Drones over New Jersey?

[RTM]

Ignoring witness testimony again!

It's probably not that black and white.

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

Reason Magazine has obtained documents via FOIA from the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), dated December 17, 2024 which provide what I think is more concrete detail than has been released by any agency or white house statement so far, indicating that some federal officials were much more intimately aware that specific incidents running through news media and social media alleging mysterious and anomalous drone/UAP activity were in fact misidentified helicopters and airplanes. They had the information that could help clarify and tamp down on misinformation, but for whatever reason, the administration did not make it available and did not address specific widely-reported incidents they believed were reported on in a misleading way. This information is not classified, these are all referring to public flight data, it is only marked 'for official use only' (stricken out in the FOIA release). This is only one slide deck for one meeting from one agency, covering 4 incidents. I wonder how many other documents exist that can shed light on other investigations of "drone" incidents.

https://reason.com/2025/05/09/what-the-feds-knew-about-the-new-jersey-drone-scare/

The TSA slides (also attached):
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25930815-25-0428-2025-hqfo-01883-final-records-0/

The resolved cases include the incident early into this NJ drone hysteria period on Nov 26, 2024 in which a NJ State Police medevac helicopter approaching a car crash site to pick up an injured person was forced to divert course when firefighters on the ground spotted a group of drones nearby and determined them to be a flight risk. This case was referred to the FBI for official investigation, and as we now know, federal law enforcement believes the firefighters saw distant planes and mistook them for closer drones. This incident in particular went viral because of the nature of it the story: illegally-operating drones tangibly interfering with emergency response services.

https://www.nj.com/somerset/2024/12...king-patient-to-nj-hospital-college-says.html

The other incident I recognize is a reported sighting of drones hovering over the nuclear power plant in Salem County, NJ. This one also went a bit viral also probably due to the story involving a nuclear power plant. Members of congress got involved and the power plant operator PSE&G responded to the story by requesting a TFR over the facility, which was granted and expanded to (I believe) all power facilities in the state. After investigating, the TSA determined there was a relatively low and slow-moving blackhawk helicopter and a small private plane in the line of sight south over the plant, and other planes departing Philadelphia airport flying away from the viewer would appear to be moving slowly in that direction.

https://nypost.com/2024/12/14/us-ne...over-nuclear-plant-as-mystery-drones-spotted/
https://vandrew.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1793

For this one they show flight tracks and give the aircraft registration numbers, so I went to look into it. The slide says it happened at 16:10 (December, so this would be EST (UTC-5), meaning 21:10 UTC). An issue here is that the flights they listed and displayed in the slide were not there at 21:10 UTC, they were there at 23:10 UTC (18:10 EST). So did the TSA just write the time down wrong on the slide maybe? Was the report from the witness actually for 18:10 EST (6:10 PM EST)? Could have confused 6:10PM for 16:10 in a transcribing step. Or was the sighting actually 16:10 EST and did the TSA identify the wrong flights because they converted the time wrong for their actual investigation?

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

I will add that using the marked location in the TSA map for the Salem power plant slide and assuming the actually correct time *was* 16:10 EST, the witness would have been looking pretty much straight down approach paths for Philadelphia and Wilmington airports, and these two planes were in basically the same spot of sky the TSA shows for the blackhawk helicopter, ~24 miles away, and would have been flying towards the witness at low angles for more than 10 minutes. AAL1662 going to PHL and VXP525 going to IHL. Other planes farther away on the same paths could very plausibly have been visible on a clear night. AAL1250 for example was at 12.6k ft altitude and 45 miles away. Difficult to see if landing lights were off but at 12k ft in increasingly busy airspace approaching the airport, the pilots may have decided to turn them on.

(map filtered to flights under 15k ft)

line of sight + distance: