Early federal assessments suggest unexplained New Jersey drones aren’t UAP or US military assets
U.S. government assessments indicate that the unexplained drones recently reported maneuvering over at least two defense installations and elsewhere around New Jersey and other skies are not produced or being deployed by the U.S. military — and at this point, they’re categorized as unmanned aerial systems (UAS), not unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), Pentagon officials told DefenseScoop on Monday.
But questions continue to swirl as local law enforcement and an interagency coalition investigate the still-growing caseload of thousands of tips about various perplexing aircraft observed flying in multiple states since November.
Broadly, some of the elements that remain unclear include details about the drones’ technical features, the data they transmit, who is operating the vehicles and different agencies’ roles to respond in such incidents.
“You’ve heard the White House, FBI, DHS, FAA and DOD say that we’re taking this matter very seriously, and significant federal, state and local resources are being devoted to looking into these reports and countering UAS activity,” Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Monday in an off-camera briefing.
Without citing hard evidence, Ryder doubled-down on statements he and other government officials previously made emphasizing that there’s no proof right now that the drones threaten U.S. national security or public safety, or that they have a “foreign nexus.”
He told DefenseScoop that “to [his] knowledge,” currently, the systems are not considered to be U.S. military drones or associated defense contractor assets running in real-world operations.
“It’s also important to remember that domestically we in the DOD, understandably, are limited on the kinds of capabilities that we can use when it comes to drone detection, and tracing them. So the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that we can employ outside the homeland aren’t capabilities that we can necessarily deploy inside the homeland. In other words, we don’t conduct intelligence on U.S. citizens,” Ryder said.
However, he added that there are certain “passive and active” measures the U.S. military can pursue as necessary — specifically in terms of detection and defending its facilities — if it is ultimately determined that any unidentified drones could harm personnel at bases on the ground or national security writ large.
“I won’t go into details, for operational security reasons. But that could include things like affecting the signal. It could include using our own drones to take down drones or, essentially, redirecting them — and things like that,” Ryder told DefenseScoop.
The press secretary did not definitively clarify the military commands and other DOD components involved in such monitoring, detection or response operations, or what their responsibilities could each entail.
Testifying to Congress in November, the new chief of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), Jon Kosloski, told lawmakers that when incursions by seemingly unexplainable technology occur, his team supports other federal agencies and the intelligence community “through an advisory capacity.”
“As AARO is trying to push the bounds on detectability for UAP, we are hopefully going to have best practices that we can also provide to the counter-UAS [mission], and potentially we might have additional technologies that we can offer them to support,” Kosloski said.
In conversations on Friday and Monday, a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed that AARO officials are positioned to assist in the local and interagency investigations as needed.
“So far, AARO has received no reports of UAP in conjunction with the recent drone flights or incursions in New Jersey and other eastern states. AARO is following the reports of drones or other aerial objects over New Jersey and other states closely and is prepared to support law enforcement agencies if requested,” the spokesperson told DefenseScoop.
Around the same time as the media briefing at the Pentagon on Monday, President-elect Donald Trump speaking in Florida suggested without providing evidence that “the government knows what is happening” with the drones reported over New Jersey, but it’s withholding the information from the public.
“I will tell you we are also committed to providing as much information as possible — as quickly as possible — on this issue,” Ryder told reporters at the Pentagon.
