News / Jul 10, 2026

The New Jersey drone wave had two sets of answers

By Jan for UAP Logbook / Published

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On 17 December 2024, the same day Joe Biden told reporters "nothing nefarious" was in the sky, the TSA circulated an internal slideshow matching four of New Jersey's most prominent drone sightings to commercial aircraft. The public got the first version. Reason.com published the second on 9 May 2025.

Editorial illustration of a White House press briefing room at night, empty podium in front of a blue curtain, three open file folders on the reporter table showing redacted pages, envelope stamped 17 December 2024 beside a paper coffee cup.
Editorial illustration by UAP Logbook. It represents the public-private record gap of the 2024 New Jersey drone wave. It is not source imagery.

In mid-November 2024, residents of northern New Jersey started posting videos of large, blinking objects crossing the night sky. Within a month the reports had spread to New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and Connecticut. Videos showed formations of red, green, and white lights moving slowly over the coast, the Turnpike, and military installations including Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle. Two Republican congressmen, Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew, began calling for the drones to be shot down. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy asked the federal government for help. By 12 December 2024, the FBI had received more than 5,000 tips about drone sightings in the state alone.

The federal response split into two records. The first is the one most readers saw at the time. The second stayed inside the bureaucracy for five more months.

What the federal government said

On the morning of 12 December 2024, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement. "We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus," it said, noting that the FBI and DHS had "not corroborated any of the reported visual sightings with electronic detection."

Two days earlier, on 10 December 2024, the public version was not yet that settled. At a joint hearing of two House Homeland Security subcommittees titled "Safeguarding the Homeland from Unmanned Aerial Systems," Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) asked Robert Wheeler Jr., the assistant director of the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group, whether there was a threat to public safety. Wheeler's answer has been quoted many times since. "There is nothing that is known that would lead me to say that," he told the committee, "but we just don't know. And that's the concerning part." When Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) pressed him — "You're telling me we don't know what the hell these drones are in New Jersey?" — Wheeler confirmed: "That's right."

Four days after Wheeler's testimony, on 16 December 2024, the four biggest federal agencies in the airspace business — the Department of Defense, DHS, the FAA, and the FBI — issued a joint statement. It was the one that settled the public version of the story for most readers:

Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones. We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the Northeast.

That night, on 17 December 2024, then-President Joe Biden gave a brief answer to reporters on the White House lawn. "Nothing nefarious apparently, but they're checking it all out," he said. "We're following this closely, but so far, no sense of danger." The same day, members of Congress came out of a classified briefing and said the alleged sightings posed no threat.

The next morning, on 18 December 2024, the FAA imposed temporary flight restrictions over 22 New Jersey communities, declaring them National Defense Airspace and warning that drone operators could face interception, detention, and, in extreme cases, deadly force. The following day the agency extended similar restrictions over parts of New York, including Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island. The restrictions were requested by federal authorities for "special security reasons." The public-facing story was still reassuring. The airspace rules said otherwise.

On 28 January 2025, at her first White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt closed the federal file with a single line. The drones, she said, were "authorized to be flown by the FAA" for "research" and "various other reasons," and were "not the enemy."

One piece of the public record that rarely makes it into the recap is what the military bases themselves said while the federal statements were being written. On 14 December 2024, the Joint Staff acknowledged on background that "we have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle," but framed the issue as routine: "This is not a new issue for us. We've had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now." A Naval Weapons Station Earle spokesman, Bill Addison, told ABC News the same day that the base "can confirm multiple instances of unidentified drones entering the airspace above Naval Weapons Station Earle." Lt. Col. Craig A. Bonham II, the Picatinny Arsenal Garrison Commander, was blunter about the origin question: "While the source and cause of these aircraft operating in our area remain unknown," he said, "we can confirm that they are not the result of any Picatinny Arsenal-related activities."

What the federal government knew

The 17 December 2024 Biden quote and the 28 January 2025 Leavitt line are the version of the story that most Americans heard. The internal record of those same weeks did not move at the same speed.

On 17 December 2024, the same day Biden said "nothing nefarious," the Transportation Security Administration — a DHS component that sits inside the same department that was publicly telling the public not to worry — circulated an internal slideshow that walked through four of the most alarming New Jersey sightings and matched them, point by point, to flight logs.

