by WorldTribune Staff, December 11, 2024 Real World News
Since Nov. 18 there have been frequent sightings of mysterious drones in the skies over New Jersey.
What is the origin of the drones?
New Jersey Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy said: “They are apparently … very sophisticated. The minute you get eyes on them, they go dark. We’re obviously most concerned about sensitive targets and critical infrastructure.”
The feds have kept a lid on the drone activity, which has been occurring daily in Morris, Passaic, Bergen, and Hunterdon counties. The Federal Aviation Administration has restricted drone flights over Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County and the Trump National Golf Club in Somerset.
New Jersey Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew on Wednesday said that the mystery drones over the Garden State are from Iran, and they’re being launched by a “mothership” situated off the U.S. East Coast.
Van Drew said the drones “very possibly could be” from Iran, citing confidential sources during an appearance on Fox News Wednesday morning.
“I’m going to tell you the real deal. Iran launched a mothership that contains these drones,” Van Drew said. “It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.”
“These drones should be shot down,” he said, adding that “the military is on full alert with this.”
Van Drew, whose district includes most of the Jersey Shore, did not reveal where he got the information.
Security experts told the New York Post that the drones could be part of a secret U.S. military program which tests new hardware before sending it to the battlefield.
“My first guess is these are potentially government programs kept within what’s known as a ‘Special Access Program,’ which is purposely put together to keep even the most cleared people out — it truly is to keep it secret,” Clint Emerson, a retired Navy SEAL and owner of security company Escape the Wolf, told The Post.
“That’s why the government’s like, ‘We don’t know.’ They’re being truthful,” Emerson said, adding that the circle could be as small as a dozen officials. “They don’t even know the program exists.”
Emerson suspects the secret of the drones is likely the technology they’re carrying, not the devices themselves.
“It could be different types of collection capabilities — so, different types of cameras, like high-definition, infrared or thermal,” he said.
A second payload, for instance, could be hardware that grabs all the cellphone data in a given environment.
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Kelly McCann, a security expert and former Marine special missions officer who worked for the Office of Naval Research, said he thinks the feds are testing out some “operational capacity.”
“It’s weird how we’re supposed to have control of the skies — but this is going on and no one is saying s–t?” McCann, a frequent Fox News contributor, told The Post. “I don’t buy it. Tech exists to drop one or all of them, and they haven’t? Bulls–t.”
State Sen. Jon Bramnick said in a statement Tuesday that New Jersey should “issue a limited state of emergency banning all drones until the public receives an explanation regarding these multiple sightings.”
New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith said that more than a dozen drones followed a 47-foot U.S. Coast Guard boat Sunday night, while law enforcement tracked another 50 drones coming onto land from the ocean at Island Beach State Park.
“I think this is a very serious threat,” Smith said, adding that when he asked officials at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst why they couldn’t shoot down the drones, he was told they don’t have the authority to do so. Smith urged officials at the hearing to grant military authorization to shoot down the drones so that their identity and capability could be ascertained.
Biden-Harris administration officials admitted during a congressional hearing that they can’t say definitively whether the drones pose a threat.
“There is nothing known that would lead me to say that but we just don’t know and that’s the concerning part,” Robert Wheeler, assistant FBI director, said during the congressional hearing.
Wheeler said that based on verified eyewitness reports, some of the drones are larger than commercial drones, and are both rotary and fixed-wing craft.
“It concerns me that we don’t know the answer yet,” he said.
Others have speculated that the drones may have been deployed by China (remember the spy balloon?), or are extraterrestrial in origin.
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New Jersey mystery drones: Deployed by Iran ‘mothership’, a secret U.S. military program, or something else? added by Editor Two on
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