Drones over New Jersey?

The contagion is spreading.

Unexplained Drone Sightings Reach Philly Area

[Emphasis added]
"The drones, some of them as large as cars, :rolleyes: appeared throughout the night Sunday night and into Monday morning."
https://patch.com/pennsylvania/across-pa/unexplained-drone-sightings-reach-philly-area
I had some friends work for Patch back in the day; almost had to work for them myself. Theoretically real local news from personal reporting, but since you had to generate enough page views to get enough ad revenue to pay for your time and generate a profit and there was no budget to go anywhere they got stuck having to pull from social media and press releases and televised meetings. Or, in this case, just uncritically rehash other people's sensational coverage.
 
Has "Americans for Safe Aerospace" issued a statement regarding these shooting/laser threats yet? Someone ought to talk to Ryan Graves.
Ever noticed how a lut of the big names in UFOs are completely silent when this kind of thing happens..
 
One thing that seems to be confusing people is the distance at which you can actually see aeroplanes. Big planes far away are being confused with small drones that are up close. Here's an example - this guy checks his FlightRadar24 and sees no planes nearby , but then looks up and sees six or seven 'drones' (planes) that are near the horizon (and therefore far away!). But he cant see them on his Flightradar24 map because he's really zoomed in on his location.

Source: https://x.com/DougSpac/status/1865964637537071127?t=-B4-Av2BF2C4CaB1SR--SQ&s=19

View attachment 74219

If he'd zoomed out on FlightRadar24 he would have seen that there were a lot more aircraft at a slightly greater distance away, and were at sufficient altitude to be seen....

https://www.flightradar24.com/2024-12-09/00:57/20x/40.59,-74.84/11
View attachment 74220

That reminds me of Alison Kruse who lived in Pennsylvania. She would film the flight patterns in her region and claim that the UFO/orbs were in the trees close to her property. Some people simply don't understand just how far away aviation lights can be seen.

https://www.youtube.com/@seeingUFOsPA/videos
 
Sorry fast moving thread. Apologies if this one has been posted. Quite worrying if the local police are putting drones up to monitor what they believe are drones. It would be interesting to see their footage?


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf065dJDX3U

I hate how sketchy national news segments have become; they're like TL:DRs of actual news. Some of the social media footage is of airplanes; the background image looks like some commercial eVTOL car. The police are trying to get eyes on drones they've been told are "twice of the size" of their drone, so what happens if/when there's actually nothing that large to find?

It's not clear which drones Gen. McCaffrey is expressing concerns about - the vague reports of drones over military bases -- at least one of which we know turned out to be an LED kite -- or the more recent days of the flap. It seems ludicrous to suggest some foreign actor needs to test their ability to stealthily deliver bombs (or scout) using large drones running FAA warning lights -- they might have gotten less-reactionary comments from someone familiar with modern commercial drone technology, or the actual military use in Ukraine. (DJI sells commercial drones that can carry 30-40 kg of any cargo to designated coordinates; it's concerning, but it's not untested or mystery tech.)
 
So at 1:13 -- Venus setting, or Jupiter rising? Both are prominent right now, Venus early in the evening and Jupiter later. Or am I totally wrong?

I was in Harmony Township, NJ (Warren County is one of the spots news crews "filmed drones" and where mayors and the state legislative reps have called for investigations into drone activity) yesterday evening and Jupiter was very bright. I was ~3mi south from Martin's Creek power plant and filmed aircraft in that direction which, if you misjudged the distances and did not correctly identify them as planes, could look like they were drones flying low over the power plant, as the news reporters and politicians have claimed is occurring (I did not see any drones while I was there).

Here is a video filmed looking NW-NE following flight FDX3719 as it goes ESE towards EWR. Video begins at 5:38:13PM EST. about 2:20 into the video you can see it cross the line of sight to the power plant, which has a vertical tower of blinking white visibility lights. As it keeps going further east, Jupiter, Capella, Aldebaran passes within the frame. Jupiter comes in at 3:12 in the video. There is no engine sound from the plane at this distance, and though it looks "low, right over the power plant", the plane is ~5 miles ground distance from the power plant at its closest point, and over a mile and a half up off the ground. Completely normal. There were at minimum several different aircraft visible from where I was filming, continuously, the whole time I was there. All on flightradar.

I'm just linking the video directly from my google photos backup so as to not have to re-upload it here:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/UP2F9MRG7GLRRCsv9

Flightradar and map of locations:

Screenshot 2024-12-09 at 3.35.27 PM copy2.png

Stellarium:
Screenshot 2024-12-09 at 3.25.18 PM.png


Lights identified:
Screenshot 2024-12-09 at 3.51.55 PM copy.png
 
Hey where are the Tedesco's at isn't this the exact thing their van is for? And they are sort of nearby in New York.
it'd be interesting to see whether they can actually identify aircraft when they know which way their camera is pointed

that said, their marine radar probably isn't allowed to operate just anywhere?
 
