Are We NOT Alone?

Drones over Langley, drones over Picatinny ...

A New Jersey mayor, along with twenty others, are calling for aggressive interception of drones in the vicinity of Picatinny Arsenal. These are visible to observers on the ground and they’re sometimes displaying alternating red and green running lights, as would general aviation planes and helicopters.

The capability these drones display are akin to things we can build, this is nothing at all like the physics violating vehicles described seven months ago in We Are Not Alone. The issue here is that they appear nightly for a week at a time flying over defense related facilities. If the operators are American, they should be facing criminal charges, if they’re foreign it’s an espionage problem.

Both facilities either have or can quickly get SIGINT capabilities to examine radio spectrum in the area. Given the low, slow activity, a competent amateur with a spectrum analyzer could perhaps sort out the band being used - one of 433MHz, 915MHz, 2.4GHz, or 5.8GHz. Or perhaps these are a slightly customized setup using cellular data for control.

There are three things in this video that are briefly mentioned once each that raise my eyebrows.

• These drones operate for HOURS, while battery operated large commercial drones are just reaching for the one hour endurance mark.

• There’s mention of a small thermal plume in this video, and the drones the U.S. military have encountered two issues in this area. The first being maneuvering that was not supported by the volume of heat produced, and the second was duration of heat output being implausible given the volume of the drone observed.

• The drones appear from around 1800 to 2400, which is full dark in New Jersey this time of year, and when human observers appear, the drones quickly “blink out”, which would seem to indicate they’re equipped with sensitive night vision.

The technical capabilities of these UAPs are much less interesting than the ones covered in We Are Not Alone, but this situation is much more interesting. Instead of a Navy exercise range, where you need a high altitude transonic aircraft to participate, this is visible from the ground. Instead of needing the updated AESA radar on an F/A-18, human eyeballs and cell phone cameras are sufficient. And instead of a national security apparatus with strict information control, we have two dozen mayors, the local media, and a bunch of high school kids who are about to have a nice long holiday from school who are all going to be out there trying to see E.T.

We won’t get the details on how they do the capture, but there will be a focused effort to bring one or more of them down with a “soft” method, which usually involves entangling their rotors with a sturdy mesh. The “hard” stop methods would involve kinetic attack and nobody is going to be firing a 40mm grenade launcher in suburban New Jersey.