With Americans’ fervor mounting about mysterious drone sightings over New Jersey, government officials on Saturday had few answers as to who was operating the drones but insisted they were not a threat.
Officials from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, Pentagon and National Security Council said there was no evidence that the unidentified crafts posed a threat, nor were they being controlled by foreign actors.
The officials told reporters on a call that investigations into the unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS, were ongoing, but they were unable to provide more information on where exactly they had come from.
“To date, we have no intelligence or observations that would indicate that they were aligned with a foreign actor or that they had malicious intent,” a Pentagon official said. “But you know, I just got to simply tell you we don’t know, we have not been able to locate or identify the operators or the points of origin.”
Reports of drone sightings began to pop up around Thanksgiving. Since then, drones have been seen over key military installations in the Garden State, including the Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle.
Theories about where the drones came from and why they appeared have cropped up online, and sightings have now happened in Pennsylvania, New York and, most recently, Maryland.
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Congress members and state officials have demanded answers.
At a separate press conference on Saturday, Rep. Chris Smith, New Jersey Republican, said he planned to introduce legislation that would allow local authorities to “protect at-risk persons and infrastructure, and if necessary, bring down a dangerous drone or drones.”
Mr. Smith said that a Coast Guard rescue boat was trailed by “numerous” drones and questioned why authorities could not “bag at least one of these drones and get to the bottom of it.”
“The elusive maneuvering of these drones… suggests a major military power sophistication that begs the question whether they have been deployed to test our defense capabilities, or worse, by violent dictatorships, perhaps maybe Russia or China or Iran or North Korea,” Mr. Smith said. “I mean, they have the capability, and they certainly have the motive.”
Officials from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security said that the location of the sightings matched up with air traffic patterns around John F. Kennedy International Airport. They said they were “confident that many of the reported drone sightings are, in fact, manned aircraft being misidentified as drones.”
The FBI launched an investigation into the sightings days after reports began spreading and set up a tip line that has so far received 5,000 calls. An official from the agency said that of those calls, 100 tips have turned into credible leads. An FBI official said that there has been a “slight overreaction” but that the agency is still seriously investigating the phenomena.
“I don’t want to cause alarm and panic, right? But we can’t ignore the sightings that have been there, and we are concerned about those just as much as anybody else is,” the FBI official said.
The federal officials also argued that they were somewhat limited in their ability to investigate and get to the root of the issue and pushed for Congress to pass legislation that they said would broaden their authority.
House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green, Tennessee Republican, introduced legislation that would expand the usage of counter-UAS systems to deal with drones.
“I have a bill right now in Congress to give local law enforcement the ability to shoot down these drones,” Mr. Green told Fox News on Friday. “Right now, they don’t have the authorities from the FAA, and we’ve got a bill that’s working its way through Congress to make that happen.”
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.
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