A New Jersey sheriff attempted to track the mysterious drones that have been spotted flying over the state with his department’s own drone, which he said the mystery aircraft “easily evaded.”
Ocean County Sheriff Michael Mastronardy said that one of his officers witnessed a swarm of 50 drones “coming off the ocean.”
“We contacted state police, we contacted the FBI, we contacted the Coast Guard, at which point the Coast Guard went out with their boat, and they reported seeing 13 following their boat,” Mastronardy told NewsNation on Friday:
The Coast Guard told his office the unexplained aircraft had a wingspan of eight feet, Mastronardy said.
The sheriff’s office then put up their own “industrial-grade drone” to follow one of the strange aerial devices, but the sheriff told NewsNation’s Rich McHugh that it “easily evaded” their drone and “disappeared out of thin air.”
“If this is not our military, then it’s even more scary,” McHugh said. “These things look like they are fixed-wing and they have multiple lights. I’m not really sure how to process what I saw last night. Both the photographer and I were kind of stunned.”
In an interview with CBS News, the sheriff said the mystery drones sped away at 60 mph, explaining that “our drones only go 40”:
Drone sightings have been reported in several northeastern states over the last month, and the federal government has done little to calm the concerns of witnesses or inform the public.
The Pentagon has stated that the drones are not controlled by the United States military, but also are not believed to be controlled by foreign entities — but did not say who exactly was controlling them, Breitbart News reported.
In a joint statement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), both agencies stated they have “no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”
In a post on Truth Social, President-elect Donald Trump questioned if the sightings could “really be happening without our government’s knowledge” and called for the government to either inform the public what they are or “shoot them down.”