I
n November of 2024, I was at my desk in the home office, doing the unremarkable work of spreadsheets and email, when my wife appeared in the hallway outside the bathroom. She did not call out or raise her voice. She made an urgent hand motion, the kind you make when you are trying not to alarm children. Our two sons were in the tub, laughing at something private and momentary, as children do. She pulled me toward the doorway and whispered, “Look.”

Above the bathtub is a skylight. It looks out onto nothing in particular, and at night it shows only darkness. I looked up and saw nothing but the flat blackness of the autumn sky. She kept her eyes fixed on the glass. Only after the moment had passed did she describe what she had seen: a large object, solid, vaguely airplane-shaped, close enough to feel present rather than distant. There were lights, she said, different colors, arranged in a way she could not quite describe. It had been almost directly overhead.

What struck me was not the description itself, but her expression. She was unsettled in a way that did not fit the moment. My wife does not scan the sky, nor is she an aircraft enthusiast. She is not prone to imagining aerial threats where none exist. And she was rattled.

In my twenties, I had spent five years as an Army artillery officer and left the service as a captain. Part of that work involved learning how to identify aircraft — distinguishing fixed-wing from rotary, understanding approach paths, thinking in terms of airspace rather than scenery. I am not an aviation expert, but I am not entirely naïve about what normally flies overhead. Still, that background did not supply a possible answer for what hovered above our skylight.

That faint disorientation lingered after the object was gone, after the children had finished their bath, after the ordinary business of the evening resumed. We were less shaken by what my wife had seen than by the lack of an accessible explanation for it. And it turned out, many of our neighbors had been standing at their windows, too.

WHAT MY WIFE SAW above the skylight that night was apparently not unusual. At least not for where we live. In December 2025, after about a year of queries from ordinary citizens reporting similar sightings across the state, the New Jersey legislature moved toward funding a research center to study unexplained aerial phenomena or UAP (what we used to call UFOs), a decision that passed in both houses without fanfare or confession. No one in a position of authority said they knew what the objects were or claimed to have solved the riddle. 

As word spread about the drone sightings over the prior year, New Jersey became something of a laughingstock (don’t worry, we’re used to it). While similar sightings were reported along the East Coast, in parts of Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, the concentration of the chatter came from the Garden State. And when the mystery gained traction on social media and news outlets, a narrative began to emerge that New Jersey residents were in some state of hysteria, caught up in a War of the Worlds-level alien panic based on hearsay and delusions. But the reality on the ground was much different. And what the events ultimately revealed was a perhaps more unsettling truth that has nothing to do with extraterrestrials and is much more mundane: Our government, from the local to federal level, apparently has no coherent system for addressing such queries. 

Ryan Graves, a former Navy F/A-18F pilot who testified before Congress on UAP in 2023 and now leads Americans for Safe Aerospace, a pilot safety advocacy group, says a functioning system would require a three-step process around UAP, activated at the local level and escalating as needed to state and then federal entities: detect, identify, and respond. In New Jersey, that loop did not close. “There is really no closed system,” Graves tells me, “that would actually allow us to respond in a manner that would prevent an adversary from causing harm.” The problem, he says, is not the absence of relevant agencies but the absence of coordination among them. “Right now, we essentially have a bunch of arrows pointed in different directions, because no one even knows what the proper processes are.”

The earliest sustained alarm about strange objects in the sky came from municipal offices. In late November 2024, in townships across Morris County, about 30 miles west of New York City, residents began calling their mayors with similar accounts: low-flying aircraft seen at night, returning on successive evenings, sometimes appearing to move in coordinated patterns. These were not sporadic, outlier calls but clusters of complaints arriving through official channels, logged by staff whose job is ordinarily to field questions about snow removal and zoning permits.

The mayors began comparing notes, not because they believed something extraordinary was unfolding, but because they could not answer a question their constituents kept asking, and they weren’t sure who could. They called the county sheriff. They contacted the State Police. They reached out to the governor’s office. The answers, when they came, were procedural and inconclusive: no confirmed operator, no identified launch site, no clear line of authority over the problem. 

One of the moments that crystallized the concern arrived as a phone call. Around Thanksgiving 2024, Ryan Herd, then the mayor of Pequannock Township, heard from a constituent who asked him, almost casually, “What’s with all the drones?” Herd wasn’t sure what she meant. Drones were everywhere now — used by wedding videographers, hobbyists, kids in parks. When he asked her to clarify, she didn’t elaborate. She simply said, “Look up.”

“How can you assess a threat profile without knowing what the objects are?”

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When I met with Herd at a local coffee shop late last December, he described the moment his concern shifted from curiosity to unease: when he saw the aircraft himself. “You look up, and you’re like, ‘Holy crap,’” he said. “They’re really low — like, going over the houses — and they’re going in a grid pattern. You start seeing patterns that don’t exist normally.” What troubled Herd was the repetition in the aircraft’s movements, the sense that the activity followed a logic no one had explained to him — something his residents were beginning to notice as well.

Several of the mayors who spoke publicly during this period emphasized the same point. Herd told me municipal officials were “getting no answers,” despite repeated outreach to the State Police. Matthew Murello, then-mayor of Washington Township, where I live, some 30 miles southwest of Pequannock, echoed that frustration. Murello, who now serves as vice-mayor, said residents were reporting objects that did not resemble the small hobbyist drones people had grown accustomed to seeing. Whether those assessments were correct was, at that stage, beside the point. The issue was that local officials could neither explain nor dismiss what their residents were describing. 

Like Herd, Murello described spotting the objects himself. “They were just above tree height,” he told me, emphasizing how close the aircraft appeared to the ground. Their scale stood out immediately. “They were large,” he said, “and they had the ability to turn and maneuver in odd directions.” He recalled seeing more than one object — “at least two, maybe three” — navigating together at low altitude, not randomly but “in a pattern of some kind.” 

He was especially struck by how they moved. “Airplanes fly linearly,” he said. “They don’t turn quickly. They don’t go one direction, stop, and go 90 degrees or 180 degrees the opposite direction.” Murello recalled visually tracking the objects’ path as they moved over Schooley’s Mountain in Long Valley, reached the ridge line, and continued east, circling low near residential streets and the local grade school. They were not adhering to any flight profile he recognized.

Murello, a trained acoustical engineer, had an additional well of expertise to draw on in his analysis. “I may not know what I’m looking at,” Murello told me, “but I know what I’m listening to.” The sound the objects made “wasn’t the normal little whir of even a commercial drone,” he said. “It had a rotor slap.” To Murello, that detail mattered. Hobbyist and commercial mapping drones rely on small blades spinning at high speeds, producing a thin, continuous buzz. Rotor slap, by contrast, is a heavier, rhythmic thumping caused by large blades displacing air, more characteristic of a helicopter than consumer electronics. The distinction gave weight to many of the reports reaching his office, including one from a resident who said a drone hovered over his truck and appeared to be “about the size of the cab — six feet in diameter.”

Bill Chegwidden, then the mayor of nearby Wharton, happened to be in Washington, D.C., during the height of the sightings. He was on Capitol Hill, attending meetings on behalf of Picatinny Charge, a local advocacy organization that promotes the interests of the Picatinny Arsenal, the Army’s primary weapons research facility in the region. He hoped someone there might have answers about the mysterious drones, but his inquiries were fruitless. “You would think somebody knows what was going on,” he told me. They didn’t, or wouldn’t say. He came home with nothing more than his constituents had.

The geography here is relevant. Morris County sits within the crowded airspace of the greater New York metropolitan region, between Newark Liberty International Airport, Teterboro’s private-jet corridor, and several smaller regional airfields. Commercial jets descend overhead on approach paths, helicopters transit between cities, and military and industrial facilities operate nearby. As the reports of unidentified aircraft continued, state and federal agencies began issuing public statements urging calm. Investigations were underway, officials said, and there was “no evidence at this time” that the sightings posed a national security or public safety threat. 

Yet those assurances did not resolve the mayors’ underlying concern. While they sought to avoid inflaming the situation, they also wanted to prompt a clearer sense of urgency and a more visible indication that someone at a higher level of government — the Federal Aviation Administration? The Department of Homeland Security? The Department of Defense? — was prepared to own the problem. Reassurance without explanation is a debased currency: It circulates briefly, then collapses.

AS THE REPORTS CONTINUED into early December, Herd drafted a letter addressed to New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and circulated it among his counterparts in Morris County. The document was concise and cautious. It did not speculate about the mysterious aircraft’s origins or intent. Instead, it focused on the practical bind local officials were facing. Within days, 21 mayors had signed on. “Our efforts to address these concerns have been hindered by the lack of information available to us,” the mayors wrote. “This situation is untenable.”

That so many local officials were willing to attach their names to a single document reflected not a shared theory, but a shared constraint. None of them could tell their constituents who was responsible for determining what was happening overhead, or when an answer might be forthcoming. These were officials from different towns, with different political affiliations and different relationships to the statehouse, all united by circumstance. Each had been left to manage public concern without access to information that would allow them to do so credibly.

Sent on Dec. 8 and subsequently circulated on social media, the letter elevated the mayors’ complaint. Local news outlets began calling them for comment. Regional reporters followed. What had been a series of private exchanges among municipal officials became a matter of public record — a collective acknowledgment that local governments did not know who was in charge of explaining activity in local airspace.

“They’re really low — like, going over the houses — and going in a grid pattern.”

State officials responded by moving to contain the uncertainty. Briefings were scheduled, tip lines were established. In a joint statement released on Dec. 12, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security declared that many of the reported drones appeared to be “manned aircraft, operating lawfully,” and that there were “no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace.” Still, temporary drone-flight restrictions were imposed over certain sensitive locations. The machinery of governance had begun to turn.

In response to the letter, the governor’s office indicated that a closed-door meeting would be convened to provide clarity. No press would be present. The purpose, the mayors were told, was to share information that could not be conveyed publicly. It all happened quickly. The mayors’ letter was made public on a Monday; by Wednesday, they were in the room. And their ranks had grown. “Within 48 hours,” Herd told me, “you’re going to put together a meeting and you’re going to have a hundred and eightysomething mayors show up. That’s unprecedented.”

The meeting was held at the state’s emergency operations center in Ewing Township. Despite the short notice, the room was full. Herd recalled roughly 185 mayors in attendance, along with senior representatives from the New Jersey State Police, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense. The briefing was opened by Colonel Patrick Callahan, then the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, who began by explaining that the governor would not be present. Other speakers followed from what Herd described as “every three-letter organization there.” For municipal officials who had been fielding calls without guidance for weeks, the setting reinforced the sense that whatever could not be said on television might at least be explained privately — that authority, once assembled, would speak plainly.

Herd arrived expecting clarity. “We were told this was the meeting where information would be shared,” he said. What became clear instead was the limit of that promise. Callahan and others acknowledged that they did not know what the objects were, even as they insisted there was no threat. 

“How do you know they’re not a danger if you don’t know what it is?” Herd recalled asking. “How can you assess a threat profile without knowing what the objects are? They were saying a bunch of nothing.” The room was tense. The leader of the state was not there. It felt like no one had ownership.

At one point during the briefing, Herd stood up and interrupted. “I said, ‘Excuse me. Mayor Herd here. I got a question,’” he recalled. He asked whether officials had reached out to major technology companies. “Are you saying you’ve contacted Google? Amazon? And you can confirm it has nothing to do with them?” The answer, he said, was yes.

Next, he recalled, he asked whether officials had confirmed with the Department of Defense, Picatinny Arsenal, and the naval weapons station in Monmouth County that the flights were not connected to any authorized operation. He said the answer, again, was yes. “So what you’re telling me,” Herd said he responded, “is that you’ve got confirmation that things are flying over us, and the smartest people in the world are telling us they have no clue what this is.”

In Herd’s telling, he did not wait for a response. “I fucking turned around. I walked out of the room.” Outside the building, he encountered what he described as “every media tent you can imagine.” Reporters had gathered as the mayors met inside. Herd did not pause to collect his thoughts. “I hit every single media tent,” he said. “Every single one.”

In interview after interview, Herd said he emphasized two points: that the governor had not attended the meeting, and that officials inside had offered no explanation beyond reassurances. “They don’t know a fucking thing,” he remembered saying. “And they’re telling us there’s nothing to worry about.”

In the days that followed, public statements from federal agencies struck a different tone. The FBI and DHS determined many of the recent reports from residents were misidentifications — people who’d been spurred by widespread talk of strange sightings to believe that anything in the sky, even planes and helicopters, was a potential UAP. Pentagon spokespeople said military installations had not been threatened. Temporary drone-flight restrictions were framed as precautionary. The language was calming, even dismissive.

In response to queries from me, a spokesperson for Governor Phil Murphy provided a written statement on Dec. 23, 2025, characterizing the drone sightings as “a wake-up call for our region and nation, exposing serious gaps in public safety and the security of our skies.” The statement acknowledged the seriousness of the episode without resolving its cause. 

When asked directly whether the State of New Jersey had ever received a definitive explanation from federal authorities, the governor’s office offered a narrower answer. “Nothing definitive other than public statements made by [officials with] the Biden and Trump administrations,” the spokesperson replied by text several hours later.

BEFORE THE INSTITUTIONAL response can be fairly judged, it has to be set against the limits of what domestic airspace monitoring can actually do. In a flight corridor as congested as that in northern New Jersey, small unmanned aircraft are difficult to distinguish. The sensors used to find them — radar, radio frequency monitors, cameras — each have blind spots, and reconciling what they collectively pick up takes time. In complex airspace, getting from a signal on a screen to a confident answer about what the object is and who controls it can take longer than the object stays visible.

Craig Robertson, a retired Army major who spent years working at the Pentagon, tells me that the United States is not short on detection tools, but on coherence. Robertson served in the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a now-defunct unit that embedded with forces across the Army to solve unconventional tactical problems — IEDs, drones, emerging threats that didn’t fit neatly into existing doctrine. He eventually moved into a specialized role assessing counter-Unmanned Aerial Surveillance systems — that is, identifying and combatting the small unmanned aircraft that began proliferating over battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan during America’s two-decade deployments there. 

“The problem with UAS is that they’re low, slow, and small,” Robertson says. “They’re really hard to detect, because when you fine-tune the radar to pick them up, you start picking up birds flying. You pick up trash. The radar sees everything.”

The limits of the DOD’s detection systems become most obvious at night. When the sky goes black, depth disappears. A light that drifts across it looks deliberate, even if it is not. Robertson has seen this before. During deployments overseas, he watched soldiers mistake ordinary air traffic for hostile activity. “At night, you just see something moving,” he says. “It could be a satellite. It could be a star. The reality is, no one knew what they were looking at.” 

Robertson, a Morris County resident, is not dismissive of New Jersey’s UAP phenomenon altogether. He is careful to separate statistical likelihood from absolute certainty. “I’ll never say there weren’t drones,” he tells me. But the vast majority, he says, were probably misidentifications. That concession also leaves room for what he has encountered himself. While deployed in Iraq, Robertson says, he was shown a video classified at the highest levels. “They had no idea what it was,” he says. “I looked at it and said, ‘I don’t know what it is, either.’ It wasn’t anything in our technology base. It made no absolute sense.” For him, the lesson was not that the skies were full of mysteries, but that even one unresolved case can be lost in a flood of misidentified aircraft and mistaken sightings.

“Right now, no one really knows what the proper processes are.”

In December 2024, as the sightings intensified, Robertson reached out to the State Police and the FBI in his capacity as a counter-UAS specialist working in the defense industry. He offered to bring in industry experts and to leverage his experience identifying and assessing drone activity. He met directly with Colonel Callahan of the New Jersey State Police and Nelson Delgado, the Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Newark Field Office, saying he could help ensure they had both the technical resources and the public messaging they needed. The discussions, he recalls, were initially receptive. Then, he says, they cooled. “Every time I tried to dive deeper, the conversation just went cold,” he tells me. “Like, ‘Hey, we’re just trying to figure this out.’ And then nothing.” He attributes that reaction to a broader institutional posture. “Anything the military does,” he says, “they don’t really owe answers to civilian people. It’s none of [the public’s] business.” That attitude, routine in classified environments, becomes corrosive when applied to domestic airspace, where public trust depends on at least knowing who is responsible for answering the questions.

WHAT LOCAL OFFICIALS in New Jersey encountered in practice was not new. It had already surfaced more formally in Washington, D.C. Long before mayors began fielding calls about low-flying objects, Congress had begun to act on the premise that it had not been fully informed about programs meant to account for anomalous activity in U.S. airspace. The Wall Street Journal reported that for 17 days in late 2023, unidentified drones swarmed over Langley Air Force Base — home to several dozen F-22 Raptors, the Air Force’s premier air-superiority fighter — disrupting training missions and forcing changes to operations, even as authorities still could not explain who was flying them or why. The concern in Congress was not what the objects were, but whether the institutions responsible for tracking them were reporting honestly to civilian oversight authorities.

