Gov. Murphy, enough is enough. It’s time to come clean on the drones.
Rightly or wrongly, speculation has reached a fever pitch in New Jersey. Social media and cable news are aflame with reports of drones over military bases and sightings over reservoirs, car-sized drones, truck-sized drones, “Iranian motherships” full of drones.
It’s time to take a page from your early COVID days and hold a televised news conference with the experts: State Police, Homeland Security and other agencies. Federal officials from the FBI, FAA and military should be asked to join as well.
People are scared. Perhaps they’re being overwrought. But they need better answers.
Instead, we’ve gotten cryptic responses like the one Murphy gave reporters on Monday, seemingly calculated to satisfy no one. The governor, echoing other officials, reiterated that he doesn’t see “any concern for public safety.”
But, he added, “It’s really frustrating that we don’t have more answers as to where they’re coming from and why they’re doing what they’re doing.” The governor also offered the disturbing detail that the purported aircraft appear “very sophisticated” and “The minute you get eyes on them, they go dark,” without providing any further context.
Huh? As many residents have asked: How do we know there is no threat if we also don’t know the origin of these unusually “sophisticated” objects?
The FBI has said it is investigating but has been equally maddening in its statements. On Tuesday, an agency director told a congressional hearing that “there’s nothing that is known” that would suggest a security risk. But, he added, “we just don’t know. And that’s the concerning part of it.”
The drone discourse has morphed from curiosity to institutional failure, with vague answers from authorities, politicians passing off conjecture as fact and too many media organizations breathlessly repeating those statements unchallenged.
An open, comprehensive airing of just what federal and state law enforcement know, what they’re doing about it and why they can’t be more definitive would help calm our collective nerves.
We still count ourselves as skeptics. The speculation about a mass aerial invasion has enough holes for, well, a fleet of drones to fly through it.
To start: When the first alleged sightings were reported around Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, it seemed mildly plausible that that military base could attract nefarious eyes. But now drones have been reported over tony bedroom communities like Mountain Lakes and Mendham Township, not to mention over the Jersey Shore and Staten Island and countless towns in between. Are the invaders looking for good real estate? We hope they’ve checked the taxes.
Charlie Stile:Frustrated NJ officials don’t know where to turn on supposed drone sightings
If these alleged drones are trying to gather information, why do they only appear in the dark? If they’re spying, why do they keep their lights on at night? If they’re trying to intimidate us, why do they disappear by day?
And if packs of “SUV-sized” drones are hovering over suburban homes for hours, why has nobody captured quality video? Distant points of light and blurry, two-second snippets on Facebook aren’t persuasive. We won’t eat a slice of cheesecake these days without Instagramming it. But there’s a drone invasion above us and nobody has the goods?
The logistical and logical problems pile up, the more you think about it.
And yet: We keep waiting for authorities to come forward and take down the temperature, to say “we’ve looked into it and found nothing — just a handful of stray drones and a lot of overactive imaginations.”
But they haven’t. Instead, we’ve gotten ambiguous answers and unnerving hints, not enough to ease the minds of skeptics or believers. The Murphy and Biden administrations should know that in an era of online echo chambers, an information vacuum will be filled with fear and speculation.
At this point, what we need are facts, explanations and transparency. Right now.