Reason.com obtained the slides through a Freedom of Information Act request and published them on 9 May 2025. The Black Vault, the long-running document archive run by John Greenewald, obtained a related package under FOIA case 2025-HQFO-01452. What they showed was a federal investigative team that had already reached specific, mundane conclusions in December 2024, and was not sharing them.

The four cases, with the TSA's own language:

1. Somerville, NJ, 26 November 2024 — the medevac. A medevac helicopter attempted to land; three drones were observed in close proximity, forcing the unit to abort and find another landing zone. The TSA found that three commercial aircraft were on direct approach to the Solberg VOR at the same time. "The alignment of the aircraft gave the appearance to observers on the ground of them hovering in formation while they were actually moving directly at the observers."

2. Sea Girt / Jersey Shore, 5 December 2024 — the ocean swarm. Six to seven large drones were reported traveling in from the ocean toward the base and hovering over the coastline in close proximity for 2 to 3 minutes, then turning back out to sea. Flight tracking during the same window showed commercial airliners arriving from the south on approach into JFK, turning toward land around Sea Girt, and looping back out to sea. "For these periods of time, they would appear to almost hover in the sky as they flew toward, and then away from, land."

3. Salem Nuclear Power Plant, 12 December 2024 — the nuclear plant. More than three drones were reported hovering over the waterlines at the Salem Nuclear Generating Station and the adjacent Hope Creek plant. Two non-commercial aircraft were in the same airspace at the time: a Cessna C150 (N3073S) at 4,200 feet, 62 mph, and a UH-60 Black Hawk (G24493) at approximately 600 feet, 100 mph, plus commercial Philadelphia departures. The TSA mapped each one to the observation window.

4. Clinton, NJ, 12 December 2024 — the mist. A witness described a drone dipping down and going back up, then spraying a gray mist. The TSA identified the aircraft, with "high confidence," as a Beechcraft Baron 58 (N525TM) that experienced turbulence and dropped roughly 100 feet before regaining altitude. "The rapid pressure change over the wing's surfaces cause wingtip vertices [condensation clouds] that may appear as gray mist." Clinton Township Police Chief Thomas A. DeRosa informed the public of the finding on 31 December 2024 — but only for that single local case.

None of those specific identifications appeared in the 16 December 2024 joint statement. None of them were shared in the 17 December 2024 classified congressional briefing summary that members of Congress repeated to the press afterward. None of them were in the 28 January 2025 Leavitt line. The four cases sat in the TSA deck for five months, while the public version kept saying the same thing in different words.

The Coast Guard piece that did not close

There is one report the TSA deck addresses, and one that still does not sit clean. The deck handles the 5 December 2024 Sea Girt sighting as a JFK-approach geometry problem. It does not fully address what happened the night of 8 December 2024, when two separate sets of observations piled onto the same coastline and the federal response split along a different line than the public statements would suggest.

The first was an over-the-horizon count. Smith and Ocean County Sheriff Michael Mastronardy went drone-hunting at Island Beach State Park on the Monday night after the Sunday sighting. The reason, Smith said, was that the night before — Sunday, 8 December 2024 — a New Jersey State Park Police officer had counted 50 drones crossing the horizon from the ocean and moving over Barnegat Light and Island Beach State Park toward Seaside Heights. Mastronardy confirmed the count to reporters: "She saw them coming over the horizon," he said at a news conference with Smith on 14 December 2024. "The officer did an excellent job — she documented it." Mastronardy also said the officer had reported what appeared to be a cargo ship about a mile and a half offshore. The incident was separately confirmed by NewsNation on 16 December 2024, which reported that the deputy had called 911 about "50 drones over the ocean." This is the sighting that the TSA deck refers to as "approximately six to seven large drones sighted traveling in from the ocean toward the base and then hovering over the coastline in close proximity to the land around Sea Girt." The 6-7 figure is what the flight-tracked JFK-approach overlay accounts for. The 50 figure is what the witness on the beach counted.

