Drone sightings caused a national stir and sparked debate over their capabilities and future of the technology.
By Janice Hisle
|January 18, 2025
For the past decade, Jennifer Krazinski felt safe living in a home “tucked away, off of a dirt road,” in Hewitt, a northern New Jersey suburb.
But what she recently saw in the night sky left her disquieted.
Near her house, Krazinski noticed flying objects with blinking red-and-white lights, emitting a whirring sound.
After three consecutive nights in mid-December 2024, “I stopped looking for them because it just was overwhelming,” she told The Epoch Times. “This makes me uneasy.”
Krazinski worried that someone was using drones to collect information for some nefarious purpose. But she decided against alerting authorities already inundated with similar reports of apparent drone sightings.
Weeks later, specific answers elude Krazinski and thousands of other Americans who spotted Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had registered more than 1 million drones as of last month.
And drone use is expected to continue surging.
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About the Sightings
Gabriel Garcia, technical director for SPS Aerial Remote Sensing, a Texas company specializing in counter-drone technology, said he thinks people were filing a lot of false reports, unintentionally.
People who are unfamiliar with the nighttime appearance of various aircraft may have misidentified some crewed aircraft as unmanned drones, he said.
Many types of aircraft, including drones, are equipped with white, red, and green lights to aid navigation and avoid collisions. Numerous witnesses reported seeing these lights on the unidentified objects.
Garcia believes authorities know a significant amount of information about the suspected drones.
That’s because the FAA requires drones to be equipped with “a sort of virtual license plate,” which broadcasts a traceable signal, Garcia noted.
That signal provides a lot of data, he said, including GPS coordinates of the drone’s pilot, timestamped actions, altitude, and speed.
Some of the aircraft that aroused suspicions may have been flown by operators who were ignorant of regulations or careless about drone use, Garcia said.
Concerned citizens wondered why authorities didn’t “just shoot them down” to examine them. But Garcia said that would be unsafe, unnecessary, and illegal without special permission.
First, there’s a “grave risk” that innocent people can be injured by ammunition gone astray or falling debris, Garcia said.
Federal law forbids damaging or disabling aircraft, including drones; violations carry heavy penalties. However, police in Long Island, New York, late last year obtained authority to shoot down the drones.
Rather than shoot the drones, authorities can remotely take over control of a drone. “They can tell it where to go and where to land with a much, much safer outcome,” Garcia said.
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