Drones Over Wayne

When you're looking at the lights in the sky, what aren't you seeing?

One of my neighbors growing up had a brother who was a stage magician. Stage magicians get a lot of shit these days, because most people associate them with the schlocky, X-TREEM nu-metal aesthetic of guys like David Blaine -

Zoomers won’t understand it but this video was the single funniest thing in 2007 behind Shoes.

Or tacky, hackneyed shit for kids performed by a guy named The Great Zamboni or something who’d show up in a Spirit Halloween top-hat to perform for elementary schoolers.

“For my next trick, I’m going to distribute this catalogue full of cheap crap made in a Laotian sweatshop for you to hawk to your friends and family!”

I don’t think that’s a very fair assessment of stage magic. If you read up on how a lot of the tricks are done, more talent goes into it than one might think, and the people who do it usually have a pretty sharp sense of humor since running your mouth and keeping people distracted is integral to pulling off many illusions. Keep that in mind.

Also, I always thought Zatanna was one of the most underrated members of the Justice League.

It’s totally just because I like magic, of course. No other reason.

I digress.

Stage magicians also get a bad rap for being, as the kids these days would say, broke boys who sustain their hobby by working children’s birthday parties and elementary school seminars while holding down some miserable, soul-crushing 40+ hour grind like the rest of us. Again, this isn’t entirely accurate, since some folks ride the hobby to great success. My neighbor’s brother was one of these guys. He struck it big with his act… just not in America. If you happened to grow up in Southern Europe, you might have seen this guy on television, as apparently he was something of a minor celebrity in that part of the world after he got picked up for a television program after impressing a television executive with his card tricks while working as a bartender in a posh casino on the Adriatic. Even after that gig came to an end, he moved back to the States after acquiring a company that sells and distributes supplies for magicians, so, I think it’s safe to say he managed to do alright for himself.

I remember when I was twelve or thirteen, he came back to the States to visit his family and happened to drop by our neighborhood’s annual Superbowl party. Naturally, he ended up showing off some tricks that had both adults and children scratching their heads and asking, What the fuck? He pulled one card trick on me that bothered me, though. I don’t remember what the trick was exactly, but I do recall feeling as if it was outright impossible to pull something like that off without the use of actual black magic. Like any curious young teen would, I hounded the guy until he revealed the secret behind this particular sleight of hand.

Watch carefully, he said. He performed the trick again, and I found myself laser-focused on his right hand as he wiggled his fingers, gesticulated with it, flapping it around, and played with cards, all the while yapping nonsense about cards and magic and making shitty jokes without saying anything of any real substance. By the time he finished the trick again, I was still stumped. I’d watched carefully. I’d seen nothing.

I told you to watch carefully, he said.

I did, I protested.

He shook his head and flashed a wolfish grin. You didn’t, he said. He raised his left hand. You were staring at my right hand the whole time.

The secret behind his trick astoundingly simple, so much so that I felt as if I had to be stupid for not figuring it out myself. Everything he’d done with the cards (which were tampered with, of course) had been done with his left hand, which I hadn’t even thought to look at since he’d stolen my attention with his right. That’s the crucial skill to much of stage magic - redirection. Keep the audience distracted by waggling the fingers on your right hand so they don’t pay attention to your left.

Recently, the media has been awash with news stories of mysterious drones filling the skies of New Jersey. These drones don’t seem to be your average hobbyist’s quad-propeller drone, either - many seem to be designed to resemble commercial aircraft. According to both police, military, and state officials, these drones do not register on radar, do not broadcast flight information (as is required), can operate for six to seven hours at a time¹, are highly maneuverable, and can easily evade both helicopters and industrial-grade interceptor drones operated by the police. Apparently, they don’t even give off a heat signature. Many eye-witness reports claim that the drones arrive from the sea². Perhaps most strangely, in many of the video footage taken by civilians recording these drones, it sounds as if they’re equipped with speakers that play commercial airliner sound effects.

Silly as it sounds, these paper-thin attempts to mask the drones seem to be working; more than a few mediocrities have taken to social media to hand-wave it all away as, It’s just a plane, bro. This has to be willful ignorance on their part, as all one need do is watch one of the myriad videos of these aircraft to clearly see that, whatever’s up there is not a plane. They’re flying too low, and they turn on a dime and hover in the way commercial jets just don’t; these features can all be seen in footage captured by concerned civilians watching these things fly over their homes. These claims that do you not know what a plane looks like? also discount the fact that these strange plane-drones make up only a portion of the reported sightings.

