White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby claimed that the government still does not have definitive answers about the nature of the reported drone sightings as public frustration mounts.
“Many of the confirmed sightings turned out to be piloted aircraft. I didn’t say all of them, and what I said were the sightings that we were able to confirm,” Kirby said.The story.” “There are certainly things that we haven’t been able to do, and we don’t know the answer to them, and I strongly encourage people who see and document these things to share that with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.”
In a letter dated Wednesday to Biden, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy asked the president for more federal resources to address drone sightings, noting that federal law limits the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to counter drones.
“…it has become clear that more resources are needed to fully understand what is behind this activity,” Murphy wrote. “Continued reporting on UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) activities has raised more questions than answers and led to an increase in conspiracy theories on social media and other platforms.”
A map of drone sightings around New Jersey.
Kirby addressed the possibility that the reported drone sightings could be linked to a private company, saying they could “very well” be commercially developed drones of some sort.
‘Why don’t we know? I wish I could tell you exactly why we don’t have an answer for you here on the afternoon of December 13th,” Kirby said. “But I can tell you that we are working very, very hard to know, because we want to answer those questions the same way the people of New Jersey want answers to them.”
Kirby announced that an interagency discussion on the subject took place Friday morning.
“We’ve now decided to deploy some additional technology in New Jersey and some additional staff to try to get a better sense of what these things are,” he said.
New Jersey State Assemblyman Paul Kanitra snapped a photo of what appears to be multiple drones hovering in the New Jersey sky on Thursday, December 13. (Paul Kanitra / “Fox News @ Night”)
Monmouth County, NJ, Sheriff Shaun Golden urged officials to declare a state of emergency over the drone sightings, issuing a statement Wednesday evening. The release included a heat map showing the density of drones spotted across his province:
A heat map showing drone activity in Monmouth County, New Jersey. (Courtesy of Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office)
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Rep. Chris Smith, RN.J., whose district includes parts of Monmouth and Ocean counties, where he says he spent Monday evening on a beach talking to several individuals, including a U.S. Coast Guard commander stationed at Barnegat Light.
The commander, he said, said a 45-foot Coast Guard ship had been closely followed by more than a dozen drones last night.
Monmouth and Burlington counties are home to several military installations, including Naval Weapons Station Earle in Colts Neck and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.
Mayor Tony Perry of Middletown, N.J., expressed “concerns” to Fox News on Thursday about the drone sightings near the waterfront of Naval Weapons Station Earle in his city, 14 miles north of the Colts Neck installation.
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“I’m not going to lie to you or the American people, and I’m not going to say we know something when we don’t,” Kirby said. “We would never dare to think that an American citizen was crazy or crazy because of what he sees and what he documents. We take those images seriously and we do our best to analyze these images. and we encourage people to come forward if they have additional sightings and images.”
