Matt Laslo
February 10, 2025
RAW STORY
REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised unparalleled transparency to allay fears over the New Jersey ‘drone invasion.’ Instead, his administration’s response has only sparked confusion across the Garden State, along with eye-rolls and frustration on Capitol Hill.
In spite of attempts to blame his predecessor and gloss over the persistent incursions that have threatened sensitive U.S. military and nuclear sites for years now, Trump’s promise just may be coming true.
With few policymakers — at least those whose classified questions remain unanswered by the Pentagon, FBI and FAA — believing his administration’s claim the FAA “authorized” these unknown craft, lawmakers are now dishing the goods and recounting tantalizing, previously unreported details to Raw Story about the government’s losing battle to secure U.S. airspace.
“Reasonable minds would say, ‘We think there’s something very serious here,’” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) told Raw Story at the Capitol. “I kept saying, ‘Shoot one down.’”
Smith is far from alone. There’s a growing, bipartisan chorus on Capitol Hill calling on the Pentagon to use its taxpayer-funded arsenal to blow these unknown craft out of the sky.
Raw Story has exclusively learned previously unreported details about how little federal agencies know about the mysterious craft buzzing the nation, including that the Pentagon reportedly retrieved at least one of the drones responsible for shuttering Virginia’s Langley Air Force Base for 17 days in 2023.
“One went down, we’re told”
The Trump White House claim that the FAA knew all along what was going on is laughable to many lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol, especially those on the House Homeland Security Committee.
At the end of last year — with the public and media in full freak out mode — the DHS committee dragged in officials from the FBI, Department of Justice and Customs and Border Protection to get answers.
Answers were few and far between, though.
“You’re telling me you don’t know what the hell these drones in New Jersey are?” an animated Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) asked during the “Safeguarding the Homeland from Unmanned Aerial Systems” hearing on Dec. 10, 2024.
“That’s right,” FBI Assistant Director of the Critical Incident Response Group Robert W. Wheeler Jr. testified before admitting the premier law enforcement agency in the nation allocates less than $500,000 of its annual budget to technologies to combat Unmanned Aerial Systems (or UAS).
“This isn’t new. Drones are 100 years old. This isn't state of the art,” Gonzales lectured. “The fact that we don't know what's flying in our airspace is only the tip of the iceberg on what's to come. We have to fix this…and if we don’t, I suspect not good things will happen.”
In spite of team Trump claiming problem solved, Gonzales proved prophetic, as ‘not good things’ is exactly what happened.
At the end of last year, the drones — or whatever lawmakers and federal officials are calling unidentified flying objects these days — reportedly honed in on sensitive sites across New Jersey, including the Picatinny Arsenal (a research and manufacturing facility), Naval Weapons Station Earle (a munitions depot) and President Trump’s own Bedminster country club (“They're over Bedminster a lot,” Trump complained last month).
While the president is now trying to move on, lawmakers in his own party still have pressing questions. Top of the list is, what are these flying objects that perpetually evade the most powerful Department of Defense — or DOD — on the planet?
“At [Naval Weapons Station] Earle, we had two! Right over the perimeter! One landed. They rushed over and it had already taken off again,” Smith told Raw Story of a previously unreported incident through a disbelieving laugh. “It’s like, are you kidding me? It’s a munitions depot!”
While Smith hasn’t witnessed the drone incursions that many of his New Jersey neighbors have, he’s been flooded with stories that don’t mesh with the new White House narrative, including from service members left dizzied and unsettled after being followed by waves of drones.
At that Homeland Security Committee hearing, Smith shared the alarming story of a commanding officer in the New Jersey Coast Guard who reported his 47-foot-long vessel being tracked by “between 12 and 30 of these drones.”
There’s a puzzling disparity between seeing 12 or 30 drones, which is exactly Smith’s point: Whosever tech this is, they’re literally flying circles around America’s best, brightest and the world’s beefiest military. But what’s Pentagon hardware of old against a fleet of flying objects that even trained sailors can’t track, let alone hack into or shoot down?
“I think hearings are really needed — DOD and Homeland Security,” Smith said.
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“FAA?” Raw Story asked of the agency Trump claims has — and always had — the situation under control. “Or are they not even needed?”
“Well, sure. But I don’t know if FAA…,” Smith trailed off. “Where’s the military? Homeland — this is U.S. airspace. It’s not just over the installations.”
At the Capitol, lawmakers have been debating whether the military has the authority to shoot these craft down over U.S. soil. The Pentagon has told lawmakers it’s resisted that because of murky rules of engagement domestically, even as lawmakers like Smith argue there’s no question they already have that authority over their own bases.
So a few different lawmakers in both parties are now sponsoring measures that would clarify the quandary and give the military an explicit green light to shoot these intruders down, specifically over military bases, at the very least.
But has the federal government been able to shoot even one of these down?
“As far as we know, zero,” Smith — who’s sponsoring a bill to empower local law enforcement to do what the Pentagon’s failed to do and combat these unknown hovering craft — said.
Then Smith let a secret slip.
“One went down, we’re told, over Langley — near Langley,” Smith told Raw Story of a previously unreported incident. “But it crashed so badly they — it’s like, c’mon, we don’t have the capability to nab one these things? I think we do.”
Langley’s the incident that freaks folks — military, suburbanites and lawmakers alike — out most, because it showed how America’s mighty military melts in the face of these new unknown flying foes.
“Neither the FAA nor the military has given us a sufficient answer”
The Langley Air Force Base — formally Joint Base Langley-Eustis, these days — is some 180 miles and a smidge under 4 hrs. from Washington, D.C., By car, that is.
