Something weird is going on in New Jersey, and it's not just the swamp gas. Residents across the state have been calling in nighttime sightings of unidentified flying objects for the past month, including over military bases and President-elect Donald Trump's golf course. Neither local police nor the feds can explain what is going on—but Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R–N.J.) believes he has the answer.
"Iran launched a mothership, probably about a month ago, that contains these drones. It's off the east coast of America," the congressman told Fox News on Wednesday, citing "sources who can't reveal who they are." Then he hedged his bets, saying that the "drones should be shot down, whether it was some crazy hobbyist that we can't imagine, or whether it is Iran, and I think it very possibly could be."
The U.S. military denied that Van Drew's story was, in fact, very possible. Asked about the Iranian mothership theory, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh seemed almost annoyed to have to answer the question. "There is not any truth to that. There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States and there's no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States," she told reporters.
The fact that Van Drew accused Iran—rather than China, which has actually deployed spy balloons over American airspace—may say more about the current political moment than what his "sources" know. With the fall of the Syrian government, some Israeli officials and their supporters in Washington say that the time is ripe for war with Iran.
This mix of hawkish national security panic and strange sightings in the sky is nothing new. The UFO fever of the 1940s and 1950s was always tied to Cold War paranoia; U.S. government coverups of experimental military aircraft led people to believe that the unexplained flying machines they saw were alien visitors. Van Drew is working in the opposite direction: Instead of trying to explain military technology with paranormal theory, he started with an unexplained phenomenon and turned it into a military issue.
And he isn't the only one. "We know nothing. PERIOD. To state that there is no known or credible threat is incredibly misleading," state Rep. Dawn Fantasia (R–Sussex) wrote on social media after a Wednesday meeting between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and state officials. "At this point, I believe military intervention is the only path forward. There will be no answers in the absence of proactivity."
Fantasia's own description of the drone threat, however, raises questions about how real it is in the first place. "Current radio frequencies do not pick up drone signals," she claimed. (Fantasia was probably referring to Remote ID, the "digital license plate" that the Federal Aviation Administration requires civilian drones to broadcast.) And when the New Jersey State Police sent a helicopter to investigate a drone sighting over the Raritan River, she said, its thermal cameras didn't pick anything up.
The drone could have been carrying an advanced new technology that allows them to anticipate and evade police detection efforts. Or there could have been nothing to "detect" in the first place. Gov. Phil Murphy admitted on the radio that there's "some amount of overreporting" of drone sights, as well as "other flying objects, including small Piper Cub planes and others, that are being understandably mistaken for drones."
On Wednesday, the local Asbury Park Press published a photo of a "drone" that "seemed to be well above the 400-foot height [Federal Aviation Administration] regulations allow. This object in the sky was thought to be a helicopter, but there was no audible sound associated with it." In other words, it very well could have been a helicopter that was too far away to hear.
Of course, that doesn't mean that all of the flying object sightings are fake. The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that it spotted a drone swarm off the Jersey Shore over the weekend. But the mass panic about a drone menace is also causing people to connect unrelated incidents and see things that aren't there.
In 1954, after police in the Seattle suburbs reported that vandals had shot through some car windshields with BB guns, a "windshield pitting epidemic" spread through Washington state. Car owners around the state started reporting all kinds of mysterious holes—on far too many cars in far too many places for it to have been the work of human hands. Rumors spread about some kind of military technology attacking people's windshields.
The Seattle Police Department crime lab eventually got a look at the cars, concluding that the "epidemic" was really "5 per cent hoodlum-ism, and 95 per cent public hysteria." The reports of pitting stopped soon after. Someone had attacked some cars, which caused others to report normal dents and dings as vandalism. The scale of the problem became so large that it could only be explained by fantastical conspiracy theories.
Iran itself has a history of UFO mania. In 1972, an Iranian fighter pilot reported trying to shoot down an unknown flying object that could make aerodynamically impossible maneuvers, jam his radar, and change colors. Over the years, Iran has reported more aerial dogfights with hyper-advanced technology. Military affairs journalist Michael Peck believes that in some of these cases, the Iranian military encountered spy drones and simply "exaggerated the performance of the intruders."
Authorities probably should figure out what people are seeing in the sky. Even if it's not as widespread and sophisticated as reported, someone could be running a malicious surveillance operation or probing air defenses. Even if there is no security threat, unexplained swarms of flying objects are a problem for the safety of air traffic. The most extreme claims about motherships and undetectable drones, however, might be up there with the Pine Barren ghosts and the Jersey Devil.
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