Better Call Mulder

Getting to the Truth of the Rogue Drone Issue

A genuine, bone fide ‘drone flap’ broke out over the UK this last week, just as, with impeccable timing, next week’s chapter of The Light Beyond The Mountains dives into the drone saga-mystery for the first time.

As reported extensively by the media – in the UK and abroad – the UK flap began on 20^th November over RAF Lakenheath, where the US Air Force’s 48^th Fighter Wing operates the fourth-generation F-15E Strike Eagle and its fifth-generation stealthy counterpart, the F-35A.

Also known as the ‘Liberty Wing’, the 48^th FW is home to more than 4000 military personnel and 1500 US and UK civilians.

This number includes personnel at nearby RAF Feltwell, which was also visited last week by drones – as were two other bases operated by the USAF in the UK: RAF Mildenhall, around five miles to the south of Lakenheath – approximately 18 miles to the north-east of Cambridge and more than 30 miles from the nearest stretch of coast - and RAF Fairford, the USAF’s only European base for heavy bombers such as the B-52. Fairford is also more than 30 miles from the nearest stretch of coast and a good 70 miles from Mildenhall and Lakenheath.

I mention their locations, because, thanks to war fever sparked by the recent ramp-up in tensions over Ukraine, the media speculation has, of course, focused on the possibility that these bases, which would be critical to any escalation in the developing ‘hybrid war’ between Russia and NATO, are being surveilled by an adversary nation – with China, even, being mentioned alongside Russia.

If the drones are being operated from a ship – somewhere off the East Anglian coast, perhaps, in the case of Lakenheath, Mildenhall and Feltwell; or in the Bristol Channel in Fairford’s case - then they got an awful long way inland without detection.

Also, whatever the USAF and the UK Ministry of Defence is saying about them – and, as was generally the case when I was a defence reporter, the US is saying more officially than the UK MoD is – it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of two of the most sophisticated militaries in the world to run down the drones’ source of control.

‘Counter-UAS’ (unmanned aerial systems) is now a pretty sophisticated thing. The RAF’s Combat Readiness Force operates the ORCUS C-UAS system, also known as Falcon Shield – and the CRF was part of a force of 60 British personnel deployed to assist US forces around the affected bases when nothing else seemed to be doing the job.

Let’s hope they find the perpetrators fast because events like this make everybody windy.

Unknown drones operating with impunity within the sovereign airspace of any nation is always a worry. But it’s also an embarrassment – I can only imagine the febrile atmosphere within government and military departments in Whitehall where these things are discussed at high level. Red faces and mutterings of ‘heads will roll’ are no doubt the order of the day.

All the USAF has said officially as of this writing is that it can ‘confirm that small unmanned aerial systems were spotted in the vicinity of and over RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall and RAF Feltwell between 20 and 22 November. The number of UASs fluctuated and they ranged in size and configuration. The UASs were actively monitored, and installation leaders determined that none of the incursions impacted base residents or critical infrastructure.’

The people I used to trust professionally whenever, as a defence reporter, I needed accurate, semi-insider data on air traffic movements was the spotter community. This time is no exception. Aircraft enthusiasts have an instinct for what is going on and their eye for detail is usually both dispassionate and spot-on.

The Aviationist’s reporting of the ‘Lakenheath Flap’ falls into this bracket, yielding the kind of detail that helps to build up a far more rigorous picture of events than anything you’ll read elsewhere. ‘The first news of issues with drones over Lakenheath came thanks to the many aviation enthusiasts who live near or visit the busy US bases,’ its post on 27^th November said. Using radio scanners, spotters were able to hear pilots and controllers reporting sightings of drones that were criss-crossing the area.

Radio traffic between F-15E Strike Eagles and air traffic control suggested that the crews were using their targeting pods to watch for activity in the air and on the ground. The F-15Es were kept in the air by KC-135R refuelling tankers from nearby Mildenhall. On 25^th and 26^th November, the online publication reported, they were joined by an RAF Shadow aircraft, which is designed to use its state-of-the-art electro-optical and electronic sensors to hoover up visual and signals/communications intelligence from the battlespace. If the crew of a Shadow (and its ground-based post-ops analysis counterparts) don’t know what’s going on, my guess is nobody does.

Next week’s chapter of The Light, Chapter 20, takes a narrative dip into the strange world of ‘drone flaps’, doing so in the context of last week’s chapter, which makes the link between sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) and nuclear weapons technology.

Chapter 20, however, which looks at four different flaps – two associated with military equipment, one at a nuclear power plant and one with no apparent relationship to nuclear or military technology at all – makes the point that these flaps generally don’t make any sense. In fact, nonsensical is just about the only thing that binds them. I took the four cases I did because they took place over a period of 18 months four-to-five years ago, giving sufficient time and space in the interim for some decent analysis to be done on them.

