The New Jersey Drones, Two Years On: The Sightings Are Back, and the Bases Never Stopped

On the night of November 13, 2024, a security officer at Picatinny Arsenal, the Army’s weapons research base in Morris County, New Jersey, logged a light in the sky. A contractor on site described it as “a light rising straight up from the tree line and toward the arsenal.” That is the first entry in what became the New Jersey drone wave: thousands of reports, flight bans over two dozen towns, a congressman talking about an Iranian mothership, and a federal government that eventually said, in effect, it was us, sort of, and we will not say more.

Almost two years later, the posts are coming back. And the thing that made New Jersey frightening in the first place, drones over military installations that nobody can stop or name, has not gone away at all. It has spread.

This is what was confirmed, what was only claimed, and what the witness footage actually shows.

What happened in 2024

The reports began at Picatinny and spread fast along the Raritan River corridor and into Somerset, Morris, Monmouth and Ocean counties. Witnesses described craft bigger than hobby drones, flying in groups, sometimes with lights off, for hours at a time.

The military sites are the part that matters. The Pentagon confirmed sightings over Picatinny Arsenal and over Naval Weapons Station Earle, the Navy’s munitions pier in Monmouth County, while saying it did not know who was flying them. The FAA put a temporary flight restriction over Picatinny, and the Department of Defense shipped counter drone equipment there in December. Officials told DefenseScoop the military was “frustrated.” Across the Hudson, Stewart International Airport in New York closed its runways for about an hour on December 13 because of drone activity, which Governor Kathy Hochul confirmed. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio also closed its airspace over small drone incursions that season.

On December 11, Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia came out of a DHS briefing with notes that went everywhere. The objects, she wrote, were up to six feet in diameter, flew six to seven hours a night, sometimes dark, “operate in a coordinated manner,” and evaded typical means of detection, including helicopter pursuit and radio frequency detection.

That last line is where “they don’t show up on radar” comes from. Hold on to it. We will come back to it.

The witness footage

Thousands of clips were posted. Most were too dark, too shaky or too far away to show anything but a point of light. Two of the better known ones:

Home security camera, December 8, 2024, 7:38 PM. A single bright light crosses the overcast sky above the trees over about ten seconds of footage. Clip originally posted on X by user @Kobe_for_3, hosted on Wikimedia Commons, where it is tagged public domain. Shown for commentary. The clip does not include a location beyond New Jersey.

Still from video taken in Randolph, Morris County, on December 4, 2024, which AP distributed as showing “several drones” over the town. Video by MartyA45_, via AP. Shown for commentary.

Look at them honestly. The Randolph frame shows a white light with a red light beside it, which is what FAA required position and anti collision lighting looks like on anything from a quadcopter to a Cessna. The CCTV light crosses the frame steadily, at the pace of a plane on approach. Neither frame shows a shape, and neither could tell you whether it was a drone, a plane or a helicopter. That is not a debunk. It is the reason the footage never settled anything in either direction.

What the government said, twice

First answer, December 2024. On December 12 the FBI and DHS said they had “no evidence at this time” of a national security threat or a foreign nexus. On December 16 they were joined by the FAA and the Department of Defense. After reviewing more than 5,000 reports, they said the sightings were “a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones,” and: “We have not identified anything anomalous.”

The same week, Representative Jeff Van Drew said the drones were coming from an Iranian mothership off the coast. The Pentagon said the same day that there was no such ship.

Documents The Black Vault later pried loose through FOIA show investigators were quietly closing individual cases. A drone said to have sprayed “gray mist” over Clinton on December 12 was a Beechcraft Baron 58 leaving wingtip vortices. Drones that forced a State Police medevac helicopter to abort a landing lined up with three airliners on approach. A report near the Salem nuclear plant matched a Black Hawk, a Cessna and Philadelphia traffic. TSA had several of these debunked by December 17 and did not tell the public at the time.

Second answer, January 2025. At her first briefing on January 28, 2025, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt read a statement from President Trump: the drones over New Jersey “were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons.” Many others, she said, were hobbyists. “This was not the enemy.”

Note what that does to the December story. In December, the official line was mostly not drones at all. In January it was drones, and we authorized them. Nobody reconciled the two. Nobody named the operator, the contractor, the research, or why it needed to happen over an Army arsenal and a Navy weapons pier at night. In October 2026 Shore News Network put it flatly: “Nobody has ever said who owned and operated those drones, what they were testing, and why it was isolated to New Jersey.” That is still true today.

Why “invisible to radar” is real, and not spooky

Fantasia’s line, that the objects evaded typical detection, was widely retold as the drones don’t show up on radar. In a narrow sense that is probably right, and the reason is boring.

