What started with a drone sighting over a military installation in New Jersey last November quickly grew into a national craze about mysterious objects in the sky. Social media was flooded with videos and images purporting to show drones. Politicians weighed in. Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) were imposed over dozens of power facilities. The so-called Jersey Drone phenomenon became such a big deal that the FBI launched a hotline for people to report what they had seen, with only a small fraction of some 5,000 sightings deemed worthy of further investigation.
The FBI told us on Thursday that the investigation is still ongoing, but declined to offer any details about whether any suspects were uncovered or any drones recovered.
So what were these things?
We asked one expert who worked at the highest levels of government for some answers.
For nearly a decade, starting in 2011, Brett Feddersen, a retired Army officer, served in a wide range of executive roles under the Obama and first Trump administrations. He was National Security Liaison / Senior Intelligence Officer for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Deputy Chief of Intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Senior Advisor for Strategy, Plans, and Policy for The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), worked in the Executive Office of the President, was Director for Transportation and Border Security at the National Security Council (NSC), Principal Deputy Director the the JCS Transregional Threats Coordination Cell and an Executive Director at the FAA. He was also a member of the Navy’s UAP [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena] Task Force, created in 2020 to investigate what used to be known as UFOs.
Feddersen is currently chairman of the Security Industry Association‘s Counter-UAS Working Group and is vice president of strategy and governmental affairs for D-Fend Solutions, which supplies counter-drone equipment to the U.S. military, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and other clients.
In the second part of our hour-long interview with Feddersen, we asked him to offer some insights about the Jersey Drone craze. In many ways, he concurred with our analysis that there is no evidence of large-scale drone incursions over New Jersey, with a chronic issue of people reporting normal aircraft as mysterious drones being glaringly apparent. You can catch up with the first part of the interview here.
Some questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: So what were these objects? Where did they come from, and who operated them?
A: That’s a great question and there is a mix of answers, which I think added to a lot of the confusion. There were a lot of manned aircraft that were operating within the normal standards in the same area that were being misidentified as drones. I’ve seen quite a few of those videos and pictures, and coming from an aviator’s perspective, they’re easy to identify because I’m familiar with aircraft that operate at night. As a matter of fact, some of the aircraft that were called drones were aircraft I flew – helicopters.
There were also government operations and different things that had already gotten approval through the FAA. And you have commercial operations, those that are making deliveries or test bed situations that also had approval with the FAA, so those are the ones that are flying around. I highly doubt that there weren’t, in that big mix of drones, some foreign adversary that was taking advantage and trying to find information or video, we see probing regularly from foreign adversaries over sensitive sites like bases. So there was a true mixture of all that. And I think what caused a lot of the – for lack of a better term – hysteria was a poor response by the government to address the public’s fear and considerations. Poor communication between inter-agencies. The FAA, talking to the government to explain which aircraft were authorized or not authorized.
Q: How should those breakdowns have been addressed?
A: Coming out right up front and saying, ‘Hey, we have a problem. We have these issues. And here’s where we’re at with it.’ That I think would have taken care of a lot of things at the beginning.
Q: You mentioned that a lot of the so-called Jersey drone sightings were government drones. Can you talk about that? What operations were being conducted by the government?
A: The government is constantly improving on drones or training on drones. So those activities are coordinated with the FAA. They’re authorized. That means that they’re flying training routes or training flights in the vicinity of certain areas to build proficiency in flying the aircraft so that you can continue to make it safer and more active. Then you also have those commercial drones that we’re talking about that are doing deliveries that also do the same thing. They coordinate with the FAA, they get approval for the routes or their runs, and then they execute in that manner. So both of those were what contributed to the Jersey drone craze.
Q: During the early days of the second Trump administration, officials said these drones were not a danger, and they were approved and known by the FAA. What were those?.
A: The majority of the flights were known and approved by the FAA. So what they’re referring to there is that these were standard operations that were going on. There was nothing classified that was going on. There was nothing that would have triggered any type of conspiracy concepts to it. They were just flying around as normal. The response of the public being heightened to the issue kind of created that craze. Now we do know that there are always flights that are flying around that are not reporting to the FAA and doing those things at this point, you know, in New Jersey, particularly, we don’t know whether those were foreign adversaries or U.S. citizens that just did not know how to operate their aircraft.
Q: What classification of drones were being tested by the government or trained on by the government? Were they nano, micro, small, medium or large?