The second was a boat-following report. Republican congressman Chris Smith, who had been briefed by the Barnegat Light station's commanding officer, said the officer had described 12 to 30 objects following a 47-foot Coast Guard rescue boat at roughly 100 feet distance, matching the boat's 20-knot cruise, and flashing what Smith described as "headlights" at the vessel. Smith put the objects' wingspan at 4 to 8 feet and the sighting window at 9 to 11 p.m. Lt. Luke Pinneo of the Coast Guard confirmed to The Associated Press that "multiple low-altitude aircraft were observed in the vicinity of one of our vessels near Island Beach State Park," and that the aircraft "were not perceived as an immediate threat and did not disrupt operations."

On 18 December 2024 the White House pushed back, calling Smith "profoundly uninformed" and saying the Coast Guard had been watching passenger jets on approach to JFK. Smith said the Coast Guard officer disagreed. The TSA deck — produced the same day as that exchange — walked through how commercial jets on the JFK approach make a large S-shaped maneuver over the ocean, and stated, in its own words, that "were these videos to be of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] operating over the ocean, we would expect to see these 17 aircraft to be visible in the background with their high-intensity navigational lights… Since we do not see additional aircraft beyond the drones, it furthers the assessment that the reported UAS in these videos are the aircraft themselves." That is, the 17 commercial aircraft and the 12-30 "drones" were the same set of objects, described two different ways by people on the water and people on radar.

That conclusion is on the public record. The factual question it leaves open is older than the FOIA release: a witness who says 50 drones crossed the horizon from the ocean and a Coast Guard officer who says 12 to 30 objects followed a 47-foot rescue boat at 100 feet and 20 knots are describing a geometry that does not match commercial aircraft on a JFK approach, no matter how the lights look from shore. The TSA analysis does not address that geometry. It only addresses the light-pattern reading. The August 2025 release of the DHS Coast Guard assessment, via Liberation Times, adds the 17-aircraft overlay for the 8 December window — but it still does not address the witness geometry, the reported cargo ship a mile and a half offshore, or the separate count of 50 drones by the State Park Police officer.

What the public record actually says

Stripped to its bones, the New Jersey drone wave has two records and they are not equally weighted.

The public record, from 12 December 2024 to 28 January 2025, has a single through-line: the FBI, DHS, DoD, and FAA all looked at the 5,000+ reports, found no evidence of anomalous activity, ruled out foreign involvement, and said the sky was a mix of lawful drones, manned aircraft, helicopters, and stars. Biden and Leavitt both said the same thing in plain English. The classified congressional briefing on 17 December 2024 said it again. New Jersey State Police, the Coast Guard, and local departments operated on the same working assumption.

The internal record, dated 17 December 2024 and unsealed by FOIA in May 2025, has the same conclusion but adds the receipts: a TSA team had already walked through the four most prominent cases — medevac diversion, ocean swarm, nuclear-plant sighting, gray-mist spray — and matched each to specific aircraft on flight logs, with high-confidence identifications in three of the four. The 8 December 2024 sightings are addressed by the same deck as a JFK-approach geometry, with the 17 commercial aircraft and the "12-30 drones" (boat-following) and the 6-7 drones (the 50-count compressed to flight-tracked JFK approachers) treated as the same set of objects, described two different ways by people on the water and people on radar.

What is not on the public record, and what the May 2025 FOIA release did not produce, is a list of the sightings the feds could not match to a known aircraft. The TSA deck does not say "these four cases are representative of the 5,000+ reports." It says these four cases had mundane explanations. The bulk of the 5,000 tips are still in the "fewer than 100 warranting additional investigation" bucket, and the FBI's public reporting on that subset has not been updated since early 2025.

What would actually close the file

Two things would move the file from "two records" to "one record." The first is a public case-by-case breakdown of the 5,000+ tips — not the high-confidence identifications the TSA already has, but the 100-odd cases the FBI said it was still investigating in early 2025. The second is a published assessment of the 8 December 2024 Coast Guard incident that addresses the geometry of the report, not just the light pattern. The August 2025 release of the DHS Coast Guard assessment, via Liberation Times, gets closer to that. It is still not the same thing as a Coast Guard deck log analysis.

Until then, the New Jersey drone wave is what it has been since December 2024: a public record that says "nothing anomalous," and an internal record that says the same thing with significantly more detail, sitting in different filing cabinets.

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