Air traffic radar is built to track large aircraft and deliberately filters out small, slow, low targets, because otherwise every flock of geese would be on the screen. A carbon fibre drone a few feet across, at a few hundred feet, sits exactly in the gap. Radio frequency detectors catch drones that talk to a remote, and miss ones flying preprogrammed routes or using unusual links. CSIS summed up the national picture: the United States has an incomplete view of drone activity largely because traditional radar is poorly suited to small, low flying drones. It is the same problem that let a drone swarm circle Langley Air Force Base in Virginia for weeks in December 2023 without being tracked once it left base airspace.

So the honest reading of “invisible to radar” is invisible to the radar we had pointed at them. DHS’s own response proves it: it sent New Jersey State Police a drone specific radar paired with an infrared camera. You do not send a new kind of radar to look for stars.

The bases never stopped

New Jersey was the loudest wave. It was not the largest problem. In February 2025, General Gregory Guillot of NORTHCOM told the Senate Armed Services Committee the military had detected about 350 drone incursions over some 100 bases in 2024. Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, in the middle of New Jersey, told TWZ in December 2024 that it had recorded several incursions that year, all smugglers flying contraband into the federal prison on the base. In September 2025 the military stood up a counter drone rapid reaction force.

Then 2026 happened.

Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, March 9 to 15. Barksdale is home to B-52 bombers and nuclear command roles. On March 9 it ordered a shelter in place over “an unmanned aerial system operating over the installation.” A confidential briefing document dated March 15, reviewed by ABC News, said security forces saw “multiple waves of 12-15 drones operating over sensitive areas of the installation, including the flight line, with aircraft displaying non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links and resistance to jamming.” The flights ran about four hours a day. The drones entered and left in ways that suggested attempts to “avoid the operator(s) being located,” and their lights suggested the operators “may be testing security responses.” The briefing judged them custom built, and its analysts said “with high confidence” the incursions would continue. The 2nd Bomb Wing confirmed “multiple unauthorized drones operating in our airspace during the week of March 9th.”

Compare that to the New Jersey list. Coordinated groups. Long nights. Military sites. Hard to detect and hard to jam. The difference is that at Barksdale the Air Force wrote it down and said so.

Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., March. The Washington Post reported that multiple unidentified drones had flown over the Army post where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were living, and that officials weighed moving them.

Toulon, France, October 5 to 16. During Typhon, a joint exercise built around protecting the naval port, unauthorized drones entered the prohibited airspace over France’s main naval base. On October 21 the Mediterranean maritime prefecture said counter drone systems were triggered at each detection, that nothing sensitive was threatened, and that the origin of the flights is unknown. A judicial investigation is open. It follows unidentified drones over Île Longue, France’s ballistic missile submarine base, in December 2025.

Our own coverage of PURSUE Release 07 adds one more: a silent black triangle that federal agents watched over a western U.S. national security site in June 2026, which their own signed statement says looked “most resembling a delta wing drone.”

And now, New Jersey again

Through October 2026, the posts started again. A Monmouth County resident filmed lights on October 10 and asked, “NJ drones back?” On October 18 a Reddit user standing on the west side of Manhattan posted an account of a strange flying object over Jersey City just after midnight. Local Facebook groups filled with more.

We want to be precise here, because this is exactly how the 2024 wave grew. None of these 2026 New Jersey reports has been confirmed by any agency. No police department, the FAA, the FBI or the Pentagon has announced a new investigation, and no military site in the state has reported an incursion this autumn. Some of what people are filming is certainly the legal, permitted drone traffic that now flies over New Jersey for utilities, inspection and police work. Some of it will be planes.

One more coincidence worth flagging so nobody gets fooled by a headline: on October 30 and 31, 2026, drones closed the runway at Jersey Airport, in the Channel Islands, two nights running, diverting flights back to the UK and to Paris. That is a different Jersey, about 3,400 miles from Picatinny. States of Jersey Police are investigating.

What would actually answer the question

Two years on, the open questions are smaller than the internet made them, and harder than the government has admitted.

1. Who held the FAA authorizations the White House cited, and for what? Those are federal waivers and approvals. They exist on paper somewhere.
2. What flew over Picatinny and Earle? The Pentagon confirmed those sightings. It has never said they were resolved.
3. Is there a sighting by sighting accounting? The government reviewed 5,000 reports and released the resolutions for a handful, and only after FOIA.

If New Jersey’s lights come back for real this winter, the test is simple. Watch whether a base or a police department confirms an incursion on the record, the way Barksdale did. Until that happens, a light in a phone video is a light in a phone video. And until someone names the operator, the 2024 wave is not solved either. It was closed.