What Happened to the New Jersey Drone Panic? Did Everyone Just Go Inside?

Hey remember drones! Those things in the air that everyone within a four-hundred-mile radius of the Philadelphia airport were seeing for weeks on end earlier this month? What ever happened to those things?

While the drone panic obviously had hallmarks of a public mania that reflected some harsh truths about present day Americans taking videos of the constellation Orion and demanding a federal investigation into it, there was some meat on this bone. People were seeing things in the sky that very clearly were not planes or constellations, and many of those things had the FAA regulated red and green lights on their wings, which to me pointed towards a very obvious earthly explanation we already knew was coming to New York and New Jersey in 2025 and beyond.

But there are far less reports of drones in New Jersey now, as Ocean County Sheriff Michael G. Mastronardy told the Asbury Park Press on Christmas Eve, that “we’re not getting the calls that we were getting before – very few. We’re just waiting for our federal partners to let us know what’s going on.”

It’s easy to just dismiss this as all a hallucination of a clearly traumatized populace currently silently and not so silently cheering for murder, but the statements on the record from authorities don’t reflect that. “We’re just waiting for our federal partners to let us know what’s going on” and the Department of Defense saying on December 17th that the “FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated” do not suggest that this is all just an invention of people’s imaginations. Not to mention, the Department of Defense also said this in its statement, contradicting the FBI’s previous assertion that New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy was wrong to say that intrusions at military bases had occurred.

Additionally, there have been a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere, including within restricted air space. Such sightings near or over DoD installations are not new.

At the start of the peak of the mania in New Jersey, I wrote about how these “drone” sightings over DoD installations are indeed not new and are in fact, fairly frequent occurrences over decades right up to our present moment, and here is the DoD adding another piece that could fit into this pattern.

As the Asbury Park Press noted, this intense drone activity and then immediate drop-off is not without precedent, and it is similar to the Wall Street Journal’s report of “mystery drones” buzzing Langley Air Force base for seventeen straight days in 2023. While this event in New Jersey was certainly juiced by a lot of misinformed folks getting swept up in a mania in a heavily trafficked air corridor, what the DoD said fits into a larger trend over history we are only beginning to have a real conversation about in public.

UFOs and Nukes is a seminal book containing interviews with over 120 service-members as well as documentation of reported interactions with unknown objects at some of our most sensitive nuclear installations over three decades during the Cold War. Award-winning journalist George Knapp submitted documents from the Soviet government detailing similar incidents in a sworn testimony to Congress last year, and I have written before about how my UAP source has confirmed the veracity of stories like these to me. It’s natural to simply assume it’s all either American or Soviet surveillance technology, but both countries have documentation repeatedly asserting otherwise. There’s a mystery here.

As easy as it is to dunk on the hysteria that cropped up around the New Jersey sightings, the official word from the Department of Defense is that there were leads that sprang from those sightings in New Jersey, and drones were reported in restricted military air space. In fact, just as the hysteria around the New Jersey drones began to die down, The Warzone reported that the high-profile Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio closed their airspace due to unknown “drone” incursions, publishing a radio call between Wright-Patterson AFB and a medical transport aircraft during the event. This all comes on the heels of similar incidents at American installations at Royal Air Force bases in the United Kingdom in November. Maybe they’re hobbyists with much larger drones than the ones you can buy at Best Buy, but then that raises a bunch of uncomfortable questions as to how this keeps happening at our most sensitive military bases.

Something is unfolding here that is more than just America’s over-active imaginations and a jarring lack of familiarity with lights in the sky that have been there for millennia. We don’t know for certain what happened in New Jersey past the litany of false reports from very confused people, but according to Lt. Col. Craig A. Bonham II, New Jersey’s Picatinny Arsenal Garrison Commander in a statement to The Debrief, “While the source and cause of these aircraft operating in our area remain unknown, we can confirm that they are not the result of any Picatinny Arsenal-related activities.”