Have they been seen over the township of Wayne, as the title of this article implies? I can’t find any news stories about it, but given how many of the little buggers are being spotted in the Garden State, I assume a few have been spotted big chillin’ in the night sky there. I really just wanted an excuse to remind you that Fountains of Wayne, which was named after the township, was still one of the most criminally underrated bands of the 2000’s.

Anyways, these mystery drones have been spotted and filmed flying low and slow over residential areas with no real apparent purpose, often giving away their unusual nature by turning on a dime in a way no conventional aircraft can. If you want more details, I highly recommend you give this piece by

Steve Skojec

a read, who’s done a good job at compiling the various oddities associated with these strange flying contraptions.

We Are in the Midst of the Biggest UFO Flap in Decades and Nobody Has Answers

Over the course of November and December 2024, these drones have been making some serious headlines by floating over places they should very much not be. They’ve been seen congregating over the Picatinny Arsenal, a military research and manufacturing center, as well as President Elect Donald Trump’s golf course in Bedminster. Over fifty drones reportedly tailed a Coast Guard vessel off the coast of Island Beach State Park. This hasn’t been limited to New Jersey, either; while these drones have been seen most commonly over states along the Atlantic seaboard, Skojec has a long list of sightings that stretch across the United States. Just over the past several days, Wright-Patterson Airforce Base outside of Dayton, Ohio shut down its airspace as some of these drones cruised overhead. New York’s Stewart International Airport temporarily shut down due to similar reasons.

In late November, reportedly entire swarms flew over various naval installations throughout the Hampton Roads area of Southern Virginia, which includes Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base not just in the United States, but the world. The drones have become such a frequent sight in the skies over Virginia in recent weeks that Governor Glenn Youngkin issued an address to his constituents a day ago as of this writing.

“The Commonwealth of Virginia is home to a significant number of national security and critical infrastructure sites upon which our nation depends each and every day. I remain deeply concerned that Virginia has consistently sought information from federal partners, and to date, the information shared with the Commonwealth has been insufficient. The Virginia State Police Homeland Security Division and Virginia Department of Emergency Management continue to closely coordinate through our Fusion Center with the greater law enforcement and first responder community regarding drone activity in the Commonwealth. We will continue to engage with numerous federal partners and release further information as it becomes known and available.”

His statement mirrors those of New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, and New York governor Kathy Hochul, which basically boils down to, Lol IDK. Murphy has gone on the record as stating that the ambiguous they have deduced that there’s no reason to assume these drones are dangerous to the public.

This seems like an awful bold claim to make concerning unidentified drones operated by unidentified actors for unknown reasons.

The FBI, who claims to be investigating the drones, is acting similarly flummoxed.

The long and short of just about anyone in a position of power’s stance on this flap of unidentified flying objects - because that is technically what these are - comes down to this:

Not every elected official is so laissez-faire about these unidentified crafts, however. Here’s New Jersey assemblyman Brian Bergen’s reply to Governor Murphy’s apparent strategy of sit and do nothing.

Even Trump used the situation to get a jab in at his erstwhile cohort, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, by posting this… lovely piece of AI-generated content to Twitter, most likely utilizing their in-house generative AI, Grok. Christie obviously supposedly has nothing to do with anything going on, but Trump holds grudges like a thirteen year old girl with a burn book³.

As I’ve said before, love him or hate him, Trump is objectively the funniest president of all time.

One of the many strange aspects of this case is that the only elected officials that seem to care are, like Assemblyman Bergen, relatively low on the Government totem pole⁴. One might think Phil Murphy or Glenn Youngkin might take a more vested interest in sussing out where these drones are coming from and what they’re doing, assuming that they’re really as in the dark as they claim to be, but the onus on solving the mystery is now coming down to local sheriffs, mayors, and congressmen, most of whom seem about ready to declare open season on anything in the sky smaller than a Cessna two-seater.

This apparent apathy displayed by state and military leadership seems a bit stunning, given the fact that the airspace of both closely guard and highly restricted military bases is being violated almost daily by what several government officials are now speculating are drones of foreign origin. Depending on who’s doing the talking, these drones are supposedly of Chinese, Russian, or most commonly, Iranian origin. The luminaries over at Fox News have postulated that these drone swarms are being launched from an Iranian mother-ship drone, which… well, I don’t know enough about drones to argue, but that just doesn’t sound right to me. Another theory is that they’re being spit out of a Chinese spy submarine parked off the Atlantic coast, which is more plausible. But only marginally.

