Drones Over Jersey

The drone panic of late 2024 is a Rorschach test. Don’t fail it.

A former governor posted video of weird, streaking lights. A police chief said they were the size of SUVs. Some images showed luminous orbs moving like hummingbirds, but others looked like ordinary planes, with red and green aviation lights. Some have been spotted over military bases, and some say we oughta shoot ’em down. But no one knew — or knows, even now — what was going on.

The drone panic of late 2024 amounts to a Rorschach test on a national scale. It has all the ingredients of a UFO craze in the sense that no official can or will explain the aircraft, and all the pictures are kind of blurred. I mean, this is 2024. With a battalion of high-resolution cameras aimed at the Jersey sky, somehow we still have to squint at the pictures and feel mystified?

The most coherent explanation so far is a story about a medical device that left a cancer clinic in Belleville, New Jersey, on December 3 but failed to turn up at an unnamed disposal facility. Michael Melham, the mayor of Belleville, went on a local Fox morning show and stoked the fire by pointing out that it was radioactive. “It was a shipment. It arrived at its destination. The container was damaged, and it was empty.”

Around the same time, Bethenny Frankel from Real Housewives told the world on TikTok that someone she knew, whose father used to work “for the Pentagon … and, like, secret projects,” had told her that the government had radiation-sniffing drones which were classified because why would you announce to the public that you were launching a drone swarm to sniff out radiation if you don’t want to cause panic in the streets of suburban Jersey?

The Department of Energy threw cold water on this idea. (Of course they would.) The medical device in question, an Eckert & Ziegler model HEGL-0132, was just a calibrating pin for CAT scanners — smaller than a pencil and not too radioactive. Also, it had been recovered. Oh and also, according to a spokesperson, the Department of Energy “does not employ drones for nuclear / radiological detection missions, and is not currently conducting any aerial operations in that region.”

Still, a drone-pilot friend points out that photos so far show aircraft with “FAA-rated lighting” and notes that most of them stop flying after 11pm. Drones adhering to US law would be American. My friend wonders if they’re sniffing for a dirty bomb lost on the Eastern seaboard. But that’s just an idea, a rumor amplfied by another TikTok video, with less reported fact behind it than the radioactive calibrating pin.

Meanwhile, the former governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan — who posted those streaking lights — was community-noted to the effect that he had managed to film the constellation of Orion with a shaking camera hand. (“No anomalous objects are apparent in this video.”) The confusion has allowed people to wonder if the drones came from Iran, launched by a surveillance mothership off the Atlantic Coast. Or from Russia. Or China. Author and editor Walter Kirn wrote that Grok, an AI answer-bot on X, had told him “the NJ drones may be related to security for [Trump’s] inauguration.” To protect it? Or prevent it? Just remember that tabloid journalism sells, baby, and the new media landscape — dominated by personalities, individuals, as well as edgy social-media feeds just slavering for your attention — can fall victim to the same old market forces that put The National Enquirer or The Weekly World News on the newsstand at Ralph’s.