The Journal. - The Mysterious Drones Flying Over U.S. Military Bases

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

For 17 days last year, unidentified drones swarmed an area in Virginia that is home to a military base and other sensitive intelligence sites. WSJ’s Gordon Lubold looked into why it was so difficult for U.S. officials to stop them.  Further Reading: -Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. The Pentagon Is Stumped.  Further Listening: -How Ukraine Built a Weapon to Control the Black Sea  -Cheap Drones Are Transforming the Battlefield  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One evening after sunset, in December 2023, a senior military commander at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia went outside. He wanted to take a look at something unusual. Ultimately, he was very concerned, climbed up on a roof with binoculars and night vision goggles to look up into the sky and try to figure out what it was he was looking at, which were essentially formations of small drones flying over his base. That's our colleague Gordon Lubold.

Basically every night after dusk, they'd show up between one and two dozen drones at any one time flying in formation over the base. Some had lights, some didn't. And this went on over the course of 17 days. And it was just kind of creating a sense of chaos because they were coming and going and they were in and out and flying in some versions of formations and then splitting off. From what we can gather based on police reports and just our own reporting was that these flew not in any particular regular way each night but kind of crossing the water near the base

crossing over the base and over the tarmacs and the runways and then disappearing again back over the water. Some of the drones were estimated to be around 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour. Others were smaller quadcopters that occasionally hovered. After 17 nightly visits, the drones disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived. This was the first example that we know of, of the scale and scope of this, these kinds of drone operations over a U.S. military base. They've never had to really deal with this before.

U.S. officials kept the incident largely under wraps. But a few months ago, Gordon got a tip from a source. And after he and his colleagues started digging, they were able to publish a story about it earlier this month. This was an incredible, well-reported scoop, Harris, from our colleagues at the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to us by Pentagon officials early this morning. A dozen or more drones every night for 17 nights straight circling the area of Langley Air Force Base

along the Virginia shore. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the U.S. military is largely stumped as to who owns the aircraft. What did officials at the Pentagon think when they heard about this? I think the primary question was, yeah, what are these things, and are these hobbyists,

or is it something else? I think pretty soon after the initial days of kind of assessment were complete, they realized that there's no hobbyist could fly one or two dozen drones at any one time. And so that leaves foreign adversary. And so primary question for the Pentagon and up to the White House was whose drones are these

and what do we do about them? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, October 22nd. Coming up on the show, the mysterious drones flying over U.S. military sites. Get yours with TELUS at telus.com slash Pixel 9 Pro. The area the drones are flying over, along the coast of Virginia, is a very sensitive military zone. So the whole area that this base sits in has a very high concentration

of a number of national security sites. And so there's this Langley-Eustis base on this peninsula, but nearby is the Newport News shipyard where they build nuclear submarines and the latest aircraft carrier. Then you've got the Norfolk Naval Port, which is the largest naval port in the world. You've also got the area where the Navy SEALs train. And there's also even a place called The Farm where the CIA does training. So this would be a pretty interesting area to spy on.

I think so, yeah. I think that became pretty clear after we started looking at it closely. Drones pose a unique risk because they're so hard to track. And initially these aircraft were not triggering the normal radars that exist at a base to protect the base. But if you have radars that pick up everything, then you kind of almost don't pick up anything because it's so much noise. So I think they later calibrated some of their radars to be able to pick up some of these things, which were in some cases the size of a large bird or very small plane.

Besides being hard to track, drones have the potential to do a lot of damage. And so if these drones were armed, or if they're, you know, sometimes people refer to kamikaze drones, which is have a very small bit of explosive duct tape to the bottom, literally, and they could just fly in and you could do a lot of damage to American aircraft assets right there. As the drones continued to fly over the base each night, concern about what was going on went up the chain of command. A report went to the White House Situation Room, and the president learned about it in

his daily briefing. Other parts of the government also got involved— the Department of Transportation, the FBI, even the Pentagon's UFO department. So, these drones are flying into an area where, as you said, some of the most advanced military technology exists, why couldn't the military just shoot them down? Of different stories I've done for the journal

that have resonated with readers, this one is probably one of the most, and I've received dozens and dozens and dozens of emails. And the primary theme coming out of most of the emails were exactly that question. Why couldn't they just be taken down? Federal law prohibits shooting down drones unless they pose an imminent threat.

There's a risk to American citizens or people who live on the base, if you shoot a drone down and it falls on somebody's head, not a good thing. Or if it flies outside of the restricted airspace and lands on a freeway or something. So there's a lot of concerns there. So officials considered other options.

They thought about using electronic signals to jam the drone's navigation systems, but that might disrupt emergency 911 calls and wifi networks. Officials also considered deploying a new technology that beams targeted energy to destroy or disable the drones. But that could pose a risk to the many commercial airplanes flying through the area.