If you ask the Pentagon, they’ll tell you that it’s none of the above, and that they don’t know who the Hell is operating these things. But don’t worry! They’re not a threat. Really. Honestly. We promise.

And, don’t misunderstand me, here; I’m not trying to fear-monger and tell you that those of you on the East Coast need to bust out the Flak guns and blow these hunks of junk out of the sky before they air-drop a grenade down your chimney. So far, there are no reports of these drones doing anything other than just… y’know. Cruisin’. I’m simply saying that, again, I’m not sure you can make the claim that they don’t pose a threat if you don’t even know what the Hell they are or who they belong to.

And no one seems to.

Here’s what one Defense Department official told the media in regards to drones being seen over Naval Weapons Station Earle, also in New Jersey.

“To date, we have no intelligence or observations that would indicate that they were aligned with a foreign actor or that they had malicious intent. But I just got to simply tell you we don’t know. We have not been able to locate or identify the operators or the points of origin. We have very limited authorities when it comes to moving off base. We have to coordinate with local and as well as federal law enforcement to try and locate these persons and where they’re launching from to either cite them or, you know, execute law enforcement activities that we, you know, we are restricted from doing off base. So we simply don’t know.”

Comforting, isn’t it?

Call me crazy, but if advanced drones that don’t register on radar are following military sea-going vessels or invading military airspace, they’d be shot out of the sky on sight. At the very least, one might think the government would only wait as long to ascertain who they belong to before blasting them to bits like clay pigeons.

Of course, some might point to the 2023 incident in which a high-altitude balloon belonging to the Chinese government, ostensibly for civilian weather-tracking and research purposes, was allowed to float over most of the continental United States and, conveniently, several major military installations before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina. There’s an argument to be made that the Air Force was hesitant to blast the thing out of the sky for fears that the balloon’s equipment was carrying a payload of explosive or, worse, bio-hazardous material that would cause a lot of damage were it to crash in a heavily populated area. It wouldn’t be a very good look if a thirty-meter chunk of metal crashed through a roof in North Dakota and mulched someone’s granny while she was watching her soaps. There’s also the fact that, if something untowards really was happening, both then and now, it would behoove the powers that be to downplay whatever the threat might be for the sake of maintaining public peace.

I get all that.

But, at the same time, there was a lot of other weirdness surrounding that case, including three other high-altitude objects spotted over the Great Lakes, the fact the Canadian Air Force did approximately nothing as the balloon cruised through their air space, and many strange reports from Billings, Montana, where the balloon was first seen by civilians, leads me to suspect we never got the full story surrounding Balloongate ‘23.

If there was more to it, I doubt we’ll ever know, just as I doubt there will ever be a conclusive answer to what’s going on with these drones. It’s likely that some other story will barrel through the headlines and knock the tale of the drones into the gutter of obscurity without any real resolution being offered. Kind of like every other major flap of unidentified aerial phenomenon, as the G-Men have taken to calling them.

As civilians, there’s no real way of knowing who or what is operating these drones. But I think that there is next to no chance that they are, as some are speculating, of extraterrestrial origin. By all eye-witness accounts, the drones are more advanced than anything a hobbyist is going to fly, but that does not an alien craft make One would think a civilization capable of traversing the stars could field drones a little more advanced than, kinda like human drones, only slightly better. I also don’t believe that they belong to hoaxsters or hobbyists, as some have speculated. Not only is the technology clearly above what even the most avid civilian drone-enthusiast could get their hands on, there’s simply too many spread too far for one or even a handful of amateurs to coordinate.

For reasons I expounded upon above, I also doubt that these are drones operated by foreign actors. The idea of a Chinese submarine or Iranian mother-ship is significantly more likely than little green shitheads from Zeta Reticuli taking out their toys for a joy ride over the Garden State, but I just don’t believe that even the most inept military official would tolerate Russians, Chinese, Iranian, or anyone’s drones flying recon missions over the largest naval base on the planet. But, I’ll admit - I may be giving the top brass of 2024 more credit than they’re due.

