Federal officials sought to ease tensions but had no concrete answers for reporters about mysterious sightings of drone aircraft in New Jersey which have led to alleged sightings across the eastern seaboard.
Officials with several agencies explained that reviews of thousands of reports to tip lines, 911 centers and other sources revealed the vast majority of sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere to be cases of persons mistaking low-flying commercial aircraft conducting holding patterns around regional airports.
But they did acknowledge, however, that a handful of reports appeared to substantiate rumors of drone aircraft flying across the night sky in New Jersey. For those sightings, officials had no answers — beyond assurances that there was no evidence to support claims of foreign involvement.
“To date, we have no intelligence or observations that would indicate that they were aligned with a foreign actor or that they had malicious intent,” a Department of Defense official said Saturday.
“But I just got to simply tell you, we don’t know.”
An official with the Federal Aviation Administration noted that private drone flights are legal (within certain parameters) in the United States.
A senior official with President Joe Biden’s administration added that agencies had no indication that the sightings in New Jersey involved criminal acts.
“At this point, we have not identified any basis for believing that,” the Biden official said. “There’s any criminal activity involved, that there’s any national security threat, that there’s any particular public safety threat, or that there’s a malicious foreign actor involved in these drones.”
One FBI official didn’t rule out Americans’ response may be a “slight overreaction” to what is actually happening in the skies.
Lawmakers in Congress are likely to have some answers for the public later this week after the House Intelligence Committee receives a classified briefing on the matter.
To date, federal agencies have repeatedly issued assurances that the drone sightings, alleged or otherwise, are not the result of foreign activity but have not explained what they actually are.
And as some of those same officials have correctly pointed out, the void of silence from federal authorities regarding the true explanation for the phenomenon has opened a vacuum for disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed, without any evidence, that the drones were actually federally operated.
She gave no reason for why that would be or their supposed purpose, only giving her social media followers a vague sense of unease with the declaration: “It really is that bad.”
