Sinister attack or hoax? The drone sightings sending the West into a tailspin

As fans of science fiction movies, Superman comics and old Louis Theroux documentaries know all too well, there are few things more American than paranoia about what exactly is in the airspace above us. In recent days and weeks, that’s hit fever pitch after a spate of mysterious drone sightings over the skies of at least six eastern states have led to something approaching panic.

Since the middle of last month, drones have been spotted in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio and Virginia, in areas ranging from residential streets to military sites. Two of those locations – near a US military facility, Picatinny Arsenal, and president-elect Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf course, both in New Jersey – were of particular concern.

Russian spies? China? Domestic terrorists? Pesky kids? Hobbyists driven by curiosity and mischief? Extraterrestrial visitors? The government secretly keeping tabs? Or is it all a hoax, and is not happening at all? Every possible explanation has been considered and, while the most likely causes are the least dramatic, experts are not ruling out some of the more sinister possibilities.

“Flying drones is not illegal. There are thousands of drones flown around the US on a daily basis,” a Pentagon spokesman, Maj Gen Pat Ryder, told reporters on Monday. “So, as a result, it’s not that unusual to see drones in the sky, nor is it an indication of malicious activity or any public safety threat.

“The same applies to drones flown near US military installations. Some fly near or over our bases from time to time. That, in of itself, is not unusual, and the vast majority pose no physical threat to our forces or impact our operations.”

President-elect Trump isn’t convinced. “The government knows what is happening,” he said at a press conference in Florida on Monday. “For some reason, they don’t want to comment. And I think they’d be better off saying what it is our military knows and our President knows.” Pressed on his own theory, he said he “can’t imagine it’s the enemy”, but didn’t say whether he’d received an intelligence briefing on the matter. His comments supported a growing consensus that, at the highest echelons of the government, there may be a known explanation.

The drone hysteria started on November 18, when several were spotted around New Jersey, causing civilians to report sightings to the FBI. A week later, after a sighting over Trump’s golf club and the Picatinny Arsenal military base, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Picatinny base restricted drone flights in those areas.

By that point, the sightings had spread to all over the East Coast. When drone activity temporarily closed the runways of New York Stewart International Airport, New York governor Kathy Hochul said “This has gone too far.”

But what had gone too far? As social media and then the mainstream media speculated wildly, with the most common theory concerning the potential for foreign state involvement, still nobody was sure.

Irina Tsukerman, a national security lawyer and the president of security consultancy firm Scarab Rising, is scathing about the government’s reaction. It was, she says, an “unparalleled failure… the correct reaction should have been to call for an immediate military and intelligence inquiry into these incidents and to present a clear plan. Instead, complaints are being dismissed and swept under the rug, which only contributes to the panic, and sends a message of incompetence, arrogance and unprofessional disarray to US adversaries.”

Last week, a Chinese citizen was arrested after allegedly flying a photography drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Yinpiao Zhou, a 39-year-old permanent US resident, was stopped at San Francisco International Airport, attempting to board a flight to China.

It is one of several China-linked drone occurrences in recent years. “These incidents show a clear pattern, and not a coincidental one, of adversarial intelligence measures,” says Tsukerman. “Combined with [multiple incidents of] spy balloons and reports of other surveillance efforts by Russia and China, it is safe to say that Beijing and its allies are ‘testing the waters’ and pushing the envelope of surveillance. Not all of them may present a serious security threat, but the US government should be taking no chances. There is no reason foreign objects should be entering US airspace.”

Dr Michael Boyle, author of The Drone Age and associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, notes that “it’s become increasingly common to have drone sightings around military bases and high profile civilian locations [but that], in most cases, the explanations are straightforward – for example, a hobbyist gone astray or a military exercise.”

This week marks six years since reported drone activity saw Gatwick Airport shut down for three days, affecting more than 1,000 flights and in excess of 140,000 passengers. It was a source of great frustration for travellers and authorities alike, as seen in this video from the time:

That case was never solved, and one theory holds that there never were any drones, merely lights, anxiety and overcaution.

Meanwhile, there have been no updates on the unusual activity at US military bases in the UK last month, when drone incursions were reported at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk, prompting an investigation by the Ministry of Defence. Around 60 British troops, among them anti-drone specialists using the Orcus counter-unmanned air system, were deployed to defend the bases. The system can detect, track, identify and, if necessary, defeat hostile drones.

In that case, as in the US, foreign actors were the prime suspects for pundits. Boyle finds this a “highly unlikely” explanation for what’s happening on the East Coast. “If it were a foreign intelligence service, the US military would be bringing them down aggressively and interdicting them earlier,” he says.

“If some of the reported features of these drones are correct – that some of them are much larger than quadcopters for instance – I find it hard to believe that a foreign intelligence service is somehow launching them in a highly populated area without anyone noticing.”

The Biden administration, for its part, has offered a simpler explanation. Alejandro Mayorkas, the outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security, finally addressed the matter on Sunday, pointing out that in September 2023, the FAA “changed the rules so that drones could fly at night. And that may be one of the reasons why now people are seeing more drones than they did before, especially from dawn to dusk.”

That hasn’t stopped Republicans insisting more should be done, more could be done, and that the US’s nascent drone laws clearly leave gaps that could be exploited. One, president-elect Trump’s choice for national security advisor, Mike Waltz, said on Sunday that “we need to know who’s behind this”, and that the Department of Homeland Security, local law enforcement and the Defense Department were all “pointing [the finger] at each other”.

“President Trump has talked about an Iron Dome for America,” Waltz added, referring to Israel’s highly effective missile defence system. “That needs to include drones as well, not just adversarial actions like hypersonic missiles.”

Trump himself has been even more direct. “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” he posted on his Truth Social platform last week.

Meanwhile, Boyle hasn’t ruled out the idea it could be a “highly classified government exercise, where drones are being used for some official purpose”, such as “scanning, mapping, or testing… This would account for the disjuncture of the White House assuring us that it’s lawful, but saying little. We could be in a situation where only a small part of the government knows what’s actually happening.”

What he can say for sure is that “these frenzies are going to become more common”, as commercial drones numbers increase, hobbyists continue to be nosy, and the public continues looking warily to the skies. “I want to assure the American public that we are on it,” Mayorkas told the nation on Sunday. And perhaps they are. But what about next time?