Flying Elephants

And Other Things in New Jersey's Skies that Shouldn't be Up There

(Credit: thirdphaseofmoon)

When I wrote in my last post about the ‘drone flap’, never in my wildest dreams did I think it would still be a thing two weeks on.

But in the interim, drones have gone from being a sidebar issue on social media to achieving near pole-position in the mainstream news cycle, at least in the US, with little sign of going away.

For those not familiar with the story, here’s a brief recap.

In mid-November, some unidentified drones showed up over several bases in East Anglia, UK – and then kept on appearing for days, particularly over RAF Lakenheath, where USAF F-15E and F-35A fighters are on higher alert status than usual because of the increasingly unstable situation centred on Russia and Ukraine.

Then, like some viral infection, they started spreading to other parts of the world, nowhere more conspicuously, however, than New Jersey, where swarms of drones have been reported across the state, with no-one in officialdom appearing to have the least clue whose they are.

The New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, wrote to President Biden last week, requesting ‘more resources’ to ‘fully understand what is behind this activity.’ It’s a genuinely good question.

When it comes to responsibility for getting to the heart of the mystery, to find out who is actually controlling these things, there’s a considerable confusion of candidate agencies and departments: the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and a plethora of dedicated, specialised intelligence outfits.

You’d think one of them would have stepped up by now, one way or another, to knock this business on the head, but none has - not unless you include this from Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary, Sabrina Singh, on 11^th December: ‘Our initial assessment is that this is not the work of a foreign adversary,’ she said. And the US military isn’t responsible for them either, she added.

In another woefully deficient statement from the Pentagon – this after several more nights of persistent, random drone activity in New Jersey’s skies - we got this on 14^th December from a spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who confirmed that at least two military bases in New Jersey - Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle - had suffered incursions: ‘This is not a new issue for us. We’ve had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It’s something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited.’ The spokesperson added that military installations have the means to detect and respond to drones, and security personnel are trained to ID, categorise, and employ certain ‘tools’ to keep them from flying unauthorized over US military bases.

Great. But what about everywhere else?

In the absence of anyone showing any sign of getting a grip on the situation, people’s imaginations have run riot, the ‘explanations’ ranging from the mundane to the exotic.

In the mundane corner, we have drone hobbyists, misidentifications of planes, birds, stars, you name it; and mass hysteria.

In the exotic, we have in-country, drone-operating Russian and/or Chinese special forces teams baffling and spoofing US defence and detection systems; and, of course, aliens.

My favourite, which was submitted in all seriousness, was Congressman Jefferson Van Drew’s explanation. He serves the 2^nd District of New Jersey, so has a legitimate right to demand action – he didn’t help himself, IMO, by blaming an Iranian ‘drone ship’ lurking off the East Coast. The Iranians do have drone ships, but the thought of one somehow having crossed the Atlantic undetected and then sending drones with impunity into the Garden State whilst anchored off Atlantic City is laughable. The information was supposedly given to Congressman Van Drew on the QT by a ‘credible source with high security clearances’.

What isn’t funny is the fear this has induced for people living in the shadow of the phenomenon, who are still looking for answers – or, push come to shove, any kind of a response from any authority that looks half like it wants to take charge (beyond local law enforcement, which seems to be doing its utmost).

Reports from the citizenry who represent the real front line of this mystery describe flying objects that look like quadcopters – insofar as you can tell at night – but which don’t behave like quadcopters; not consistently, anyway. Some exhibit bright light patterns – not a good look for a surveillance operation – while others have been described as the size of SUVs.

These things appear to have persistence, too – they remain in the air for a long time, which is challenging for a drone belonging to your average hobbyist and even for many military operators. Drones the size of SUVs that do this would truly belong in the exotic camp.

Compounding it all, eye-witness statements describe fixed-wing aircraft flying around in the midst of these swarms and drones that ‘go dark’ – turning their lights off and remaining invisible to IR sensors - whenever law enforcement drones and helicopters try to approach them. Fixed-wing aircraft – or things flying around with navigation light patterns that resemble fixed-wing aircraft - are clearly apparent in film taken of these ‘drones’ too.

As I said in my post two weeks ago – writing here as a former defence editor – whilst the military-intelligence community has to watch what it says in ‘active situations’ like this for fear of revealing classified technologies and methods, what it hates as much - if not more - is being made to look foolish. Since, it has already crossed that line, sadly, we have to presume there’s a reason for it – one that outweighs the fear of ridicule. Your guess is as good as mine as to what might be driving that impulse but let me offer a couple of thoughts.

One: there’s a really nasty real-world threat that requires a US black ops agency to prowl above New Jersey looking for something that only emerges at night or is only detectable at night, using sensors on drones that fly at baseline altitudes of several hundred feet – which is too high to be useful when it comes to detecting WMDs: weapons of mass destruction.

Two: whatever’s going on in New Jersey’s skies – plus, now, over key USAF bases that include Ramstein in Germany and Wright-Patterson in Ohio (good job, The War Zone) – is too incomprehensible to most people’s minds (and I include the group-mind of the military/IC here) – to be shared.

Simply put, under this scenario, what you risk by going public on something you yourself don’t fully understand – or have any chance of controlling – risks a more catastrophic outcome than staying silent.

And this paralysis extends to the media too. I honestly don’t know how I would have responded to this story were I still reporting on the field at my former place of work, but the specialist defence media, with one or two exceptions, has been conspicuously mute – and when it has engaged, it’s stopped short of attempting to describe the elephant in the room.

As I wrote last week, what we find ourselves in here – whether it’s Option 1 or Option 2 or something in between or beyond – is X-Files territory. And whilst I wouldn’t presume to know how its protagonists – special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully – would have responded to the New Jersey flap, I do believe they’d be searching for a pattern.

And, in this case, if they went far enough back in time, they’d find one.

In Chapter 10 of The Light Beyond The Mountains, I wrote about the Wallkill River Valley sightings in New York State:

Bruce Cornet, with a PhD in geology from Penn State and years in the oil industry, had documented around 140 sightings in the valley between 1992 and 2003, catching many on videotape. The craft almost always appeared at night, sounded like aircraft and exhibited navigation light patterns you’d associate with aircraft.

But their lights blinked and flashed in places conventional aircraft didn’t have structure.

They would occasionally stop on a dime and hover.

They made sharp, almost impossible turns.

Visible as silhouettes against the stars, some of them appeared to be Boeing 707s, an aircraft by then that had become so long in the tooth it had been all but phased out.

Most unusually, the pitch of their turbines decreased on approach and increased when departing.

In last week’s chapter of The Light, in which I examined a plethora of strange drone waves that took place five years ago on the US mainland and in proximity to US assets at sea and abroad, I talked about Cornet’s research again:

“It was a series of lights in a row, and it looked like a cigar-shaped object coming up over the ridge,” Cornet told George Knapp’s Mystery Wire of a UFO he’d seen in the Wallkill River Valley. “And as it got over the ridge, it spread wings out, the wings just folded out and lights that were on the wingtips, you could see them on the photograph (Cornet took of them: ed) coming out.”

What Wallkill, the drone flaps of five years ago and this one all share is none of them makes sense. There’s a technology in our skies that – alongside its other manifest capabilities – exhibits some novel deception traits, not least the ability to mimic and shape-shift.

The stills in this post are taken from film acquired by the YouTube channel Third Phase of Moon, purportedly of one of the drones operating above New Jersey. I can’t vouch for its authenticity – nor am I attempting to – but if you give it a watch, it looks pretty genuine.

And, if that’s the case, we really do have a problem, because whatever that thing is, it isn’t anything I know that should be able to fly.