“Is it frustrating to not have more answers on this?” New Jersey governor Phil Murphy mused on Wednesday as his state buzzed with consternation over a weeks-long run of unexplained drone sightings. “Is it frustrating to not have a source for these things? Yes.”
The widespread agita is less about the danger these mysterious vehicles might pose than officials’ exasperating inability to figure out who’s operating them and why. It seems like the problem shouldn’t be that hard to solve. For decades, the U.S. has maintained an elaborate air-defense system that can detect and intercept everything from supersonic bombers to ballistic missiles. So what’s so tough about a handful of buzzing, low-altitude drones that for all we know might have come off the shelf at Best Buy?
It turns out that the problem is way harder than it seems like it should be, and the problem has been repeating for years with no obvious solution in sight. On the contrary, there’s every expectation that the problem could get considerably more widespread in years to come. Basically, if you think this is weird, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The first great drone-swarm mystery to capture the public imagination happened five years ago, when residents of Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas began to report unidentified craft appearing overhead in large numbers at the start of 2020. Residents reported that drones were lighting up the sky “with Christmas lights” and “zipping around all over the place.” I visited the area and dropped in on Rick Bain, a retired power-plant operator who took me into his backyard and showed me where he’d seen a craft hovering for several minutes. “It was right over the house, about 300 or 400 feet up in the air, barely moving,” he told me. “Probably five or six feet across, definitely not big enough to be any kind of manned thing.” His account seemed sober and credible. But drone-swarm skeptics abounded. Vice headlined one report, “Mass Panic: It’s Not Clear That Colorado’s Mystery Drones Even Exist.” The visitations stopped shortly before COVID hit, and suddenly everyone had something more obviously dangerous to worry about.
The mystery never was solved. There were various speculations: Maybe it was a foreign bad actor testing our defenses, or our own military surveilling the nuclear missile silos in the area, or maybe a company secretly testing its swarms of delivery bots. The bigger mystery was why weren’t the authorities able to figure out what was going on.
Part of the problem, experts told me, was that drones are just by their nature really hard to detect, track, and intercept. Their small size makes them hard to see from a distance, and the fact that they generally fly less than 400 feet off the ground means that they’re often hidden by trees, hills, and buildings. Even if you’ve got one in your direct line of sight, there’s little you can do to tell who’s operating it or where they are. “We don’t have a magical technology that can point to the drone and tell you where the person who is flying it happens to be standing,” Arthur Holland Michel, founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone, told me at the time.
Nor was the situation likely to improve. Drones, he said, “are becoming more autonomous. They are getting better communications that are harder to disrupt and harder to track. They are becoming more invasive. They can operate in swarms, which are almost impossible to defend against.”
To combat the problem, the FAA requires drones registered with the agency to be equipped with a technology called Remote ID that broadcasts a signal that allows its operator to be identified. But detecting that signal requires equipment that most people don’t have. And the system only works if people willingly take part. Bad actors using drones for nefarious purposes obviously aren’t going to play ball. A few weeks ago, a drone-detection system at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California picked up an unregistered drone flying overhead. They were only able to track it down because base personnel noticed a Chinese national named Yinpiao Zhou, spoke to him, and found the drone hidden in his jacket that contained photos of the base.
Mysterious aircraft aren’t popping up only at low altitude. In February 2023, a high-altitude balloon appeared over the Rocky Mountains and wafted eastward with seeming impunity. That incident at least had a resolution, when it was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet and its payload recovered. It turned out it was a Chinese spy balloon that had been capturing electronic intelligence data. But other high-altitude mystery objects, including three others shot down by U.S. jets in the following weeks, remained unidentified. Rumors had it that some if not all might have been hobby projects released by amateurs.
That December, another drone swarm occurred, this time at Langley Air Force Base in Norfolk, Virginia. The drones of unknown origin overflew the base for weeks before melting away.
Since the New Jersey drone-swarm sightings began, some have again speculated that it’s all just hysteria, that people are overreacting to normal drones and aircraft because news reports have sensitized them to noises and sights in the night sky that they’d otherwise ignore. There certainly are plenty of drones around. The official FAA registry contains nearly 800,000 of them, and soon even those numbers will seem tiny. In coming weeks, the agency is expected to approve new flight rules for delivery drones that will open the floodgates for a vast swarm of aerial-delivery vehicles all across the country. Amazon alone has said it expects to deliver 500 million packages per year by the end of this decade.
Once that happens, the era of drone-swarm apparitions will most likely be gone for good, simply because there won’t be a time or a place where a swarm isn’t happening at that very moment.
