atlanta officials told Fox 5 in a Dec. 15 statement, “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”
Floating Unsupported Theories
Politicians and social media users have spread various theories about the origin of the drones.
New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew said on Fox News on Dec. 11 that the drones were launched from an Iranian “mothership” located “off the East Coast of the United States,” and said his information came from “high sources” in the government.
Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh responded to Van Drew’s remarks in a press briefing the same day. “There is not any truth to that,” Singh said. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”
A day later, Van Drew returned to Fox News and restated his claims, calling his sources “dependable, credible individuals that have security clearance.” But he sounded less definitive about Iran’s involvement.
“They were, in essence, whistle-blowers and said, look, they believe there’s a real possibility it could be Iran, that there could be a ship out [there],” Van Drew said. He also suggested that the drones might have been sent by China, referencing the spy balloon incident from January 2023.
Social media users have echoed Van Drew’s claims that Iran was responsible for the drones. Others have suggested aliens or the U.S. military itself are the source of the drones.
President-elect Donald Trump claimed during a wide-ranging press conference on Dec. 16, “The government knows what is happening.”
“Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it’s a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don’t want to comment,” Trump said, adding, “Our military knows and our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense.”
No Evidence of Foreign Involvement
Four days prior to Trump’s press conference, John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications at the White House, did provide comment regarding the drones, saying on Dec. 12 that the Coast Guard found “no evidence of any foreign-based involvement from coastal vessels.”
In a Dec. 16 interview on Fox News, Kirby said that a government analysis of the drones found they are “lawful, legal, commercial hobbyist and even law enforcement aircraft activity.”
“Some of it’s manned, some of it’s unmanned. We absolutely acknowledge that a lot of these are probably drones, but they’re flying legally. And it is legal to fly drones in non-restricted airspace as long as you’re registered with the FAA and there’s thousands of these kinds of flights every single day,” Kirby said.
Kirby also said in a Dec. 17 CNN interview that “thousands upon thousands [of drones] fly in U.S. airspace legally every single day, including in the northeast corridor. In fact, that’s one of the busiest areas.”
He later added, “people are right to see these things and be concerned about it. I mean, I think what you’re seeing, honestly, is the huge ecosystem of drones now really coming to light. … [M]aybe people just didn’t appreciate how many of these things are flying in U.S. airspace every single day, and it’s only going to get more,” Kirby said. “The numbers are only going to increase as the utility of these drones for commercial and law enforcement purposes, in particular, become apparent.”
More than a million drones were registered with the FAA as of Dec. 2, including 403,000 commercial drones and 387,000 recreational drones.
On Dec. 17, the FBI released a joint statement with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the FAA saying they had followed up the “more than 5,000 reported drone sightings” over recent weeks with “advanced detection technology” and “trained visual observers.”
“Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens,” the statement said, “we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones. We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast.”
Pramod Abichandani, an associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Applied Engineering and Technology, told CBS News on Dec. 13 that he reviewed some of the “eyewitness videos” of reported drone activity and consulted with other experts. “Some of them are not drones, some of them are just straight-up your helicopters and manned aircrafts. It’s just air traffic,” he said.
“On the other hand,” said Abichandani, who is also director of the Robotics and Data Lab at NJIT, “there are drones that look like the kind of drones you would purchase off a vendor’s website. Those are big drones, but they still display the characteristics of a commercially available drone. And then there are some videos … that it’s hard to ascertain whether these are really like small aircraft that are being piloted by somebody in them or are these like slightly bigger-type drones that are being remotely piloted.”
Of the size and range of the drones being reported, Abichandani said: “It is true that these are not the recreational drone types, but it is also true that, you know, they’re not like massive, sort of the bigger drones that you see with long-range endurance that usually the military uses.”
Juan Alfonso, director of the Aerospace Design Laboratory at Stanford University, told us in an email that general aviation aircraft, such as Cessna jets, which are smaller than commercial planes and fly at lower altitudes, and military cargo and observation planes are “easily confused” with drones.
“It is not easy to tell whether an aircraft … is manned or unmanned,” Alfonso said.
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