Regardless of whether these drones belong to the Rockin’ Rollah Ayatollah, reptoids from beyond the stars, or even if it is Chris Christie just air-dropping some Quarter Pounders to his backyard, the drones milling about American military installations and civilian airports do not pose an insignificant threat. I spoke to a friend of mine who’s a private pilot about the matter, and he revealed that even completely innocuous drones piloted by enthusiasts can disrupt air traffic and pose an extreme threat to aircraft, both commercial and private. More than once he’s been preparing to land at the local airport - which is not a small one - only to be redirected or delayed because of completely conventional civilian drone activity nearby. This is to say nothing of the threat a drone truly operated by a hostile foreign power could pose. Many people have speculated that these drones are dispersing chemical agents as they slowly meander in the skies over suburban New Jersey, and while I highly doubt that’s the case, it’s a possibility that someone at some point could do it. I don’t need the FAA launching an investigation into my publication, but one needn’t stretch their imagination too far to think up a possibility in which one bad actor, domestic or foreign, with a consumer-grade drone could do a lot of damage to an airliner and potentially hurt a lot of people.

On some level, I think everyone knows this, which makes the listless shrugging and resounding chorus of, I dunno, from the government, the military, and the intelligence services all the more disturbing. Many of you most likely already suspect they don’t really give a fuck about the safety of the public to begin with, but at this point, they can’t even be bothered to pretend.

Probably because, by my estimation, at least some of the good Government folks know more than they’re letting on. Again, one can make the claim that their apathy is a manifestation of incompetence, and they’ve never offered much of the way in a solid argument that they’re anything but. Yet, I can’t help but think that if these drones were, say, Iranian reconnaissance assets, the current crop of war-mongers in our hallowed halls wouldn’t be eager to shoot one down and use it as a casus belli to turn Tehran into a smoldering crater. So far as I see it, there’s two possibilities, here; either they know, and they’re lying, or they genuinely do not know. I’m not sure which would be more concerning, but they’re both troublesome all the same.

Over the past day or two, as I’ve been writing this article, a new theory has been posited by a (perhaps conveniently) now-deleted Twitter account called JerseyFutures, who posited that these drones are domestic in nature and being used to detect nuclear or biological hazards. In the absence of an official narrative, many have latched onto it. Like the Iranian narrative, it quickly gained a life of its own, and armchair theorists began looping in other stories about missing nuclear warheads from Ukraine being the target of these drone’s mysterious searches.

Though this narrative had very little in the way of compelling evidence except for JerseyFuture’s baseless postulation, it quickly became the explanation du jour over the Iranian excuse when a man named John Ferguson made a video on Twitter corroborating the story. Ferguson is the CEO of a Wichita, Kansas-based aerospace outfit called Saxon Aerospace, which reportedly produces military-grade unmanned aircraft. Needless to say, if anyone was going to offer insight into the matter, he seems like someone with the bonafides to back up whatever he said. In the video, Ferguson does, indeed, claim that an insider source within the government confirmed to him that there were nuclear warheads from Ukraine that made their way to America in the 1980’s, just so happened to go missing (whoops!), and just now, for whatever reason, I guess the government is invested in finding them. These drones, according to Ferguson, are searching for these warheads, or similarly radioactive or biological hazards.

It didn’t take long for Ferguson’s videos to begin making the rounds. The traction it was gaining all but multiplied exponentially when none other than Joe Rogan retweeted it for his 14.4 million followers, stating, This is the first video about these drones that has got me genuinely concerned.

Though this is the narrative currently dominating the discussion around the mystery drones, others in the field of aerospace and defense have stepped in to begin battering it like a pinata. Given that these are all former military and intelligence personnel who all just happen to know a guy, while their refutations are compelling, they’re no more verifiable or quantifiable than anyone else who’s getting top secret information from anonymous whistleblowers. Even if one these guys trotted out their source to talk to a camera, how would anyone know whether or not the person in question was a government insider or a dude he got to sit down and read a script in exchange for twelve-pack of Yeungling?

It’s all ultimately hearsay.

A UFO researcher by the name of Richard Geldreich offered the most compelling refutation of this narrative when he posted an AI-summary of Ferguson’s video along with a very simple statement of just two words - containment narrative. This is all to say that, what ever’s actually going on, the theories of Iranian drone mother-ships launching swarms of smaller drones to spy on military bases or domestic drones searching for lost warheads from a country that relinquished their nuclear stock in 1991 are most likely only there to muddy the metaphorical water and shroud the truth.

In a word - PsyOps. It’s Psychological Warfare 101. People getting curious? Poking their noses where they shouldn’t? Tell ‘em a story. The more ridiculous the better. Iranian drone mother-ships. Chinese spy submarines. Whatever. Send them on a snipe hunt in the opposite direction of whatever it is you don’t want them to see.

