Drones in New Jersey

And Drones, Mechanical and Human, from Coast to Coast

Via Asbury Park Press

Circa 2012, an unidentified projectile was spotted off the west coast. I vividly recall fairly low quality videos posted to Facebook of a vague missile-like object flying near the shoreline. The Department of Defense claimed to have no knowledge of it or its provenance. There was some minimal awareness of it; I remember California rock journalist, author, and former MTV Headbanger’s Ball personality Lonn Friend trying to call attention to it. I also remember discussing it with Billy Beck, a knowledgable aviator and son of an Air Force officer, who was concerned that the government claimed not to know what it was. (When I asked him if he trusted the Defense Department to tell the truth about their knowledge of lack thereof, he unequivocally responded that he didn’t.) Billy and I also discussed the general apathy and lack of awareness of it, in a culture driven to hysterics and histrionics by footling trifles and cavils. Referring to a recent post of mine, he responded, “Your post about an unserious culture takes care of that. They’re the Eloi now.” (For those unaware, the Eloi are a race of gentle but inefficacious, idle, ignorant, childlike semihumans in H.G. Wells’s dystopian 1895 novel The Time Machine who are literally eaten by the savage, simian Morlocks in Wells’s dualist dystopia.)

Other than Lonn Friend and a few others like Billy Beck and me, I saw little awareness of this mysterious object, and heard even less, even though I was living near the California coast. It was completely forgotten within a few days.

Two years ago today, I moved to the New Jersey coast. And for weeks now, there are continued reports of unidentified, mysterious drones sighted in and around the state.

To state that there is significantly more, and significantly longer, attention to and awareness of these reported sightings and shared images, videos, etc. is to understate the case considerably.

I have yet to see a drone, and Billy Beck and others think that many of these sightings are actually innocuous airplanes mistaken for something more sinister, whether foreign or domestic. The Asbury Park Press has reported that “experts”, including an Engineering Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, believe something unusual is happening to some degree. County sheriffs have opined on the matter, with Ocean County Sheriff Mastronardy’s “drone unit” hunting the drones for well over a week. Congressman Thomas Kean (R-NJ) and President-Elect Donald Trump have exhorted government officials to disclose to the public what they know about the drones or, if they know little or nothing, shoot them(or at least one of them) out of the sky. Civilians have already begun to try to do that.