Some Thoughts On The Mystery Drones

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Okay I need to jot down some thoughts on the “mystery drone” thing because it’s way too interesting a story to ignore.

For those who aren’t aware, since mid-November people have been sighting large drones all over the east coast of the United States, and what makes this so interesting is that the US government is claiming they don’t know anything about them. Don’t know who owns them, where they’re taking off from or where they’re landing.

They’re either lying or telling the truth about this, and either way it’s a major story. Either the US government is keeping secrets from the public about huge numbers of drones that have spent weeks flying over populated areas, or they somehow legitimately don’t know what’s going on with these sightings. Contemplating either of these possibilities should widen your eyes a bit.

And to be clear there really does appear to be something up there. Many of the sightings that are being reported are just the result of a fun news story causing people to look up from their smartphones into the night sky for the first time in years and see things they’re not familiar with like planes and stars — but there are also large, hovering aircraft of uncertain origin.

The clearest footage I’ve seen of these mystery drones so far was presented by NewsNation’s Rich McHugh, who actually turned and pointed to one of the craft in the air behind him while reporting out of central New Jersey. It must have been fairly low down because they got a great shot of the thing; it had fixed wings and blinking lights like a plane, but was reportedly only eight to ten feet wide.

McHugh said he and his crew saw some 40 or 50 of the aircraft in the hour they were on location. He interviewed officers from the Ocean County Sheriff’s Department, who told him the drones evade detection because they don’t give off heat like normal drones, and that one vanished when they tried to pursue it with a police drone. A sheriff named Michael Mastronardy told McHugh that one of his officers reported seeing fifty of these drones flying in off the ocean all at once, after which the US Coast Guard reported seeing a number of the same craft over the water.

Michael Tracey, one of the very few western journalists I have any respect for, went drone hunting and reported seeing “one mystery drone with all red lights, hovering quite low, and another with green and red lights, higher altitude, flying in a straight line.”

“It was hovering. If that’s a plane, I’m a horse’s ass!” Tracey tweeted.

https://x.com/mtracey/status/1867793269075456253

So as far as I can tell this is a real thing and not mass hysteria resulting from large numbers of people suddenly looking up and misinterpreting the lights they’re seeing.

But what is it?

As of this writing we’re not getting any answers from the US government. The White House, FBI and DHS are all saying that they don’t assess that the mystery drones have a foreign nexus or pose a threat to national security, but that they also have no idea what they are. All three departments have released statements saying that “many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully,” which sounds intentionally obfuscatory because obviously there are going to be many reports from people misidentifying normal aircraft thrown into the mix, and this is completely irrelevant to all the reported sightings which don’t fit that description.

White House spokesman John Kirby was grilled by Fox News’ Martha McCallum on the lack of answers on this front, adamantly insisting that he knows absolutely nothing about where these things are coming from or what they’re up to.

“I’m telling you we don’t know,” Kirby said. “We know people are afraid of it. We know people have concerns. We have those same concerns.”

New Jersey congressman Jeff Van Drew attempted to sell the idea that what people are witnessing are drones from an Iranian “mothership” which is hanging out off the east coast of the United States, a claim which the Pentagon unambiguously shot down as false. Iran does indeed have ships which carry drones, but obviously the US war machine knows where those ships are located at all times because satellites are a thing.

But aside from Iranian motherships and mass hysteria, it doesn’t look like there’s much we can cross off the list right now as to what these things could be. I’d imagine if the US government knew they were a foreign threat they’d be doing everything they can to sound the alarm and roll out the war machinery, so maybe we can rule that out too.

Other than that, who knows? The US government is either knowingly lying to the public about its own UAVs or those of a US defense contractor, or it somehow legitimately does not know what these aircraft are, who they belong to, or where they are taking off from and where they are landing. It’s hard to imagine how the latter scenario could possibly be the case after all these weeks with all the technology the world’s most powerful government has at its disposal for monitoring objects in the sky — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not true.

For now, I myself am content to not know. It’s not often we get to enjoy major news stories about a complete mystery these days, so I’m going to relish this one while the mystery lasts. With all the dark, ugly things that we do know about what’s going on in our world, it’s nice to have a big strange question mark hovering around in the air for a bit.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the NewsNation YouTube channel (Fair Use).