Like a magician, you start waving your right hand; so long as they’re looking at the right, they won’t even notice what you’re doing with the left.

There’s a not insignificant chance that the only reason these stories are circulating is because it’s what the people in charge want people to think. And a lot of people are just eating it up and asking, can I have some more, please?

Anyone who looks at any community built around UFO/UAPs, extraterrestrial disclosure, or purported alien activity with a critical eye will quickly notice that many of the thought leaders and prominent figures in them are former (and in some cases, active) military or intelligence personnel. This can be and often is explained away by saying that, well, of course they would know more than the average arm-chair investigator by virtue of their careers and connections they made within them. But I also think it’s a bit… oh, how can I put it nicely? Naive to believe that all of these individuals who worked for shady government organizations are simply blowing whistles out of the goodness of their heart. I’m not saying that they’re all disinformation agents, or that they’re all acting with malicious intent to obfuscate the truth, but I am saying that anyone who takes what they say at face value without an ounce of scrutiny is setting themselves up to be deluded by anyone who is spreading disinformation or acting in bad faith.

Unfortunately, in my time doing research on these matters, I’ve noticed that skepticism is usually in short supply around these communities. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people who are interested in these topics already have a pet theory of their own about what they are, who’s behind them, and what they’re doing, and will latch on to anyone who says the right thing to validate their beliefs. If the right guy with the right credentials says the right thing, he can make a small fortune peddling people’s theories right back to them.

On the flip side, it’s also very easy to lose one’s better judgement to paranoia and cynicism in an environment where solid proof is vanishingly scarce and the most evidence that’s ever put forward is testaments by faceless, anonymous claimants that someone just so happens to know, or received a late-night phone call from. It only gets all the murkier when many of these people have an agenda to push and, more often, books to sell.

That’s not to say that everyone in these spaces is entirely untrustworthy, or only out to sell books and make a profit off of gullible truth-seeker. What I’m trying to say is that the world of conspiracy theories and the paranormal is a convoluted and byzantine place in which nothing can really be trusted or taken at face value. Just about everything, regardless of who it comes from or what they’re saying, has to be taken with not a pinch but a hearty handful of pink Himalayan sea-salt. Perhaps even more so when they’re telling you what you already wanted to hear.

I advise everyone to keep their heads clear and their eyes sharp as this story unfolds; as many suspect, this may be the prelude to a much bigger events. If that’s the case, it’s imperative that you maintain the ability to think critically and not sleep-walk into the embrace of a false narrative spread by a bad actor.

Personally, I think whatever is going on with these drones is, as is so often the case, much less fantastical and much more mundane than most observing it want it to be. Like the aforementioned card trick, the explanation is most likely disappointingly simple. I wouldn’t be surprised if these are just new drones developed behind closed doors at a place like Skunk Works that are being taken for a spin to test their efficacy. Or maybe it’s being done to gauge public reaction to what might happen if the Ayatollah and his pals actually do send over a drone mother-ship in the near future. I’d also be lying if I said it wasn’t also very convenient that all of this was happening less than a calendar month before Trump is set to be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, and kicked into high gear only after he clinched the election. Like I said, there’s probably something else the powers that be don’t want people paying attention to, but what that is, I don’t know. I’m not going to make any claims to the contrary.

Ultimately, the mounting hysteria building in the headlines and in the online discourse seems to me an awful lot like a stage magician’s act. Misdirection and distraction are the two most valuable tools in any illusionist’s arsenal. While he waves his right hand about and distracts you with his rapid-fire torrent of meaningless words, keep a close eye on his left-hand - he doesn’t want you noticing that’s where the magic is happening.

If you’re interested in reading further on this topic, again, I highly suggest that you check out

Steve Skojec

’s articles on the drones. I discovered his Substack while doing research on this topic, and he’s doing a great job comprehensively covering and documenting this situation in detail with a bevy of sources I was unable to find elsewhere.

1. Most consumer drones can only stay airborne around thirty to forty-five minutes. Even most industrial-grade drones can operate for two hours.

2. By which I mean from the direction of the ocean, not out of the ocean, though more than one - and I must stress this, but unverifiable accounts claim to have witnessed them both rising from and disappearing into the water.

3. As of this writing, Trump came out hours ago and made an official statement on the drones spotted over his golf course, stating the obvious with, Something strange is going on.

4. This does seem to be changing daily, as now Senate-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has come out and told the intelligence agencies to hurry up and figure out what’s going on.