Pentagon’s Assessment of Recent Drone Sightings Leaves More Questions Than Answers

Micah Hanks·

Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder

Welcome to this week’s giant-sized installment of The Intelligence Brief… this week, the Pentagon and other federal agencies weighed in on the recent sightings of mystery drones over the northeast, attributing most of the sightings to common drones, misidentified airplanes, and celestial objects. However, we still have a lot of questions… in our analysis this week, we’ll be looking at 1) what the U.S. military’s recent statements reveal about drones in our airspace, 2) why the recent drone “flap” might have seemed familiar to longtime researchers of aerial mysteries, and 3) why the admission of legitimate drone sightings over U.S. facilities is a real problem and should be treated as such.

Quote of the Week

“In the case of drones flying near or over US military installations, that in and of itself, just given the volume of drone flights we see on a given day, is not something that’s new.”

– Pentagon Spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder

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DoD Says Drones Over the U.S. Are “Nothing New”

After several weeks of mysterious nighttime sightings over the northeastern United States, the great “mystery drone” craze of 2024 finally appears to be subsiding.

Although reports continue, earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Defense released a joint statement with other federal agencies that attributed many of the sightings to lawful flights of commercial drones or those flown by hobbyists and law enforcement. Additionally, many sightings involved misidentifications of conventional aircraft or celestial objects.

Speaking at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters “The vast majority of these drones are going to probably be recreational or hobbyist. They’re going to be commercial drones used in things like architecture, engineering, farming or they could be used for law enforcement.”

In a separate Pentagon news release issued earlier that day, the DoD also confirmed that “there have been a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere, including within restricted air space.”

“Such sightings near or over DoD installations are not new,” the Pentagon release stated. “DoD takes unauthorized access over its airspace seriously and coordinates closely with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities, as appropriate.”

More Questions Than Answers

While some have taken the DoD’s assessment of the recent drone sightings as an indication the situation has been resolved and can be put to rest, that is far from being true. If anything, the Pentagon’s recent statements—especially its admissions about drone incursions over U.S. military sites—only leave us with more questions than answers and potentially reveal serious problems the U.S. military is facing amid an increasingly cluttered national airspace.

However, before we examine why the DoD’s current stance is, rather than being any kind of “resolution,” really more of an admission of a problem, there are other elements of the recent drone situation that warrant attention, too. Most of these perspectives have been lost in the fray amid ongoing reporting that, in some instances, has propelled premature conclusions, conspiracy theories, and claims involving otherworldly sources behind some of the sightings.

In reality, at least some of the dynamics behind the recent sudden spike in drone sightings involves a phenomenon that is well known to longtime students of aerial mysteries, and one which takes us into the social and psychological dimension of the problem.

The Truth About the Recent Drone Sightings

Neither U.S. Department of Defense nor White House officials have denied that there were at least some legitimate sightings of drones in recent days, which included sightings over military facilities that were initially downplayed or denied (an issue we’ll address shortly).

What U.S. officials have tried to emphasize is that most of the sightings were probably benign, and that many more alleged sightings that have gained attention lately—helped along by videos and imagery aired on national news and posted on social media—were not of drones at all, but instead were misidentifications of common airplanes, stars, and other things.

Although this is often an unpopular viewpoint, it is a true and accurate one that can be demonstrated, and which The Debrief discussed as early as December 5 in a past edition of The Intelligence Brief. At that time, we acknowledged that there were likely to be a few legitimate sightings of drones while demonstrating why most of the objects being shown by national media outlets were, in fact, simply planes.

For those of us who had already been following the UFO subject for many years by the time 2017 rolled into town, with its unnerving revelations about U.S. government involvement in the study of what since has become known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the recent events over the northeastern U.S. seemed familiar. That’s because they have all the hallmarks of what “Ufologists” would call a flap.

Short of the long, a UFO flap traditionally involves a sudden surge in sighting reports of aerial phenomena, often within a certain region, and also frequently accompanied by significant factors that include media reporting and a proportional increase in public interest in the sightings.