In July 2023, that question moved into public view during sworn testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer who had been detailed to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office — both Defense Department agencies responsible for satellite imagery and space-based surveillance — testified under oath that certain highly restricted Pentagon programs related to unidentified aerial phenomena had not been fully disclosed to Congress, as required by law. 

By the time he testified, Congress had already taken steps that suggest it considered the issue serious. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) expanded whistleblower protections for intelligence personnel, creating a formal pathway for military or government personnel to report information about unidentified aerial phenomena to inspectors general and to Congress without risking career reprisal. Those statutory protections were the mechanism that allowed Grusch to submit his complaint and later appear in open session.

After Grusch testified publicly in July 2023, Congress attempted to go further. The Senate included the Schumer-Rounds Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act in the 2024 NDAA, a sweeping proposal that would have required government agencies to inventory, review, and disclose UAP-related records to appropriate congressional oversight bodies, with enforcement mechanisms tied to funding and compliance. In its final form, however, the legislation was substantially stripped by House Republicans during negotiations. The disclosure requirements were weakened, the enforcement provisions removed. The result: Oversight obligations remained on the books, but the financial and legal consequences for noncompliance were left unresolved.

Grusch was not an outlier. He was one of 10 individuals who have testified publicly before Congress on UAP issues since 2023, including senior Pentagon officials, Navy aviators, intelligence officers, aviation regulators, scientists, and journalists. Across 16 appearances, their testimony did not converge on a single explanation for UAP generally, but on a more troubling conclusion: that the U.S. government lacks a transparent system for accounting for anomalous activity in its own airspace.

Domestic airspace sits at the intersection of multiple authorities. The Federal Aviation Administration regulates civilian flight safety. The Department of Homeland Security has limited counter-UAS authority in specific circumstances. The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates potential criminal activity. The Department of Defense possesses the most sophisticated detection capabilities, but operates under strict legal constraints when activity occurs over U.S. soil. Each agency can describe its role with precision. None can claim ownership when those roles fail to converge. As the events in New Jersey demonstrated, it was not that no one in government was paying attention. It was that everyone was paying attention to a piece of the problem, and no one was responsible for the whole.

This fragmentation is the product of decades of lawmaking designed to prevent overreach: to ensure that military power is not casually exercised at home, that surveillance does not bleed into everyday life, that civilian airspace remains civilian. Those safeguards matter, but without coordination they produce a different risk: a system capable of observing anomalies, issuing reassurances, and yet unable to say who is accountable when those reassurances fail.

This problem is not confined to the spate of New Jersey drone sightings. The pattern has repeated itself around UAP sightings over military bases, airports, and civilian neighborhoods in the United States and Europe: investigations ongoing, no known threat, jurisdiction complex. 

In February 2024, at a routine budgetary meeting of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and state legislators, PEMA Director David “Randy” Padfield was asked about the agency’s role in “protecting the safety of our nuclear power plants in the state, given growing sightings of drones, unmanned aircraft, and other unidentified aerial phenomena.” Specifically, asked state representative Ben Waxman, “What is PEMA’s role in encouraging the reporting and tracking of these unknown objects and potential threats?” 

Padfield’s answer was a very genial and thorough summary of governmental insufficiency. He confirmed past reports of UAP that were relayed to PEMA through county 911 calls. He confirmed sharing relevant information with state and local law enforcement. He stated that the tracking of drones, nationwide, is “really under the FAA’s purview,” though he acknowledged that drones “being used for nefarious purposes” would probably not have government-required remote IDs and thus not be trackable by the FAA. He admitted that when it came to countering UAS, that was a whole different discussion at the federal level. 

Still, he assured the gathered legislators, “most” of the reported sightings were actually just cases of people seeing stars aligning or activity over military bases — sightings that were “unfounded, or they’re attributable to some other mechanism.”

State representative Jordan Harris interjected: “You said ‘most.’ So what about the un-most?”

That was a harder question for Padfield to answer. “Some of those are undefined,” he began. “They’re hard to be able to understand because we don’t have— we look into everything, but unless there’s pictures… We take all reports and we share it with the appropriate agencies to be able to investigate.”

In Pennsylvania, as in New Jersey, as across the nation, the skies have stayed open. And whatever moves overhead does so without anyone willing to answer for it.