At a cruising speed of roughly 500 mph, an F-22 Raptor — the military’s fifth-generation fighter jet — can make it from home base in coastal southern Virginia to the nation’s capital in some 30 mins. That puts it on presidential protection detail, if stuff really hits the proverbial fan in Washington.
Stuff hit the fan in December 2023 — only at Langley itself, as waves of drone swarms incapacitated the strategic base for 17 days, grounding the world’s most elite stealth fighter fleet.
At roughly $350 million per F-22 and with an estimated 36 jets in the Langley fighter wing, that means when the Pentagon got spooked by the unknown air invasion, the Air Force relocated roughly $12.6 billion of U.S. taxpayer-funded hardware. If foreign actors used over-the-counter commercial drones, as some lawmakers claim, to best billions of dollars worth of top secret stealth technology, then the military — let alone the rest of us — has a serious problem on its hands.
The commonwealth’s U.S. senators aren’t buying Trump’s FAA argument, because in the 12+ months since the historic incapacitation of Langley, the FAA, Pentagon and other federal agencies have failed to answer any of their most basic questions, starting with ‘who?’ and ‘what?’
“Neither the FAA nor the military has given us a sufficient answer. And I don't think they have an answer that they're not giving us, I just don't think they have one,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) — a member of the Armed Services Committee — told Raw Story. “I don’t know about Jersey. That’s definitely not the case with respect to the Virginia situation at Langley.”
Just this December, Kaine and Virginia’s other senator, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-chair Mark Warner, received a classified briefing on the December 2023 drone swarms that cripled Langley.
Warner’s no dove, but he’s also not one of the Senate’s many war hawks. Still, the Langley incident has him wanting to pop off missiles himself.
“Disappointing. We’re a year in and we still don’t know where they came from, who's behind it,” Warner told Raw Story shortly after their latest briefing. “You gotta have the ability to take them down.”
It’s not just Langley. American military bases in the UK and Germany have also been surveilled by unidentified drones in recent months. Britain even deployed 60 members of the Royal Air Force — or RAF — to help Pentagon officials investigate these incursions of sensitive military airspace.
“It's not satisfactory to me. It just raises more concerns."
Other senators are alarmed too. They’ve been raising their concerns for more than a year now, because this isn’t new.
And no, we’re not talking about U.S. airspace being invaded by that Chinese spy balloon that floated from Alaska to the waters off South Carolina before the Air Force finally downed it with a roughly $400,000 Sidewinder missile before recovering a trove of spy gadgets last January.
A few months before that incident dominated a handful of cable news cycles, in the fall of 2023, just outside of Las Vegas, five drones were reported hovering over the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site — where more than 900 nuclear tests were conducted until America stopped that practice in 1994 — over a three-day period.
And last fall — before New Jersey videos mesmerized the nation — in California, the FAA was forced to step in and place temporary flight restrictions around the Air Force’s Plant 42 — a top secret aerospace facility — after “multiple” waves of drones were spotted surveilling its grounds a few months in a row.
Just last spring, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) pressed the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on drone incursions that flummoxed officers at Arizona’s Luke Air Force Base — home to the Barry Goldwater Range — after a fighter jet collided with a drone in 2023.
‘Air Force jets dodging drones over Arizona desert,’ reads the headline from the local Phoenix CBS station last February. “This is just one of 22 incidents between October 2022 and June 2023 where Air Force fighter pilots reported seeing or colliding with drones in mid-flight.”
Still, the problem has persisted.
“constantly around our military sites”
Since returning from a classified tour of a Nevada Air Force base — as well as stops at Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman facilities that work on classified programs — last February, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has been fighting for better sensors for the military.
She’s one of only a handful of senators who sits on both the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. She complains America’s military simply doesn’t have the technology necessary to combat these unknown invaders or UAPs — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — which is the government’s new term for ‘UFOs.’
“I’m very concerned about UAPs, particularly drone technology, aircraft technology that is constantly around our military sites, and it’s a form of ubiquitous surveillance that causes great concern for me,” Gillibrand told Raw Story after her trip last year.
Like Virginia’s senators, Gillibrand says Pentagon officials still haven’t gotten to the bottom of these “constant” incursions over sensitive nuclear and military sites from coast to coast.
She says it’s a major national security vulnerability.
“We need to know, is it Russia, China, Iran or other? Because it’s highly relevant that we can function at military bases,” Gillibrand said. “But, also, it’s important that we can protect secrets and it’s important that we have air superiority and domain awareness.”
The serious debates that have engulfed Congress over air superiority are in stark contrast to the simple — even simplistic — line Trump’s team is peddling.
“After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters recently.
Instead of the promised clarity, confusion’s been left in the wake of this White House.
“It made it sound like there was, like, some research project that they're — like, as far as I know, none of that exists,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) told Raw Story.
The New Jersey congressional delegation has been briefed by FBI and DHS officials on the unknown drone incursions into Garden State airspace, including one from former DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas himself at the height of the panic.
In the wake of those very serious briefings, Kim — a former national security adviser before serving three terms in the House who’s now a freshman senator — says he’s only been left scratching his head since hearing team Trump’s claims.
“It's not satisfactory to me. It just raises more concerns — in that kind of vein — and, you know, doesn't at all kind of address some of the concerns that even President Trump raised before,” Kim told Raw Story. “I don't see how the answer we heard is any different than what we've heard from the previous administration.”
And no one in Congress was happy with those crickets, even if many say the silence from the Biden administration was better than the lies being peddled by the Trump administration.
Matt Laslo has covered Congress since 2006, bringing Raw Story readers the personalities behind the politics and policy straight from Capitol Hill. Based in Washington, D.C., Matt has been a long-time contributor to NPR, WIRED, VICE News, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. More about Matt Laslo.
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