A: In the vicinity of New Jersey, they are really the medium and small ones that are being used. Often…drones used by the Army for reconnaissance in other areas. If they’re testing new payloads or sensors or cameras on systems, they’re flying around in their set training areas and their patterns to make sure that all the flight characteristics of that payload on the drone is doing what it’s supposed to do. So that’s what that does. Every flight that you take in a drone, especially a military drone, gives the operator, that drone or the camera operator, a chance to become more proficient at what they’re doing, and that’s what was occurring in conjunction with all the other flights that were happening during those days.
Q: One theory floated at the time was that the government was testing counter-drone capabilities. Did that really happen?
A: It’s highly unlikely, and here’s why. In New Jersey and Atlantic City, there is the FAA Technical Center, and they do counter-drone testing and drone testing at that airport. Butt is in a very controlled manner where they are. They are either flying or aware of what is being flown and the system’s capabilities that are being used at that time. At nighttime, very little operations happen because you can’t get the same type of spectrum data as during the daytime. So it is highly unlikely that there was activity there at the tech center that was going on.
Anything else that would have been tested outside of that area, even by the military, is coordinated with the FAA, and they would have been aware of that type of activity too. And there are other places to do that type of testing. You don’t do it right there in the urban environment where there’s a lot of other aircraft flying.
Q: So, where did these drones that were being tested come from that caused people to report them as being these mystery drones? And if military drones are being mistaken as mystery drones where did they come from?
A: The Army and, well, actually, all the branches have quite a few bases or smaller facilities around the area there, between New Jersey, New York and and Pennsylvania, right? That whole tri-state area has quite a few facilities that are always looking at some research or testing or doing more things. You also have units that are there, including reserve units or National Guard units that are flying and operating drones throughout that area as well. So it again, it’s really a combination of what I would consider the majority of them being legitimate operations. There were a few that would be criminal in nature, either because of ignorance or because of nefarious activity behind it.
Q: Do you know anything about the FBI investigation?
A: I do not. I have no insight into the FBI’s investigation.
Q: Let’s switch gears and talk about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or what used to be known as UFOs. You were part of the UAP Task Force, created in August 2020 to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security. It was ultimately replaced by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Can you talk about how UAPs fit into the craze over drones?
A: UAPs are a real thing that we can’t identify. Across the globe. It’s not just in the United States. So not to be conflated with drones, we just don’t know what those are. And there’s often a confusion with those as well that are flying in the airspace. I don’t recall any true UAPs being seen in the New Jersey incident, but it’s just one of those things that the government should also take seriously.
Q: We’ve reported a lot about how some of these so-called UAPs were actually adversary drones, flying over Navy vessels, etc. Do you think that’s a big part of these UAP sightings?
A: I think it is. Remember that UAPs are, by nature, unidentified, right? And so they can be man-made structures. Some of the UAPs and their capabilities are so extreme that we are finding it hard to believe that they’re man-made. We are more concerned if they are an adversary man-made object. Then, obviously, those capabilities have gone much farther than we’re familiar with, which you know scares us in a national security sense altogether.
Q: Do you believe that UAPs are advanced adversary technologies, or is it possible that these are created by non-human intelligence?
A: Anything’s possible. Because they’re unidentified, we don’t know the origin of where they came from. We don’t know who built it. I would say that I think the adversarial view is probably the most accepted view, for obvious reasons. But you know, some of these defy our current aviation capabilities and aerial capabilities, and they defy the abilities that we believe that our adversaries have, so we’re having a hard time figuring out what it is.
Q: Are these created by non-human intelligence?
A: I don’t want to comment.
Q: What is your realistic worst-case nightmare scenario about drones that’s going to happen?
A: A drone that can dispense some type of aerosol or powder over a large crowd. That one is top of mind for everybody. Weaponized drones, or drones being used kinetically by itself. I mean, they can reach some high speeds – 50-60 miles per hour and flying into a individual is going to cause a lot of damage. Even flying into the window of a vehicle is going to create a lot of damage that will threaten the life, limbs or eyesight of individuals. These are things that we know are being proliferated across the internet for people to do. We know that there are people inside the U.S who have weaponized drones or have done these things, going back to the guy who dropped dye packs in the pools over in New Jersey. There’s a lot of agricultural drones that bring so much benefit, but they also have this risk factor.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com