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A sudden spike in unidentified drones is unnerving residents and lawmakers throughout the country.
The White House has downplayed the incidents, and denied there is any evidence of a sustained threat to public safety, though the flights have caused disruptions at airports and military bases.
Though such incidents are currently receiving enormous media attention, there have been several notable drone sightings in the past half decade for which the federal government has yet to formally account.
Groups of large drones began appearing off the coast of California in 2019. They stalked and surveilled several Navy and Coast Guard ships, including the advanced missile destroyer USS Zumwalt.
The incident raised alarm bells throughout the military and incurred a joint investigation by the Navy, Coast Guard, and FBI. No administration nor the Department of Defense has acknowledged what the drones were seeking to accomplish or who was flying them.
Invesitagative reports of Navy ship logs revealed in 2021 and 2022, however, that the vessels involved had identified the source of the drones as the MV Bass Strait, a Hong-Kong flagged bulk carrier, raising concerns of Chinese state-backed espionage.
In 2020, a new swarm of large drones began appearing in the skies over rural Colorado and Nebraska, where some of the nation’s Minuteman III nuclear missiles are stored.
Local officials eventually said that no laws were being broken, and gave up the investigation without ever identifying the source of the drones.
Similarly, the FBI, FAA, and DoD never publicly identified who was operating the drones, and suggested most of the sitings were attributable to hobby drones, and people misidentifying planets and stars as aircraft.
The White House has taken a similar stance this time around, with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby telling reporters this week that most of the sightings were misidentified hobby drones, civil aircraft, or stars.
Drones have continued to approach and enter the restricted airspace over several U.S. military installations throughout the country and overseas in 2024.
They were tracked around three separate military bases in the United Kingdom last month, including at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, which serves as the U.S. Air Forces in Europe’s only fighter wing of the fifth generation F-35 aircraft.
Shortly thereafter, federal agents arrested a Chinese national in California for flying an unregistered drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and taking photos of the SpaceX rocket pads on a day when the contractor launched a sensitive national reconnaissance payload.
In the past two weeks, new sightings at airports and military facilities have been reported in California, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia.
As in previous incidents, there appears to be no immediate threat to public safety. The risk posed to national security by drones entering and exiting restricted airspace is difficult to overstate, however.
Given the gravity of that threat, President-elect Donald Trump suggested at a news conference this week that the White House or Pentagon likely had intelligence on the incidents but was refusing to divulge it.
Kirby rejected the idea, saying that the Biden administration was being “as upfront as we can be.”
“If we had information, intelligence or otherwise, that told us that there was a national security threat posed by this drone activity, I would say that,” he said.
—Andrew Thornebrooke
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—Stacy Robinson
