TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Drone-detecting devices deployed in New Jersey in the past week have found “little to no evidence” of anything nefarious or threatening, Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday as calls grew for action to address the mysterious nighttime sightings of suspected unmanned flights across the northeastern U.S.
Murphy told reporters in Trenton that there were 12 sightings of suspected drones in the state on Saturday and one on Sunday. He declined to go into detail about the detection equipment, but said it was powerful enough to disable the drones, although he added that is not legal on U.S. soil.
Murphy, a Democrat, echoed calls by state officials elsewhere for Congress to allow them to deal with drones. Nearly all the power now rests with the federal government.
“It is extraordinary to me that, that a nation as great as ours and as powerful as ours has the deficiencies that we have now seen in living color as it relates to drone incursions,” Murphy said.
Federal officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have repeatedly said there are no signs that any drone operators have shown bad intent, nor is there evidence of foreign involvement.
“There’s no question that people are seeing drones,” Mayorkas told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “But I want to assure the American public that we are on it. We are working in close coordination with state and local authorities.”
But that hasn’t reassured everyone. Conspiracy theories about foreign actors, the U.S. government and the “deep state,” abound online, while elected officials concerned about threats to military bases, airports and other locations have increased their calls for federal officials to act.
The skeptics include President-elect Donald Trump, who suggested Monday that “the government knows what is happening.”
“Our military knows and our president knows and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense,” Trump said. He refused to say whether he had been briefed on the drone sightings.
New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat, told The Associated Press that officials could do a better job helping the public to understand what is going on, especially when people wrongly conclude they are seeing unmanned aircraft.
“What the public could use is like walking through that rather than just, you know, as a statement that says nothing, nothing to be concerned about,” he said. “I think it’s reached a level of just public attention that some greater level of depth is necessary.”
Kim said he’s heard no supporting evidence for the president-elect’s statement Monday that information is being withheld and that a lack of faith in institutions is playing a key part in the saga.
“Nothing that I’m seeing, nothing that I’ve engaged in gives me any impression of that nature. But like, I get it, some people won’t believe me, right? Because that’s the level of distrust that we face.”
Over the past two days, New York and Pennsylvania officials have also requested drone-detecting equipment from federal officials.
“It is imperative our communities in Pennsylvania are protected and questions on the presence of these drones are answered,” U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, wrote in a letter to Mayorkas on Monday. “State-of-the-art radar systems will provide insights into where these drones are deploying from and what the motives for their flights may be.”
After reports of drones in Connecticut, state police said they were monitoring drone activity and state officials said analysts were comparing reported sightings with federal flight data.
“One of the drone sightings had the word Frontier on the back, that was an airline,” Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, said Monday. “But some of them are big and unexplained and we’re going to get to the bottom of this. Right now, what we do is we make sure that our security and airports are secure.”
At a media briefing on Monday, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, said defense officials have seen no indication that the drones flying over multiple locations in the U.S. are being controlled by a foreign country. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, he said, there are approximately 1 million registered drones in the U.S. and about 8,000 are flying any given day.
Ryder said that while military bases overseas can use surveillance methods that quickly address the origin of drones, that power is limited in U.S. airspace because of domestic surveillance laws. He said most drones are operated through either radio frequency transmissions or satellite-guided GPS navigation, which can provide information about the operators. If they’re not controlled by those methods, that’s another clue, he said.
“So I’m kind of talking around it because I don’t necessarily want to get into talking classified capabilities, but the bottom line is that all of that gives us an idea that, hey, these are not foreign origin,” Ryder said.
Christopher Stadulis, a retired New York City firefighter and drone hobbyist, said he’s seen clusters of drones near his home in Clinton Township, New Jersey. He said the lights he has seen at night are different from those used by commercial airlines, and the drones he has seen are very large.
“When you look at what I’m seeing with the naked eye, you can see it’s not a normal aircraft,” he said in a recent interview. “This and we don’t have this much traffic, you know, usually on any given night in this area. So it seems like definitely some of them are aircraft that we can’t explain what they are.”
More suspected drone sightings over the weekend led to a temporary airspace shutdown at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, for about four hours late Friday into Saturday, and the arrests of two men in Boston accused of flying a drone “dangerously close” to Logan International Airport.
U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, said Monday that he is introducing legislation calling on federal officials to provide public briefings on what they know about the drones and calling for a drone air traffic control system similar to those used for planes. He also wants law enforcement to be given access to drone detectors and the authority to “take out drones that shouldn’t be in the air.”
“I believe the people I represent and, as I’ve been saying for some time now, the people in New Jersey and around the country deserve answers,” he said in a statement. “They deserve transparency from their government.”
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Collins reported from Hartford, Connecticut. Associated Press writers John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, Tara Copp in Washington and Joseph B. Frederick in New York City contributed to this report.