It’s probably just a plane: drone experts advise calm over New Jersey sightings | Technology

At first, in mid-November, the mysterious lights were seen blinking across the night skies of New Jersey. Then, they spread. Reports of incandescent flying objects were logged in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Bystanders in Virginia Beach said they saw an aircraft “unlike any other they’ve seen”. Sightings have now come from as far afield as Louisiana, Florida and Arizona. People across the US are looking up.

No one seems to know for certain where these enigmatic flying objects are from or who is controlling them. But several lawmakers and much of the general public seem dead-set on one answer: a swarm of drones.

“The American people deserve answers as to what the hell is going on,” the representative Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat, said on Tuesday. “We’ve got a serious national security issue.”

The representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, raised even more alarms on Saturday, attributing the “elusive maneuvering” of the drones to “major, military-power sophistication”, perhaps that of Russia, China, Iran or North Korea. On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banned drones from flying at all in parts of New Jersey for a month.

Stop freaking out, experts say

Drone and national security experts are telling people to please calm down. They say they’re taking the matter seriously and there’s little to worry about. What appears to be happening in New Jersey right now is a perfect storm that’s coalesced around a lack of concrete information, confusion about what drones actually look like in night skies and a contagion effect.

“In my experience, it was very, very common for objects in the night sky, such as manned aircraft, planets and even satellites or the International Space Station to be mistaken for a drone at night,” Tom Adams, a retired FBI special agent on the agency’s counter-unmanned aircraft team, said.

A group of federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA and the Department of Defense, issued a joint statement on Tuesday saying they had examined the tips from concerned citizens and assessed that the sightings are a mix of lawful drones, airplanes, helicopters and “stars mistakenly reported as drones”.

Nothing about the sightings should cause alarm, the agencies said.

“We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the north-east,” they added.

Drone panic transforms regular planes into drones

People started reporting the drones in the skies over northern New Jersey just before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest travel times of the year in the US. People said the aerial objects appeared to be hovering in formation and returned night after night.

“We’re all completely unnerved,” one local resident, Julie Shavalier, told NBC News in early December, saying she repeatedly saw the lights floating in the sky up through dawn. “I didn’t sleep last night.”

More people in the north-east started going out after dark and gazing at the sky – and more supposed drone sightings racked up. The FBI said it’s gotten more than 5,000 reports over the last few weeks; only about 100 required further investigation. The New York City police department said it received 120 calls just last weekend, more than in the whole month of November.

The timing of the sightings coincides with air traffic delays at nearby Newark airport, which can lead to longer in-air holding patterns, and a bustling holiday season in a region packed with airports. What many people in New Jersey are actually seeing are those airplane holding patterns, said Will Austin, president of Warren County Community College, which specializes in drone training programs.

“Much like that old saying: ‘To a hammer, the whole world’s a nail.’ Well, in New Jersey right now … to the person on the ground staring intensely at the sky, every light is a drone,” said Austin.

The retired FBI agent, Adams, agreed. He’s now the director of public safety for DroneShield, which provides counter-drone defense systems.

“With some of the hysteria going on, I think there’s some misidentification of those types of activities as ‘Hey, here comes a drone swarm’ or ‘There’s a swarm of drones flying over the ocean’, when it’s just a lot of aircraft stacked up to land at JFK [airport],” Adams said.

Night non-vision compounds the problem

Night skies can be deceiving, many drone experts say. In the dark, there’s an optical illusion that makes it hard to tell whether an object is close or far away.

“I spent 30 years flying a helicopter in the navy,” said John Slaughter, director of the University of Maryland’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research and Operations Center. “And I’ll tell you, if it’s 100 metres away or if it’s 40 miles away, you don’t know how far that is.”

“People are seeing lights in the night sky – that’s the only fact we really know,” he said.

Slaughter said people are still likely seeing drones, but it’s not the mass swarms being reported. Around 1 million drones are registered with the FAA nationwide, and on an average day about 8,500 are in flight, according to the Department of Defense.

Drones and airplanes can have the same combinations of red, green and white light systems, making it difficult to distinguish between them at night, especially without an indication of distance.

De-escalating fear around drones

Last weekend, drones were spotted hovering near the Wright-Patterson air force base in Ohio. Officials said the base wasn’t affected, but they did close the airspace for nearly four hours. This also happened at Boston’s Logan airport, which ended in the arrest of two men, and at New York’s Steward airfield.

Federal security officials have maintained that they’re taking drone sightings seriously but have offered little information about what exactly is going on, frustrating local lawmakers and residents.

“Security officials always walk a thin line between offering too much information, which could highlight vulnerabilities, and too little, which can stoke undue fear,” said Brett Feddersen, chair of the counter-uncrewed aircraft systems working group for the Security Industry Association. “I think the US government initially underestimated the public concern and did not offer the right information.”

Feddersen said that it’s gotten better over the last couple of days. The FAA temporarily grounded all drones in parts of New Jersey and created a “what to know about drones” page. Federal agencies have held press conferences and released statements outlining what they’re doing to track the drones. And homeland security said it had deployed an advanced drone-detection radar to New Jersey, according to the New York Times, and it hasn’t yet found anything out of the ordinary.

“The vast majority of these drones are going to probably be recreational or hobbyist,” said air force Maj Gen Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, on Tuesday. It’s possible some could be up to malign activities, he continued, “but for the vast majority that is not the case”.

Slaughter, from the University of Maryland, said that, in the drone world, people talk about threats with “the three C’s”.

“You’ve got the clueless, the careless and the criminal,” Slaughter said. “The vast majority just don’t even know they’re doing something wrong – that’s the clueless. Then you have a group of people who understand they’re doing something wrong and just don’t care … And then you’ve got this tiny, tiny little group of people who’s doing something criminal, dropping contraband into a prison, that kind of thing.”

How to actually spot a drone

One way to tell the difference between a drone and an airplane is how they fly, Slaughter said. The drones people see are known as multi-copters, which have several rotors that let them take off and land vertically and take quick sharp turns.

“Aircraft can’t do that,” Slaughter said. “They move in a very smooth and straight, steady way.”

James McDanolds, a drone expert who teaches at the Sonoran Desert Institute, said there are apps, like Drone Scanner, that are helpful in identifying drones. He advises people to check these before calling the police.

Other apps like Flightradar24 show nearby airplanes. McDanolds said he was driving in north-eastern Pennsylvania last week and thought he saw a drone. He pulled over and checked Flightradar24. No immediate aircraft appeared. After studying the flying object, he concluded it was likely a drone.

“People are definitely sighting drones,” McDanolds said. “But, by checking those tools … it helps diminish a lot of calls that go into law enforcement that may have just been a manned aircraft.”

Don’t shoot the drones

As security officials have tried to tamp down worries, Donald Trump weighed in on the drone drama last week. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”

Other elected officials, including Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, and Jeff Van Drew, the Republican representative from New Jersey, have also called for the drones to be shot down.

Drone experts say that’s a bad idea. Not only is it illegal, but it could put the public at risk of falling debris. Austin, from Warren County Community College, said that if someone were up to nefarious deeds, they probably wouldn’t turn the drone’s lights on.

“I’m going to go completely in pitch-dark, probably paint my drone black,” he said. “You’re never going to know I’m out there.”

Austin says the fact that airports have been shut down because of drone sightings is actually a good sign. It means the FAA caught something that was violating controlled airspace and took it seriously enough to temporarily ground planes. He says that if swarms of drones were actually near sensitive locations, the public would know about it.

“I feel for the people at the FAA,” Austin said. “They’ve created the safest airspace in the history of the United States, but like everybody else, they can’t prove a negative.”