Welcome to the Drone Age, New Jersey

Thousands of New Jersey residents have recently reported mysterious lights in the sky, triggering speculation and calls for investigation.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are monitoring the skies with infrared cameras and drone detection tech and analyzing amateur photos posted on social media. (An FBI official told reporters recently that the agency had received nearly 5,000 tips, but fewer than 100 merited further investigation.)

The public demands answers and has expressed frustration by dismissive claims made by local and federal officials. 

What’s interesting about this story from a journalism perspective is that it lives in the middle of a huge Venn Diagram, the circles of which would be labeled “Technology,” “Aviation,” “UFOs,” “Foreign spying,” “Cybersecurity,” “Military trends,” “Mass Hysteria and Delusion,” “Breakdown in Public Trust,” “Conspiracy Theories,” and “Disinformation.” 

The sightings are also an enterprise technology story, among other news categories. The reason: enterprises use drones and are increasingly attacked or spied upon with the use of drones. (More on that below.)

First, let’s get a solid context for what’s happening. 

New Jersey and beyond

The reports from around New Jersey are far from unique; there’s nothing particularly special about them. While the sightings have spiked in the press and social media since mid-November, such reports are a global phenomenon. 

Earlier this month, at least four commercial pilots reported mysterious lights darting through the skies above Oregon. 

Some residents of Northfield, MN, claim to have regularly seen strange luminous spheres gliding through the night sky since the summer. 

Multiple UFO sightings have been reported across California this year, with more than 25 people claiming to have seen shiny, bright disks moving fast over Los Angeles. Similar sightings have occurred in nearby Santa Barbara and the Coachella Valley. 

According to reports, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Southern California experienced multiple drone incursions over its airspace between Dec. 9 and 15. 

On Dec. 9, Yinpiao Zhou, a 39-year-old Chinese citizen and lawful permanent resident of the United States, was arrested for flying over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as he was trying to board a plane to China. Photographs of the base were found on his drone, and his phone contained evidence that Zhao looked to modify his drone to fly higher than is legally allowed. 

Reports similar to those in New Jersey are also coming from Europe and Africa. Between Nov. 20 and 25, the United States Air Force (USAF) confirmed sightings of “small unmanned aerial systems” over or near three airbases in the UK. 

Similar reports have emerged in Finland, Egypt, Lybia, and elsewhere. 

Speculation, from most likely to least

Among the debunked claims, many sightings turned out to be stars, satellites, consumer drones, and other everyday and expected objects. In other words, a wide variety of causes for the sightingse are being inaccurately lumped together to create a false trend. 

Here’s my guess as to the likelihood of each source for mystery-object reports: 

Off-the-shelf camera drones

We can be sure that many sightings, especially those who report “UFOs” or “spy drones” with red, green, and white lights, are ordinary consumer or enterprise off-the-shelf drones, of which there are more than 1 million in the United States. 

Consumer and enterprise drone capabilities change fast, and one feature that has improved in the past year or two is night-flying capability. Just look at the offerings from industry leader DJI. 

The DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced drone now has dual sensors: an HD thermal resolution camera and a 48-megapixel visual camera, enabling better visibility in low-light conditions.

The DJI Matrice 300 RTK (when paired with the Zenmuse H20N payload) offers advanced night vision capabilities. 

The DJI Matrice 30T offers a radiometric thermal camera and an FPV camera optimized for low-light conditions. 

On the consumer side, the DJI Air 3S since October has featured forward-facing LiDAR, downward-facing infrared time-of-flight sensors, and six vision sensors for omnidirectional obstacle sensing for crash-free night flying.

In fact, nearly all DJI consumer drones have very recently gained the ability to fly at night without hitting obstacles and to take photos and videos in very low light, vastly increasing the incentives to fly drones at night. 

Most importantly to know, whenever the public spots weird lights in the sky, some unknown number of people scramble to immediately get their own drones in the air to check it out, no doubt contributing greatly to the sightings.

Normal objects in the sky

With a bit of social-media-driven obsession, people are doing something they almost never do: they’re going outside and looking intently at the night sky. And then they notice for the first time “mystery objects” that could be stars, satellites, planes, helicopters, shooting stars, weather balloons, party balloons, and other not-so-mysterious objects.

Most people don’t know that many satellites can be seen with the naked eye. Ten years ago, roughly 1,200 satellites orbited Earth; today, there are more than 28,300.

Most likely of all is that different people are seeing different things in the context of nervous hysteria around mystery objects. 

Military or spy drones

The biggest trend happening in the world of espionage and military tactics involves drones. 

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, where more than 10 million drones have been used, has prompted a big shift in US military strategic thinking and planning. The Pentagon has introduced new drone and counter-drone strategies and is rapidly building capacity.

Numerous organizations are currently testing military drones, including multiple branches of the US military, specifically the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR). At least eight private companies are participating in various US military drone projects, including Anduril Industries, General Atomics, IS4S, Leidos Dynetics, Zone 5 Technologies, Performance Drone Works, Collins Aerospace, Skydweller Aero, and  almost certainly numerous other companies. 

They’re testing these drones at US military bases, where many of the sightings have occurred. 

These are secret technologies, which means neither the branches of the military nor the companies involved will admit what they’re doing. (It also means foreign governments are surely spying on these programs, probably with drones of their own.)

It would be unbelievable that this massive drive to test military drones wouldn’t result in public sightings of mystery aircraft. 

Drones looking for missing radioactive material?

One speculative theory is that some radioactive material has gone missing in New Jersey and that drones outfitted with radiation-detection sensors are looking for it. 

Or maybe it’s hackers

Some of the mysterious objects people have seen over military bases, ports, and elsewhere might well be drones being used for cyberattacks. 

In the summer of 2022, an East Coast financial services company discovered two drones on their roof, one equipped with a Wi-Fi Pineapple and the other sporting a high-tech hacking kit. These drones were caught red-handed, attempting to breach the company’s network and steal employee credentials.

Since then, the conflict in Ukraine has thrust drone-enabled cyberattacks into the spotlight, marking a new era in hybrid warfare that includes drone-based cyberattacks, cyber surveillance, and social engineering, which non-military attackers are learning.

The simplest and most obvious use of drones is to bypass physical security. Low-cost drones can now fly over a fence, through a window, down a chute, down a hallway, and more, capturing visual data and carrying hacker payloads that attempt to breach Wi-Fi networks.  

Alien UFOs, real and fake

Yeah, no, it’s not E.T. Sorry, Rosie O’Donnell. 

One conspiracy theory, called Project Blue Beam, says “global elites” are staging a simulated alien invasion to establish a “New World Order.” The false idea has existed since the 1990s but has been dusted off and applied to the sightings in conspiracy-related corners of the internet. 

We have entered the Drone Age

While many journalists have written about the mystery objects and other strange phenomena in the New Jersey sky, one perspective is missing — which is why I wrote this column.

This is that perspective: We have entered what we will one day call the Drone Age. And people are just now starting to realize that. 

Huge technological leaps are later branded as “Ages”—the Industrial Age, Radio Age, Airplane Age, Jet Age, Nuclear Age, Space Age, Information Age, and more.

It’s true that we don’t know what every reported sky object is. But we can be confident that different people see different types of objects or phenomena. (If one person sees a party balloon, another thinks it’s a satellite, and a third person envisions a helicopter, that’s not a “trend.”)

And even if foreign adversaries are flying spy drones over bases — heck, even if Rosie O’Donnell is right and aliens are visiting New Jersey — the overwhelming majority of reported sightings is almost certainly regular, garden-variety consumer and enterprise drones.

We have entered the Drone Age. And all we have to do to realize that is go outside and look up.