America's Talking - Pentagon Says East Coast Drone Sightings Not a Threat

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

(The Center Square) – Federal officials said Tuesday that drones spotted along the East Coast over the past month do not pose a threat to national security or public safety. Four federal agencies �� the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense – issued a statement Tuesday after weeks of reports about drone activity. In some cases, airports have been closed as a result of the drones. The Pentagon statement said that the majority of the more than 1 million drones registered with the FAA are used legally for commercial, recreational or governmental purposes. The agencies noted that the recent sightings likely involve a combination of these legal activities and misidentifications of manned aircraft, helicopters, or even celestial objects such as stars.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull stories: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_3d054918-bc9f-11ef-90d3-b7e9c91886d9.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAelip, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. The large drones that have been spotted over New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere remain a big mystery with federal government officials essentially saying, there's nothing to see here. But state and local officials, including those in the law enforcement community expressing concerns because they don't know what they are, what they're doing, or who is controlling them. Joining me to discuss this today is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square.

Casey, what do you make about these mysterious drones? Hold on, Dan, there's one outside my window, right? Oh, no, that's a Boeing that's crashing. No, no, it's neither. So the drones, I mean, in some ways you can laugh it off as a funny story, but I think it has some serious implications. And I'm sure you've seen the videos online on X and some of them are clearly drones. I mean, some of them, you know, once they were fact-checked, it said, well, this is actually, you know, an unusual airplane that you're not used to seeing or this is just a

regular airplane with some distorted lighting or something. So some of the stuff you're seeing online is kind of hysteria. But at the core of this, it seems that one, there are a lot of drones going over in New Jersey in the recent weeks and a lot of unanswered questions from the government. Actually, President of Donald Trump is, you know, you could say this is a nothing story on the side, but Trump himself has commented on it and the White House has responded. So we're at the highest levels of government weighing in on this issue. Trump really blasted, you know, in recent days the White House saying, you know, why aren't they telling American people what's going on?

They know what it is. They know where they took off and they know where they're going, but they're not telling people. And pretty much immediately, National Security spokesman John Kirby, you know, he had a press call and he told reporters, you know, we're not, we're talking to the American people. Like, he just kind of pushed back on that. He didn't like that assumption. So, you know, he's, I'll read this quote. He said, I recognize some of the criticism over the last few days has been that we haven't said more of what we know. And he said, that's because we didn't.

We didn't have as much information as we do now. So it's kind of crazy to think to see that, you know, one of the top national security experts saying, hey, the first few days. that we had potentially hundreds or thousands of drones flying over the East Coast, we had no idea where they were coming from. Yeah, that is kind of scary. And it's almost scarier or more worrisome than if the government did know who was operating the drones and what they were doing, perhaps the government itself, the fact that they didn't know or claim to not have known, that's more worrisome than anything else.

You remember just last year, 2023, you had that giant weather balloon. that flew across the country that apparently the federal government either didn't know about it or knew about it and decided not to do nothing to do nothing about it. It was if a memory serves, it came out of China and it flew over some, you know, sensitive defense locations throughout the country. And now we've got, we're talking about hundreds of drone sightings. And these are supposedly really large, potentially SUV-sized drones. and the government didn't know about it? I don't know. What's more worrisome to you?

I think I'm a little more worried that they didn't know about it because, you know, we've seen in the last, you know, a couple of years that drones are no longer a sort of hobby for, you know, curious Americans to kind of fly in some pastures somewhere by the interstate. I mean, we've seen, for instance, when Iran attacked Israel, if you remember, they sent, I think of something like 10,000 drones, or at least thousands, I believe the number was 10,000. You'd correct me if I'm wrong. But they sent about 10,000 drones to Israel in one of their biggest attacks.

And, of course, Israel was able to shoot down almost all those. They have a really sophisticated air defense systems, which, by the way, the U.S. does not have nearly anything like what Israel has, even though we have the capacity to build it. We've chosen not to. So, you know, we've also seen it with Ukraine in Russia in that war that drones are a big part of the war right now. They're finding soldiers on the ground, dropping grenades on them, dropping different, you know, explosives on soldiers. And so we are fully in the era of drone warfare, Dan. There's no question about it. Drones are military weapons. They're being used all around the

world. We have drones that, and I'm not just talking about the big, super expensive drones that we use to, you know, take out terrorists in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. Even the kind of smaller drones that you're used to seeing, maybe you could buy yourself, those are being used in places like Iran, Ukraine. So it's really, it's a serious story in the sense that drones are now weapons and the idea of this government didn't know what it was, setting aside, you know, potential alien invasion. I'm not really a team alien invasion just yet. But if this, even if this is all just a misunderstanding and some rich guy is pranking the whole country or something harmless as that, it shows that in some significant way, we're not prepared for a real drone attack.

More than a month into the phenomenon, Casey, when the federal government has said, Nothing to worry about. We're not taking any action. It's not its national security threat. The Federal Aviation Administration did finally take action yesterday, Thursday, when it banned the use of drones over 22 infrastructure sites in New York, excuse me, in New Jersey and another 29 in New York State for the next 30 days. So they took some step, but it seems a little bit late. I don't know. What do you expect to happen next? Casey, wrap us up here. Yeah, I mean, I think eventually we'll hopefully get to the bottom of this. I think the government's going to draw it out as long as they can. They move at a different speed, and that speed is slow. So I don't think we're going to get too many definitive answers just yet.

Maybe when Trump comes in office, he'll just on a bad news for him. He'll drop the news. Who knows? But right now, the hardest thing to get from the government has been answers. And so I'm not sure we really know just when they're going to tell us the truth about what's been going on. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.