Not to cause a fuss, but is the sheer volume of craft/drones in the air somehow up for debate, given the fact that multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, elected officials on the state, county and local levels (including the Governor and White House and Congress) are all affirming they are real?

Certainly some are misidentified craft, but should the focus not be on figuring out who / what is happening, rather than picking a few easy "THAT one was definitely an airplane or chopper" stuff to focus on?

Are you all openly disputing or trying to debunk whether the drone swarms/fleets/whatever term are actually happening?
 
Certainly some are misidentified craft, but should the focus not be on figuring out who / what is happening, rather than picking a few easy "THAT one was definitely an airplane or chopper" stuff to focus on?
we're actually looking for "that was definitely not an airplane", and you really should count only these when talking about "sheer volume".
 
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Not to cause a fuss, but is the sheer volume of craft/drones in the air somehow up for debate, given the fact that multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, elected officials on the state, county and local levels (including the Governor and White House and Congress) are all affirming they are real?
Define "real." All I see so far is people (police officers and the governor included) simply repeating repeated claims.

Case in point:

Source: https://x.com/UAPJames/status/1866219449386156330
 
Not to cause a fuss, but is the sheer volume of craft/drones in the air somehow up for debate, given the fact that multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, elected officials on the state, county and local levels (including the Governor and White House and Congress) are all affirming they are real?
I have seen a bunch of law enforcement officials and politicians say that they are hearing about it and want it investigated, but I think this is mostly a game of telephone (with a handful of credulous/mistaken firsthand witnesses among politicians and police as well). I think they are mostly basing their statements on the large number of other civilian reports of unidentified drones, but those reports are overwhelmingly not drones (or at least not confirmed to be drones) when you look into them. And for those where information provided is enough to identify it as a normal airplane, details in the original witness descriptions are often wildly flat-out wrong, like the size and speed and ground location and height above the ground. I do not think the reports have been investigated and filtered through enough to actually determine how many of them were genuinely drones, if any. The sheer number of reports, and the fact that many of the reports are now coming from or being parroted by legitimate news agencies, is making the phenomenon of widespread unidentified drone activity sound more credible to officials than it actually is. Politicians and law enforcement agencies do have a legitimate duty to look into it if they hear a bunch of people reporting that swarms of drones are flying all over including close to private residences and over critical infrastructure. It's just that this probably is not actually happening.

I spent several hours in the evening on this past Saturday and Sunday in Warren County and Morris County and there is a huge number of normal aircraft visible all over the sky, in every direction. I did not see a single moving light in the sky that could not be correlated to the flight tracker.

I had a twitter exchange with someone in NJ who filmed craft from their house and they said they gave it to police and the police told her it was drones. The craft in the video look like airliners, and move in trajectories that are plausible airliner paths, in a region full of airliners. Nothing in the video indicates the craft are anything other than commercial airliners. I get the sense that they did not check flight trackers.
 
I guess I can't get past this notion that 'everyone' is allegedly mistaken. I get guarding against mass hysteria, but you guys need to carefully caution on pumping the brakes so hard that you crash from that.

Here is EMS services alerting about drones in a specific area to warn Medivac flights:


Source: https://x.com/EthicalTruther/status/1866164532453740849



Is the hesitancy based on the fact that we're only going by the statements so far of government officials, due to the still generally poor quality of the photographic/video evidence?

At a certain point, don't we have to move past silly Greenstreet-type arguments that it's all mass hysteria, given the bizarre quiet from the Federal level and the insistance by basically everyone speaking from any official position that they are drones, but of uncertain origin?
 
Certainly some are misidentified craft, but should the focus not be on figuring out who / what is happening, rather than picking a few easy "THAT one was definitely an airplane or chopper" stuff to focus on?
Fair enough; where are the ones where THAT one was definitely a car-sized drone?" There are none that I've seen. Zero. There're only one or two I've seen thatvappear to be even ordinary consumer drones, plus a few that appear to be a planet.

I don't think low hanging fruit is being picked here, there does not seem to be ANY "high hanging fruit!"


...the still generally poor quality of the photographic/video evidence?
Plenty of the evidence is sufficient to identify what is shown. None of it shows big mystery drones. Unless I'm missing some of the evidence -- please, if I'm wrong about that show me, as I'm staking myself out pretty strongly on this one among friends and family, so if I need to backtrack I'd appreciate the heads-up!
 
