As reports of strange lights in the sky over New Jersey and other parts of the East Coast have grown, government officials have been stating more firmly that, in essence, there is nothing to see here.
Officials from the F.B.I., Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security said they were taking the sightings, and the concerns they have stirred, seriously, deploying advanced radar systems to hunt for foreign reconnaissance drones and scouring records for secret U.S. government programs.
But of the more than 5,000 tips they had received about drone sightings in recent weeks, only 100 required further examination, John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said on Monday.
Most were fixed-wing, piloted aircraft that were taking off or landing at major airports, officials said. Others were smaller planes, and some were hobbyist drones.
“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 even stars that were mistakenly reported as drones,” Mr. Kirby said. “We have not identified anything anomalous or any national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the Northeast.”
Many of the most exciting videos posted on social media have shown piloted planes, according to experts.
“People’s brains aren’t very good at judging how big things are in the night sky,” said Mick West, a science writer who has focused on debunking conspiracy theories. “You see something in the sky, you have heard stories about it being drones, so you think maybe that is a drone.”
Bright landing lights, seen at a distance, can make a plane appear to transform into something more interesting, and potentially threatening, Mr. West said. “A majority of the videos are just big planes,” he added.
But, as Mr. Kirby noted, some of the confirmed sightings have been drones, though so far they have proved to be commercial or law enforcement aircraft. None are believed to be foreign surveillance drones, and the government has not confirmed any of the sightings to be larger, more unusual, uncrewed aircraft, officials said.
Mr. Kirby said that more than 1 million drones were registered with the Federal Aviation Administration. “That is the ecosystem we are dealing with and it is legal and proper,” he said. “With the technology landscape evolving as it is, we have every expectation that the number of drones over the United States will increase over time.”
As experts and officials tried to calm concerns, President-elect Donald J. Trump continued to stir people up. Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Mr. Trump said on Monday that he was canceling a trip to his property in Bedminster, N.J., because drones had been spotted there.
“The government knows what is happening,” he said.
Mr. Trump asserted, without evidence, that the military knew where the drones “took off from.” As president-elect, Mr. Trump receives intelligence briefings, but he did not say whether he had received one about the incidents.
In a social media post on Friday, Mr. Trump suggested that the drones should be shot down, an appeal he has made in the past. Experts and government officials say shooting into the air is a bad idea, potentially endangering the public, especially in densely populated parts of the East Coast.
“If people willy-nilly take these things down, it could cause more harm than good,” said James McDanolds, a drone expert who teaches at the Sonoran Desert Institute.
Mr. McDanolds saw what he believed was an unusually large drone hovering over an industrial site in Nazareth, Pa., on Thursday. Its pattern did not match any crewed aircraft on flight tracking software. But Mr. McDanolds said it would be difficult to draw any conclusions until the government was able to put its most cutting-edge radar to wider use.
“Keep bringing it to the attention of people in the government who are working with new technology to try and figure out what is happening,” he said.
Advanced radar and other detection devices have not detected anything that would appear to be a foreign espionage effort, much less anything otherworldly. The Department of Homeland Security sent New Jersey an advanced drone detection radar, but a D.H.S. official said on Saturday that the equipment had not detected anything unusual.
In a letter to the department, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said the government needed to do more to get its most advanced radar into the hands of local officials to help detect “unmanned aerial systems,” or UAS. “These sightings have exposed the federal government’s limitations when it comes to the authorities for protecting against the illicit use of UAS,” Mr. Schumer wrote.
Mr. Kirby said the Biden administration was urging Congress to pass counter-drone legislation to help identify potential threats.
While research is ongoing, officials say they have not found any records that indicate that a secret, or not-so-secret, drone development program could have triggered the sightings.
Some officials, convinced that the sightings are just normal drones or airplanes, are eager to avoid a repeat of 1947, when the cover-up of a secret Air Force program led to more than 60 years of speculation about alien visits in Roswell, N.M.
An Air Force balloon designed to spy on the Soviet Union’s nuclear program crashed in Roswell and was discovered by the public. Officials put out incomplete information, which allowed rumors that it was an alien spacecraft to spread. That covered up the program but caused decades of headaches for the government and fodder for generations of conspiracy theorists.
Part of the issue with the drone reports — as with government reports on unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years — is that American officials will never speak categorically about matters that could involve intelligence. Officials say that they don’t know what they don’t know, after all.
But as the drone investigations have continued, more officials have become convinced that the sightings have very boring explanations.
Once reports started building, more people started looking in the sky and noticing lights. While large commercial aircraft can be mistaken for drones, they can be easily tracked. Smaller aircraft that use general aviation airports and can be more difficult to monitor, officials said.
Some officials said they also thought pranksters could be at work. Once reports of mysterious drones started going viral, some officials believe, some drone hobbyists might have started flying drones at dawn and dusk to get attention.
Officials pointed to the arrest over the weekend of two men accused of flying a drone near Boston Logan International Airport as an example.
Compounding the problem, Mr. West said that when drones are reported, hobbyists and police send up their own drones to investigate, triggering even more reports of unusual activity.
Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department, said that phenomenon accounted for some of the sightings. Curious New Yorkers have flown their own drones to inspect the skies, and onlookers have reported those drones, too. Other novice astronomers shined lasers at passing planes, which fueled more reports.
It “sounds ridiculous, but it’s really happening,” Ms. Weiner told reporters on Monday.
In New York City this past weekend alone, the police received about 120 calls — more than the entire month of November, Ms. Weiner said.
Most of those objects turned out not to be drones at all. Some of them were planes and helicopters, she said. Others were meteor showers and, in at least one instance, the planet Venus.
While the number of reports has soared, the Police Department has not seen a marked increase in the number of actual drones, Ms. Weiner said. On average, the department detects about 300 to 400 drone flights a day.
Some initial reports in New Jersey appeared clustered around Picatinny Arsenal, a military research facility in Morris County. Military officials said they had found no programs at the arsenal that would explain the mysterious lights. It would also be unusual for the government to test a highly classified program that could be easily observed by the public in New Jersey, a very densely populated state. Such programs are traditionally tested at proving grounds.
There of course are also not-so-secret programs that could have triggered the observations. Last year, the government began a program to test drones flying between Joint Base McGuire in New Jersey and Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, though there is no evidence that the program could have triggered any unusual sightings. (The only flights that have taken place so far were in July and involved fixed-wing aircraft, an official said.)
U.S. officials have long said foreign governments, including China and Iran, have used drones, spy balloons and other surveillance devices to observe military bases and military exercises.
Mr. Kirby said there had been “a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere.” But he said such reports were not new and the government was working to make sure detection measures were in place.
Last week, a member of Congress from New Jersey said on Fox News that some of the drones were conducting reconnaissance for Iran and had been flown from a ship off the coast. Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, denied the report.
Still, the report gave the drone sightings momentum and attention.
And it is true that over the years some of the reports of unidentified aerial phenomena reported near military bases have been foreign drones conducting reconnaissance.
This month, a Chinese citizen was charged with flying a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The man was arrested before boarding a China-bound flight, accused of illegally photographing a military installation.
But the New Jersey incidents do not appear to be foreign surveillance drones. And foreign surveillance has never involved thousands of drones or triggered thousands of reports.
The post The Ordinary Explanations Behind the Mysterious Lights in the Skies appeared first on New York Times.
