President-elect Donald Trump said that the mysterious drones spotted in New Jersey and other states should be shot down if the federal government doesn’t take action.
On Friday, Trump called for the government to be transparent with the American people.
“Mystery Drone sightings all over the Country,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”
The White House, however, said that it needs more definitive information to make a decision on whether to take them down.
“We don’t have enough conclusions to take that kind of policy action,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told Fox News on Friday.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has urged President Joe Biden to allocate more federal resources to investigate mysterious drone sightings.
In a letter to Biden on Thursday, Murphy noted that existing laws limit the ability of state and local law enforcement to counter unmanned aircraft systems and that more federal resources are needed to understand what is behind the activity.
Murphy confirmed that numerous drones have been spotted since Nov. 18.
On Thursday night, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan revealed he saw drones himself, expressing concern that they were flying 25 miles from the nation’s capital.
The federal government’s response to the incident is “unacceptable,” Hogan wrote in a Friday post on X.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (R-N.J.) called on the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hold a public briefing on the matter, give local and state agencies the tools they need to monitor drone activity, and allow them to deploy assets that can safely take down the drones.
“New Jersey can’t become the Wild West of drone activity,” Gottheimer said during a news conference on Friday. “No state can become the Wild West of drone activity.”
In addition to Maryland and New Jersey, additional drone sightings have recently been reported in southern California and Connecticut, according to local media outlets.
Following the drone sightings over New Jersey, the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security held a joint hearing Tuesday to discuss the matter.
Robert W. Wheeler Jr., assistant director of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, was among the officials who were pressed on the drone sightings over New Jersey.
Wheeler said the FBI is investigating the “unexplained sightings.”
“We do not attribute that to an individual or a group yet,” Wheeler said. “We’re investigating, but I don’t have an answer of who’s responsible for that—if one or more people that are responsible for those drone flights.”
The hearing prompted frustration among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
“We should be doing some very urgent intelligence analysis and take them out of the skies, especially if they’re flying over airports or military bases,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said.
The White House says that a review of the reported sightings shows that many of the drones are actually manned aircraft being flown lawfully.
John Kirby, White House national security spokesman, said that there were no reported sightings in any restricted airspace.
“We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” the FBI and DHS said in a joint statement.
The FBI and DHS continue to deploy personnel and technology to investigate the situation to “confirm whether the reported drone flights are actually drones or are instead manned aircraft or otherwise inaccurate sightings,” according to the statement.