Is the hesitancy based on the fact that we're only going by the statements so far of government officials, due to the still generally poor quality of the photographic/video evidence?
I would just like see the dots connected better than they have been on this story.

Where did EMS Radio get their info from? Based on that short transmission, we have no idea if it's just someone told someone something someone told them. In this day and age I require something substantial to back up whatever claims are being made, regardless of how "official" the source may be. When I hear "5 to 7 drones flying at a high level", I've very little reason to believe that to be accurate, and every reason to believe that they could be misidentified planes, helicopters, or simply the result of miscommunication.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as interested as the next person if there are several drones behaving suspiciously in a particular locale. Thus far, however, it's mostly been unverified gossip.
 
I guess I can't get past this notion that 'everyone' is allegedly mistaken. I get guarding against mass hysteria, but you guys need to carefully caution on pumping the brakes so hard that you crash from that.

Here is EMS services alerting about drones in a specific area to warn Medivac flights:


Source: https://x.com/EthicalTruther/status/1866164532453740849



Is the hesitancy based on the fact that we're only going by the statements so far of government officials, due to the still generally poor quality of the photographic/video evidence?

At a certain point, don't we have to move past silly Greenstreet-type arguments that it's all mass hysteria, given the bizarre quiet from the Federal level and the insistance by basically everyone speaking from any official position that they are drones, but of uncertain origin?

The lack of any volume of solid reports, photos or videos not identifiable as aircraft goes against the idea that there's a mass appearance of mystery drones in the last few days in New York and New Jersey.

We do have solid reports of law enforcement and hobbyists -- who may or may not have any experience hunting drones -- putting up drones to look for drones, so we know there are some drones in the sky.

We do have a lot of people going out and looking for lights in the sky who apparently don't have a baseline understanding of the sky or their equipment to compare with. Plus we have hoaxers. Plus, every jurisdiction with aircraft has had probably issues with drone being in the way in the last few years and we don't know what their baselines are.

That particular Gloucester County alert is a frustrating data point, in that we don't know what they're responding to -- could be an eagle-eyed special forces guy with night-vision goggles definitively identifying drones, could be a response to called-in civilian reports that may be mistaken and forwarded along as an alert about an abundance of caution.
 
I guess I can't get past this notion that 'everyone' is allegedly mistaken.
Well, I suppose I'm always going to be a product of, "Weapons of Mass Destruction."

In that case, literally everyone was mistaken. And the stakes were exponentially higher than the current drone scare over New Jersey.

*Although in the case of WMD, even allowing for the possibility of them being "mistaken" is probably more charitable than I'd like to be. But that's an entirely different topic.
 
I guess I can't get past this notion that 'everyone' is allegedly mistaken. I get guarding against mass hysteria, but you guys need to carefully caution on pumping the brakes so hard that you crash from that.
Please think about what your stance would have been on the witch hunts a few centuries ago.

given the bizarre quiet from the Federal level
the people actually responsible won't commit to a statement if they don't have the evidence to support it
 
...we don't know what they're responding to -- could be an eagle-eyed special forces guy with night-vision goggles definitively identifying drones...

But we should keep in mind that the "Snoopie Team" member(s?) on at least one Navy ship, using night vision gear, identified an airplane and a handful of stars as triangular/pyramidal drones. As it turns out, analyzing the video showed this to be in error. So far, the video available in this case shows that claims that a mysterious drone has been videoed are also in error. I'd remain deeply skeptical of such claims made without the evidence being made... well... evident.


Source: https://youtu.be/pbxtTEWczRk
 
Gov. Phil Murphy is saying they are sophisticated, when you "get eyes on them they go dark",
that's UFO-speak for "we can't find them", which is unsurprising if the reported close-by drone is actually a far-away aircraft
and that the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Secret Service, state police, and authorities at all levels of government, are investigating.
"investigating" means "we haven't found any".
Remember that local law enforcement is elected in the US, so if the voters see an issue for law enforcement, they'd better be seen doing something.
 
My hypothesis is that there have been some drone events that warrant investigation, but the situation is overblown.
I'd agree that there are almost surely some drone sightings in the mix, drones are very common, lots of people have and fly them for lots of reasons -- and now of course we have official and unofficial "drone hunters" launching more drones to look for drones, so more people will inevitably see some drones. But none of THAT is mysterious nor significant beyond showing how a "flap" can waste time, and money.