Indeed, given these criteria, the recent drone sightings over the northeast do appear to check several of the boxes of qualifying as a traditional “UFO flap.” Any serious analysis of the recent drone situation should recognize the factors involving how some legitimate sightings (of drones, in this case) eventually lead to media coverage, which inevitably leads to more sightings (often of other things in the sky that end up being mistaken for drones). More sightings, in turn, lead to more media coverage, and the cycle repeats.

Recognizing the dynamics of the “UFO flap” phenomenon, however, does not provide us with a complete “solution” to the drone problem, one that now includes the admission by U.S. officials (after initial denials) that sightings of the objects have been occurring in restricted airspace over military facilities.

The Pentagon’s Drone Problem

While speaking at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder also addressed recent reports of drones observed near or over U.S. military installations, which he said are nothing new.

“Is it possible that some of those are surveillance? Absolutely,” Ryder said. “Can you make that assumption in every case? Not necessarily so.”

The fact that Ryder even acknowledged there had been recent drone sightings over U.S. facilities, let alone the possibility that some of them could involve “surveillance,” does plenty to underscore the problem drones represent for the Department of Defense. Any surveillance of high-security sites that is being undertaken by unknown parties should be recognized as a serious concern.

What is truly unfortunate in this instance is that less than a week prior to Ryder’s statement, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby had stated on December 12 during a press conference that there had been “no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace.”

Kirby provided these statements days after The Debrief had already received confirmation of drone sightings from officials at New Jersey’s Picatinny Arsenal. “While the source and cause of these aircraft operating in our area remain unknown, we can confirm that they are not the result of any Picatinny Arsenal-related activities,” Lt. Col. Craig A. Bonham II, Picatinny Arsenal Garrison Commander, said at the time in a statement provided to The Debrief on December 10.

Then, just one day after Kirby’s denial of such sightings, normal operations at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio were interrupted for close to four hours as the installation temporarily closed its airspace.

The reason: sightings of unauthorized drones near the facility.

Drone Issues at Home and Overseas

It should be pointed out that drone sightings over U.S. military facilities can’t be easily lumped in alongside the “misidentifications” cited by Pentagon officials this week regarding recent observations over the Northeast. Military personnel at facilities like Wright Patterson Air Force Base are equipped with radar systems and other advanced capabilities that allow them to quickly differentiate between military aircraft that are authorized for flight in controlled airspace, as opposed to drones and conventional planes.

Further, adding recent sightings of drones over U.S. bases in the United Kingdom into the mix makes the picture even more complicated. In short, to chalk the UK incidents up to being simple misidentifications of common aircraft would be absurd. Perhaps even worse, for U.S. officials to suggest that sightings over multiple U.S. bases for several consecutive nights might just be “hobbyists” (as Pat Ryder suggested on November 26, 2024) does very little to assure us that these sightings are being taken seriously. To the contrary, such events appear to reveal targeted efforts by unknown operators, an issue that raises obvious security concerns.

So while U.S. officials maintain that the majority of sightings of “mystery drones” over the northeast can be explained (an observation which does actually conform to the dynamics of known historical “UFO flaps”), recent events have nonetheless forced them to reverse their earlier denials about sightings over military facilities. Not only that, but now the Pentagon has had to admit that unauthorized drone flights have been an ongoing problem for longer than most realize.

“In the case of drones flying near or over US military installations, that in and of itself just given the volume of drone flights we see on a given day, is not something that’s new,” Ryder confirmed to reporters earlier this week.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

Obviously, there are a range of factors that must be considered regarding the recent 2024 drone flap. While many the observations over the northeast clearly involve common aircraft and other objects prevalent in the night sky, even the Pentagon has had to begrudgingly admit that there are also some legitimate drone sightings going on too, a few of which have taken place over U.S. military facilities.

Given the fact that these unauthorized drone flights 1) have been ongoing for some time now, 2) the Pentagon claims it doesn’t know who their operators are, and 3) the possibility of surveillance by unknown parties reportedly hasn’t been ruled out, everything about the recent drone events appears to qualify as a significant national security issue for the U.S. military.

It should be treated as such, and Americans deserve honest, forthright perspectives from U.S. officials, not contradictory statements and denials that only contribute to the erosion of trust in our institutions.

That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or Tweet at me @MicahHanks.

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