New York
CNN
 — 

Big drones have become a big topic of conversation in New Jersey: Residents have reported seeing drones the size of small cars flying around at night; officials are unsure if they’re seeing anything unusual, or if these are drones at all.

But even if the New Jersey sightings turn out to be something else, large drones do exist. And they can have a wide range of potential applications for hobbyists, commercial users or the military, according to unmanned aircraft experts.

“There’s so many uses for these devices. It’s almost limitless,” Ryan Wallace, associate professor of aeronautical engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told CNN.

Law enforcement officials, including the FBI, are still trying to confirm what exactly New Jersey residents are seeing and where they’re coming from — or if they’re drones at all, versus regular airplanes, flying normal routes, that people are misidentifying.

“We have reports from the public and law enforcement dating back several weeks,” the FBI field office in Newark said December 3.

New Jersey residents have described seeing drones flying overhead, sometimes in clusters.

Drone sightings have been reported around Morris and Somerset counties, according to local officials. Both counties are in the New York metropolitan area.

But the sightings haven’t only occurred among concerned residents. The US Coast Guard, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said one of its assets encountered the drones.

The Department of Homeland Security and White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday that many of the reported sightings are actually “manned aircraft” operating lawfully, and experts told CNN that the objects in “sighting” videos they’d reviewed appeared to be airplanes.

The White House has also said there is “no evidence at this time” that the mysterious sightings “pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”

Still, New Jersey residents are frustrated by the lack of clear answers about what they’re seeing.

“You see red and green, like, flashing lights on the corners. It’ll just change direction, like, go from 90 to, like, 270 degrees, just fly in different directions,” one New Jersey resident told CNN. “And planes obviously can’t do that.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he is also pressing the federal government for more information. In a post on X, Murphy said he spoke with US Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall “to discuss my concerns over the federal government’s response.”

Most people are familiar with the smaller drones that hobbyists use for photography. In theory, a hobbyist could also buy or build a larger drone.

“The wings are not something that add a lot of bulk in terms of the mass of the drone, they’re actually the lightest parts of the drone,” said Pramod Abichandani, director of the Advanced Air Mobility Laboratory at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “Even when you’re looking at multi-rotor drones, like a quadcopter… the extensions of that quadcopter, are basically carbon fiber rods, super lightweight.”

Weight matters because you need special – and more unusual – approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones that weigh more than 55 pounds, according to William Austin, president of Warren Community College in New Jersey, who has studied unmanned aircraft and started the school’s drone program.

Hobbyists would also have to be willing to shell out big bucks for such large drones, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, experts said.

More often, big drones are used for commercial or military purposes. They can be used, for example, for agriculture, to survey or spray fields. Or for infrastructure, to evaluate the state of roads and buildings or for mapping. (However, for those applications, the drones would almost certainly need to be flying during the daytime rather than at night, when the New Jersey sightings are said to have occurred.)

Some law enforcement agencies have begun using drones for search and rescue, although they don’t necessarily need extra-large drones for that.

Some larger, heavier drones have also been used for commercial transportation (think deliveries). “It’s not super common, but it’s not unheard of, either,” Wallace said.

The military can use large drones, outfitted with all manner of sensors – from powerful traditional cameras to infrared sensors – for surveillance.

And in the coming years, Americans could start seeing even larger, more powerful drones flying around, Austin said, like those made by Chinese company EHang to transport people.

But for now, he said, “you’re not likely to see them here, because you have to go through so many steps of FAA permission. There are so few people who would have those kinds of credentials that the FAA would pretty quickly know who was flying a drone of that type around the national airspace.”