What more can you say about the drones that are attacking—or, correction, appear to be attacking—New Jersey? You’ve heard all the theories: Iranian spy drones launched from a ship; drones launched by China; drones launched from locations known only to the President and the Pentagon (via the President-elect Donald Trump, who said, “Something strange is going on”). The friendlier theories have it that the drones are searching for something—e.g., a radioactive medical device that the state’s Department of Environmental Protection had, in fact, reported missing, on December 5th. “I think it’s probably us, listening and watching,” Michael Melham, the mayor of Belleville, said. (The lost device, used for CAT scans, was found by FedEx.) But, if you head out into central Jersey on a cold, clear night to look for stuff, Melham’s words resonate. “I never saw anything like it,” the mayor said. “Dozens and dozens of drones, coming in from all different areas. We were swarmed last night.”
The sky started looking unusual in November—first in central Jersey, along the Raritan River, then north, into the Highlands. Then drones were spotted in Monmouth County, where the sheriff told Fox News that he wants the legal authority to “de-drone.” Drones were in the Pine Barrens, inching into Staten Island, and also in the Bronx. Local news posted videos that are either hard to discern or feature planes or helicopters landing somewhere in a state with close to five hundred places to land planes or helicopters. One North Jersey reporter likened his daily commute to the helicopter scene in “GoodFellas.”
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As thousands began to report seeing drones, some the size of cars, officials were stumped. Sometimes the reports were actually drones. But mostly not, and, when some police drones filmed real drones, the real drones seemed to vanish. A big issue: drones are everywhere. There are a million registered in the U.S., deployed by the police, and now delivering Jersey Mike’s subs in Holly Springs, North Carolina.
In the gap between what authorities can verify and what they can’t, more drone questions take flight, especially on WKXW, a.k.a. New Jersey 101.5. “We’re talking drones,” Bill Spadea, the host of the morning-drive show, said recently. “Why? ’Cause that’s what everybody’s talking about.” In between ads for toenail-fungus treatment, people call in with sightings, and Spadea asks drone questions. “Do you buy into the fact that they lost a nuclear package?” he asked Brian Fitzherbert, a Republican defense contractor from South Jersey.
“That one’s a tough one,” Fitzherbert said.
Spadea, who is running for governor as a pro-Trump Republican, is the former host of “Chasing News,” a defunct local Fox program; he frames drone sightings in anti-government ire. “As governor, I would order a state of emergency, put the national Air Guard on alert, and mobilize our state police to start chasing these drones down,” he said. “At that point, we’ll find out whose side our federal government is really on.”
Sky-watchers note: New Jersey has a history of hoaxes. The Great Morristown U.F.O. Hoax—in which two men attached red flares to helium balloons, in 2009—had people seeing things for weeks, despite the police saying they were “reasonably certain . . . that they were red flares attached to a balloon.”
The most famous hoax centered on Grovers Mill, the hamlet that a scriptwriter randomly chose as the Martian-landing site in Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds.” If you showed up at the fake landing site last week, you could feel a little something in the air, perhaps because the Defense Department had not yet set up the finely tuned drone-detection devices being shipped into the state, a system invented to prevent bird strikes at airports.
On the town pond, house lights reflected in the water. The geese flew overhead, honking loudly, though invisible. If you had a telescope, you would have spotted a quick orange glow, low, at the dark edge of the woods, but then would have realized that it was only a cigarette held by a distant smoker. But somehow, before packing up, you could look in the telescope and see a giant incandescent sphere with three white orbs circling it: Jupiter, brighter even than the stars. ♦