Well, per this article in the Asbury Park Press today (Jan. 29, 2025), the Trump administration has revealed those mystery drones over New Jersey had been authorized by the FAA for “research and various other reasons …”
Top secret Pentagon research and development involving testing and training for classified technologies.
This would explain why the FAA didn’t tell anyone the flights were authorized for research: perhaps the agency wasn’t permitted to divulge this because it was classified by the Pentagon.
Maybe that’s not what it was, but statements from the Trump administration seem to indicate that some of the flights were initially for some sort of official and authorized purpose.
Here are some of the most relevant bits from the Asbury Park Press article, bold and in brackets:
[That statement raised numerous questions about why the FAA did not tell the FBI and law enforcement officers that the flights had been authorized by them, or why the FAA did not acknowledge that they had authorized the drone flights.
“The drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by FAA for research and various other reasons … this was not the enemy,” Trump said in a written statement read by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at the first press briefing of the new administration.
There was no further explanation as to what “research and various other reasons” the FAA had authorized.
When asked why the FAA never revealed it authorized the drones to fly for research purposes, FAA spokesman Christopher Mullooly on Tuesday referred the matter to the White House for its official statement. He added for background that the FAA’s role is to ensure drones operate safely within the broader National Airspace System and said it is legal to operate drones under 400 feet while complying with all rules, including avoiding restricted airspace and other aircraft.]
So, there you have it.
Yet further evidence that the UFOs we’ve been seeing for decades stem from Pentagon R&D, not E.T.
[“I have a story I can tell now about an off-the-record conversation I once had with the late Jimmy Carter, about one of the great human controversies: UFOs.
“This is totally off-the-record, I assured Mr. Carter. ‘But you were president for four years. You had access to all the national security intelligence. Could these people be right? Mr. President, is there anything we should know?’ “
… The president chuckled and replied, ‘No. But remember,’ he added, ‘a UFO is simply something we haven’t identified. There are dozens of unexplained incursions of our airspace every year. They’re usually some experiment. You’d be surprised,” he said, “how often the Navy doesn’t know what the Air Force is up to, and so forth.’
” ‘ So based on what you’ve seen,” I ventured, “you have no reason to think there’s life… out there?’ “
” ‘I don’t know that,” Mr. Carter gently corrected me. “But if there is, it has nothing to do with UFOs. If there’s some other civilization out there, I doubt they’d send big, bulky airships. They’d probably just keep watch and leave us alone.’ “]
Sounds like sage wisdom, and I offer it as further evidence supporting the “terrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs: that is, the UFOs are top-secret Pentagon tech, not E.T.
And Re: The Navy not always being aware of what the Air Force is doing, remember the “tic tac”, where, in 2004, U.S. Navy pilots encountered a flying object exhibiting extraordinary performance characteristics over a military training range?
Reading all these articles about Jimmy Carter’s fascinating 1969 UFO encounter reminds me of another public figure who had a similar, as-yet unexplained encounter: John Lennon.
I would argue that Carter’s experience wasn’t any sort of mistaken identity with known objects. Instead, for whatever reason, perhaps he was being surveilled by the federal government. I would further argue that this object was some sort of classified flying platform.
In the John Lennon example, in 1974, the rock star insisted that he and his partner saw what can only be described as the classic flying saucer hovering just outside their New York City apartment. He later drew a sketch of what they both saw.
Here is my previous post about Lennon’s encounter, as well as an excellent link regarding the whole bizarre event.
In Carter’s case, I think we can dispense with the usual speculations that he saw a planet, star or some other prosaic thing. Considering his education and background, he clearly knew the difference.
And in Lennon’s case, we know he was considered a subversive, maybe even an enemy of the state, by certain federal intelligence types.
So, I propose both of these men were being spied upon by our own government.
The spying platform was a top-secret flying craft equipped with an extraordinary propulsion technology that remains secret to this day.
Here is Lennon’s description of what happened, bold and in brackets, from the article cited above in the culture site ultimateclassicrock.com.
[“I was lying naked on my bed, when I had this urge,” Lennon said in a conversation with Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. “So I went to the window, just dreaming around in my usual poetic frame of mind. … There, as I turned my head, hovering over the next building, no more than 100 feet away was this thing with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on top.”
His girlfriend, May Pang, said: “As I walked out onto the terrace,” she said, “my eye caught this large, circular object coming towards us. It was shaped like a flattened cone, and on top was a large, brilliant red light, not pulsating as on any of the aircraft we’d see heading for a landing at Newark Airport.”]
So, I propose this was likely just Uncle Sam, running electronic surveillance on Lennon, who was deemed a socialist threat, just as we spied on Martin Luther King Jr. and numerous public figures.
This conspiracy theory fits nicely with my overall hypothesis that the UFOs have never been extraterrestrial. They’ve always been Uncle Sam. They were Uncle Sam back in 1947 when Kenneth Arnold spotted a squadron of UFOs near Mount Rainier; during the flying saucer scare of 1952 over Washington, D.C., when, I speculate, President Harry Truman ordered a demonstration of these weapons much as he had arranged a similar demonstration of the flying wing in 1949, when the aircraft flew low over the capital; during the 1960s when startled pilots were reporting UFOs after observing flights of the top secret U-2 and SR-71; also during the 1960s at U.S. nuclear missile facilities, when, I propose, the military was testing a top-secret anti-missile technology capable of temporarily disabling the rocket launch systems; in the 1980s over the Hudson Valley when bystanders including police officers saw a huge triangular thing floating overhead; in Belgium when numerous credible witnesses saw the same sort of craft; a similar thing over Phoenix, Ariz., in 1997; likewise, a giant delta-shaped thing observed by a raft of cops in 2000 over rural Illinois; the “Tic Tac” encountered by U.S. Navy pilots in 2004; the flying disc over Chicago O’Hare in 2006, when employees saw a stealthy flying saucer hovering overhead before it abruptly shot straight up at high speed, punching a hole in the cloud cover that lingered afterward; etc., etc.
So, unless we think these were all space aliens, it certainly appears that based on witness testimony the Pentagon has achieved a propulsion breakthrough. Call it antigravity, if you like. I would argue that when you consider the pattern of UFO encounters going all the way back to the immediate postwar period, the U.S. has had some form of field propulsion technology either in development or in operation since that time. If this is true, then these systems have been evolving completely in the dark for more than 70 years.
Let’s call this idea the terrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, as opposed to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which has forever dominated our whole national conversation about the phenomenon.
At any rate, this terrestrial hypothesis, as crazy as it sounds, makes a lot more sense than space aliens traveling trillions of miles from another solar system, then forgetting how to land, crashing in the desert in the proximity of U.S. military research and development facilities, or inexplicably hanging out over U.S. military training ranges and the like.
As to why the Pentagon would sometimes be flying these weapons over populated areas, perhaps it’s real-world training, a “living lab” to perfect tactics and to study how well they perform against state-of-the-art, white-world technologies like F-16s. There have been examples of military training exercises taking place over populated areas. This excellent article in The War Zone documents one such exercise over Los Angeles: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/38753/those-mysterious-gray-helicopters-were-landing-on-multiple-downtown-la-rooftops-last-night
Anyway, for what it’s worth, this is my contribution to the various ruminations about Jimmy Carter’s curious UFO encounter.
Emil Venere 