The drone incursions over homes in New Jersey are “nothing nefarious,” said President Joe Biden yesterday. “We’re following this closely, but so far no sense of danger,” the 82-year-old president said. "We have not seen drones penetrate restricted airspace," emphasized Department of Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas last Friday. "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace,” stressed Pentagon spokesman John Kirby last week. “I want to go back to something I said at the top. There has been no evidence of any of this activity in or near restricted spaces."
But drones have been violating the airspaces of US military bases for years, according to military observers, and Biden said the investigation into the drones had not been completed, which undermines his assurances that there is no threat. “They’re checking it all out,” said Biden. And a few hours after Mayorkas made his remarks on Friday, drone sightings in the airspace over Wright Patterson Air Base in Ohio prompted the base leaders to shut down the airspace.
“Most of the New Jersey drone sightings were misidentified,” noted the War Zone, which broke the story, “so it is notable that the ones spotted over Wright-Patterson, as with the other U.S. military installations, were seen by trained observers that are equipped with high-end gear to maintain security and to discriminate between friend and foe.”
As military journalist and Debrief publisher Tim McMillan noted last week, “A HUGE problem with the White House’s recent stance that the recent ‘mystery drone’ craze is effectively mass hysteria is that officials from Picatinny Arsenal” had told his Debrief colleague Micah Hanks “there had been nearly a dozen confirmed sightings of drones operating near the base going back to mid-November. This was before the reports of drones over bases in the U.K. and the viral news of incursions in New Jersey.”
On Monday, Kirby admitted, “There have been some drone sightings, I think, as you know, over some military bases,” without explaining why he had said the opposite days earlier.
On a private Monday conference call with New Jersey mayors obtained by Public, representatives from the FBI, the White House, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Aviation Administration all said that nothing unusual was going on. “These sightings include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones as well, as well as other aircraft, helicopters, and other images including lights mistakenly reported as drones,” Jennifer Daskal of DHS told the mayors.
But President-elect Donald Trump disagreed, saying, “The government knows what is happening… and they'd be better off saying what it is. Our military knows. Our president knows. And for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense. I can't imagine it's the enemy because if it were the enemy, even if they were late, they'd blast it.”
Trump did not answer a reporter who asked if he was getting a national security briefing, but a current or former military intelligence officer told Public he was getting them, which others have also reported.