But I might just as easily have included the extensive wave of drone incursions that hit Langley AFB, Virginia, for 17 straight days in December last year. Just as they did over Lakenheath, the Langley drones would appear after dark, usually around 25 minutes to an hour after sunset each night.

The inability of the Air Force to identify who was behind the Langley drones, let alone interdict them, prompted a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on the matter of UAPs and base incursions, chaired by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, on 19^th November.

The hearing was as much about the anaemic grilling of the new head of the Pentagon’s hitherto lacklustre All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), Dr Jon Kosloski, as it was about raising a political stink re the powerlessness of America’s military to identify and get to the source of the rogue drone problem.

AARO is the body supposedly tasked by the DoD with investigating sightings with unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), a task, so far, it’s made a pretty ham-fisted job of.

Senator Gillibrand wants to update the law, citing a ‘huge national security breach.’ The upshot of such a change in legislation would be ‘weapons free’ authority to shoot down drones that penetrate US air bases. Given the relatively free ride she gave Kosloski on this and other issues that AARO oversees, I’m not exactly holding my breath; nor are many others I know whose opinion I respect in the domain space where rogue drone incursions cross into UAP/UFO territory.

This lack of confidence isn’t merely borne of whimsical pessimism. The specialist online military publication, The War Zone, which has reported extensively on the drone base incursion issue, spoke recently to Air Force General Gregory M. Guillot, commander of US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and the joint US-Canadian North American Aerospace Command (NORAD).

“The only thing I can tell you about the Langley drones is roughly the number and roughly the attitude,” Gen. Guillot said. An enigmatic answer that, thankfully, was illuminated by a colleague, Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly, who had previously spoken to the Wall Street Journal, whose story brought the Langley flap to widespread public attention.

At least one of the drones, Gen. Kelly told the paper, was “roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour at an altitude of 3000 to 4000 feet. Other drones followed one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.” The Langley incursions were among more than 600 reported over US military installations since 2022, NORAD said officially in October. And this doesn’t even begin to touch on previous instances of critical infrastructure and military base incursions of the kind discussed in next week’s chapter of The Light.

The ‘drone flap’ carries with it echoes of last year’s ‘balloon flap’, when US fighters shot down a genuine Chinese surveillance balloon over the east coast of the US, after it had crossed the entire country. It was followed over the next several days by shootdowns of at least three UAP – none of which has ever been officially explained.

As I said earlier, if there’s one thing I know about the military, it hates to be embarrassed.

National security demands that details of these kinds of incursion, which touch on some heavy security issues, need to be close-held. But wiping egg off one’s face is a compelling dynamic, too, and is often diametrically opposed to political and military good sense. If the military had explanations for those rogue balloons and rogue drones it could share by now, trust me, we’d have heard about it via unnamed sources and leaks.

So, what does this all tell us?

Occam’s razor – an explanation requiring the fewest possible assumptions – is what it tells me.

We have an Air Force general telling us the US Air Force is unable to identify and/or interdict a drone 20 feet long – one of many – that had been flying for two and half weeks over one of the premier air bases in the USA – Langley is 80 miles south of Washington DC.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, civilian residents neighbouring Lakenheath are telling us what they’re seeing in the sky doesn’t make any sense to them either. One resident quoted in a recent BBC report described the objects as ‘lit up and hovering over the base’. It was also large and noiseless, he said: “All you see is light, but it’s a big, big light.”

Occam’s razor – you’ll read a lot about that in next week’s chapter of The Light, because – in applying it – it usually gets us pretty quickly to the heart of the matter. Simply, it’s saying, these aren’t drones - they’re ‘UAP’: as in genuine unidentified anomalous phenomena. In his responses to The War Zone, Gen. Guillot said that he ‘coordinates frequently’ with AARO and remains confident the incursions reported over installations are small drones as opposed to ‘something that can’t be identified.’

Really?

When your prime motivation is to cover-up, eventually all you get yourself into is a big fat muddle. Had Gen. Guillot coordinated with his colleague Gen. Kelly, who talked about a 20 ft drone over Langley, he might have wanted to revise that statement. Now, in the wake of Lakenheath, high-ups in the USAF and in the UK MoD are presumably in the throes of deciding what their next move will be.

Given that the jury on the ‘new AARO’ is out – and confidence in it hardly soaring following that recent Senate hearing – I probably wouldn’t be coordinating with AARO on any of these matters – not if I wanted to get to any semblance of the truth. If I wanted some clarity, the way things are at the moment, I’d be better off calling Fox Mulder, the fictional investigator of the weird, the wonderful and the paranormal, whose dogged persistence lit up the small screen almost 30 years ago in the X-Files.

And I think I know what he would say, too: ‘Whatever those things are, they sure as hell aren’t made by us, Scully.’