And then the kind of most colorful example was a technology where they essentially shoot huge nets up into the sky. And if you're old enough to remember Scooby-Doo-Bee-Doo, the bad guy was always taken down with a net. And that was another technology that they didn't have the authority to use in this instance. And we've tried to find out a little bit more about why,

but we don't exactly know, but it was never deployed. It really laid bare the vulnerabilities of the American military and the American government to respond to such threats and a threat that we have seen since we're going to see again and one that they're ill equipped to counter. At a press briefing after Gordon's story came out, a representative from the Pentagon confirmed the presence of the drones over the airbase. They said they'd been looking into the issue, but that there did not appear to be any hostile intent. But then, in January,

authorities got a clue that they hope might crack the case. That's after the break. Your group photos are likely missing someone important. You! With Admi on the new Google Pixel 9 Pro, never rely on a stranger again. Add yourself to any group photo through the magic of AI. Get yours with TELUS at TELUS.com slash Pixel 9 Pro. Just days after the drones disappeared, yet another mysterious drone showed up near Langley Air Force Base. It belonged to a Chinese grad student. His name was Feng Wingshe.

He'd been studying in Minnesota and had flown to Virginia. So one of the more interesting aspects of this story that we were able to find was a separate incident that occurred near this base in which a Chinese national, a grad student, he had gone to Costco and bought a small drone on sale and was flying it over the shipyard that is nearby, the Newport News shipyard where aircraft carriers and nuclear subs are built. Interestingly, the kid, about 26 years old, flew the drone into a tree. It got stuck.

Zh's drone was much smaller than those drones that flew over Langley. Once it got caught in a tree and he was unable to get it down, he left. Zh's drone was much smaller than those drones that flew over Langley. Once it got caught in a tree and he was unable to get it down, he left. We learned that he ultimately left the area without his drone, but when the police and the FBI looked at the drone and removed the SD card from it, they saw that they were grainy images of the shipyard, and so sensitive images of more restricted airspace.

— After losing his drone in the tree, Zhhe flew to California. Then he tried to board a flight to China on a one-way ticket when he was arrested at the airport. Gordon attended his sentencing. — What was interesting about his case was that it was one of the first, if not the first, incidents in which an individual was charged under the Espionage Act using a drone. The judge himself said, there's no evidence that you were directed to do this by the Chinese government, but there was a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he wasn't just a hobbyist who was interested in Navy ships and flying his drone on a rainy night in 46 degree weather at midnight.

Did he or his lawyer have anything to say about that? Well, he apologized to the court for his behavior. He took responsibility for it. behavior, he took responsibility for it. His lawyer had a colorful comment about if he was a spy, he'd be the worst spy in Chinese history. Zhe told FBI agents he was a ship enthusiast and hadn't realized his drone crossed into restricted airspace. He pleaded guilty to unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations, and he was sentenced to six months in prison. It's unclear whether Zhuo had any connection to that bigger drone swarm that we talked about earlier, the one that lasted 17 days.

And US officials have not identified anyone else who might have been flying those drones. But Gordon says that what is clear is that China and other foreign governments are interested in US military operations. I think the incident with this Chinese national operating his drone and running into the tree accidentally is reflective of the larger issue of potential espionage from the Chinese government that we know occurs in any number of facets of American life. We know for a fact that the Chinese government's very interested in American military technology. And American technology is very obviously useful to foreign adversaries. And so the Chinese national who got arrested and sentenced seems to me to be reflective of the larger problem.

How does the U.S. stop this kind of thing from happening again? So the answer is there is no good answer. What I think Congress and people inside the military clearly are focused on is assembling the tools that they need in order to figure out how to respond the next time this happens. And we can assume this will happen again. It has happened again. U.S. officials confirmed this month that more unidentified drone swarms

were recently spotted near another Air Force base north of Los Angeles. It's amazing to me how this, like, one small piece of technology that people can just buy at the store is creating such a headache for the mighty US military. Yeah. I think with the ubiquity of these drones, their accessibility to the American public to anybody who may wish Americans harm, American military harm, I think it lays bare the vulnerabilities of the American military and any other national security sites.

And I was struck by this because when I was working with a photographer to try to get imagery around the base, this particular base is hard to get to and hard to photograph. But the advent of cheap drones essentially eliminates that kind of cushion that a lot of these national security sites have around them because you can so easily just throw one up in the air and fly it over and see stuff that your average person could never see before. What does that say about the US's ability to protect its military assets and its citizens at home.

The US military is by definition designed to protect American citizens. That's its primary defense. And the American citizens pay upwards of $800 billion a year to do just that. And American military has all kinds of capabilities that do all this. But this episode, I think, does lay bare the idea that every once in a while, the Pentagon gets stumped, the military gets stumped. They're vulnerable to even a basic kind of $100 drone that could be flying over a base that could potentially do the American military or American citizens harm. And so I think it, to me, it was an extreme example of how sometimes the American military, which is supposed to be doing all this stuff to protect Americans itself, doesn't know what to do.

That's all for today, Tuesday, October 22nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Lara Seligman and Aruna Vishwanatha. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.