The White House revealed on Tuesday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had authorized the flights of mysterious drones observed by residents of New Jersey and surrounding states late last year.
“After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research, and various other reasons,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday.
“Many of these drones were also hobbyist, recreational, and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity,” Leavitt said.
“This was not the enemy,” Leavitt added.
In December, a joint statement issued by the Department of Defense, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA concluded the mystery drone sightings to have resulted from “commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.”
The conclusion was based on 100 leads generated from tips received by the FBI, which determined all the drones reported to the FBI at that time had either been flown lawfully or were misidentifications of other objects that some observers had mistaken for being drones.
While Tuesday’s statement also attributed many of the sightings to conventional drone flights, it provided no additional details about the nature of the “research” the White House now says some of the drones are believed to have been involved in, or for what “various other reasons” some of the aircraft were allegedly flown.
It was also unclear whether the information Leavitt shared on Tuesday was based on last year’s joint assessment by federal agencies, or if the reference to “research” and other unspecified drone operations was intended to imply the existence of official activities involving drones that have not yet been disclosed to the public.
Following Tuesday’s briefing, some commentators online argued that the White House’s statement did little to help reduce the confusion surrounding the drone issue since sightings began to be reported late last year.
“This statement on ‘mystery drones’ misses the point,” said skeptical writer and coder Mick West in a posting on X. “Yes, of the actual drones that were observed, they were FAA-authorized or hobbyist drones. But the vast majority of the reported drone sightings in New Jersey were actually, as the FBI and DHS confirmed, misidentified planes.”
In their joint statement issued in December, federal agencies involved in the investigations into the sightings did acknowledge 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 joint statement read. “DoD takes unauthorized access over its airspace seriously and coordinates closely with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities, as appropriate.”
Just days before the joint statement issued in December, former White House national security spokesman John Kirby had stated during a press briefing that the White House had “no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat, or have a foreign nexus.”
“We have not been able to, and neither have state and local law enforcement authorities, corroborate any of the reported visual sightings. To the contrary, on review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully,” Kirby added at that time.
“And importantly, there are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace,” Kirby said.
The day after Kirby’s statement, sightings of unauthorized drones operating near Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio temporarily shut down the base’s airspace beginning late on Friday, December 14, and extending into the early morning hours of Saturday, December 15. The incident is believed to have influenced the DoD’s decision to acknowledge ongoing unauthorized drone incursions over military facilities in December’s joint statement.
Before his inauguration, President Donald Trump had promised to get to the bottom of the drone sightings, telling Republican governors at his home at Mar-a-Lago on January 9 that he believed it was “ridiculous that they are not telling you about what’s going on with the drones.”
Just minutes after returning to the Oval Office on January 20, Trump was asked again about the drones, prompting him to direct his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, to investigate the situation.
“I would like to find out what it is and tell the people,” Trump said. “In fact, I’d like to do that. Can we find out what that was, Susie?”
“I can’t imagine it’s an enemy, or there would have been—you know, people would have gotten blown up all over,” Trump added.
“Maybe they were testing things,” he also mused about some of the drone sightings.
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t have said what it was,” Trump said at the time.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.