But to safeguard UFO secrets, our monitoring and inter-department/inter-agency communication systems are deliberately dysfunctional. UFO secrecy is prioritized over air defense, and that is becoming more and more of an issue with the emerging drone swarm threats. So we either have to relax on UFO secrecy, or remain vulnerable to attacks.
What is your evidence to back up those assumptions?
 
a conspiracy theory is never a "best fit"
[referring to "But to safeguard UFO secrets, our monitoring and inter-department/inter-agency communication systems are deliberately dysfunctional"]

Ultimately, there are sophisticated DoD air monitoring systems that would have to have the answers. Assuming they do, it remains to be explained why it hasn't been settled yet. The simplest and most plausible answer is that the protocols are set up so that information pertaining to secretive activities in the airspace, whether unconventional technology of ours, an adversary, or from somewhere else, remains protected. And the consequence is hardly anybody has a clue what's going on, and we have a limited number of people cleared to address it.
 
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Ultimately, there are sophisticated DoD air monitoring systems that would have to have the answers.
not in evidence / physically impossible
"the government knows everything" is a conspiracy theory
Assuming they do,
they don't
it remains to be explained why it hasn't been settled yet.
because they don't have the answers
The simplest and most plausible answer is that
they don't know
the protocols are set up so that information pertaining to secretive activities in the airspace, whether unconventional technology of ours, an adversaries, or from somewhere else, remains protected.
yes. but take, for example, spy satellite imagery. there's a large number of people who work with that classified information, otherwise it'd be useless. The system is set up such that entities with the need to know get access.
And the consequence is hardly anybody has a clue what's going on,
that's because nobody knows much about something that does not exist
and we have a small and limited number of people cleared to address it.
see above, there's no evidence for that, and it makes no sense

you have absolutely no evidence for your claims, they're 100% fiction
 
I guess I can't get past this notion that 'everyone' is allegedly mistaken.

I'm sure you're right in that some of the sightings will be of drones, because many people fly drones, not all responsibly. I think many posters here are as interested in why this has become a flap as they are in debunking individual photos/ vids.
If drones are something to be legitimately alarmed about*, maybe they shouldn't be sold to pretty much anyone who wants one for a few hundred dollars.

What seems unusual in this flap is that some photos/ footage of what are very clearly conventional aircraft, often on known flightpaths as demonstrated by other posters here, are being treated by so many people as evidence of unusual drone activity.
Other lights in the sky might also be misidentified, and we've seen a (fixed!) marker on power lines presented as a mystery drone.

There is no evidence of an organised mass use of drones for a specific purpose in New Jersey, although I wouldn't be surprised if a few pranksters are getting in on the act.

None of the reported drones appear to have harmed anyone or anything, so apart from visual recce it's hard to see what use they might be to a "bad actor". The numbers and locations of reported sightings, plus the supposed use of lights on the drones, must make hostile reconnaissance an unlikely explanation.
The Chinese or whatever probably aren't that interested in the suburbs and roads of New Jersey.

I'll make a prediction for 2025: No reliable imagery of a truly remarkable drone will emerge from these events. There will be no clear footage of car-sized drones of unknown origin. There will be no evidence of hostile military spec. UAV use in or around New Jersey.

UFO secrecy is prioritized over air defense
Considering the sums spent, R&D efforts made, training required and the sheer scale of American air defence assets (C3I, radar, air defence missiles, F-22 etc. etc.) I would be surprised if US Government spend and resources allocated to UFO investigation since 1947 is anywhere even remotely near 0.1% of military air defense spending.


*Would add, I personally think the potential for even quite modest off-the-shelf drones to be used for seriously harmful purposes is widely underestimated, but I don't see any signs of such use in the current NJ flap.
 
No doubt there is an all out race to build massive drone armies going on right now.

The first iteration of Replicator (Replicator 1), announced in August 2023, will deliver all-domain attritable autonomous systems (ADA2) to warfighters at a scale of multiple thousands, across multiple warfighting domains, within 18-24 months, or by August 2025. Replicator 1 is augmenting the way we fight, using large masses of uncrewed systems which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times.

https://www.diu.mil/replicator

Eventually, instead of thousands, it may be millions, and then maybe even billions, and they will get smaller, smarter/more autonomous, and able to stay in the air longer.

If it is really true that the combined effort of the Dep. of Homeland Security, FBI, secret service, and authorities at all levels, with current air monitoring capability, is insufficient to track conventional drones, it would not be a reassuring signal.
 
Ultimately, there are sophisticated DoD air monitoring systems that would have to have the answers.
I disagree. IF the answer is "people are caught up in a flap and seeing planes, planets and a few consumer drones and reporting them as car-sized mystery drones," then how could any air monitoring system know THAT? All they could know would be "we're not seeing it on our super-secret magic monitoring system." They could not arrive at the correct answer, in that scenario, by looking at their detection gear, since there would be nothing to detect to match the claims..
 
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