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.
Here are some relevant bits from the article, bold and in quotes:
“When I confronted Mr. Trump [during our interview], he was very cagey, very cagey…He didn’t tell me shit,” Rogan said Tuesday. “It was basically like neither confirm nor deny.”
“I think he knows something, I [just] don’t think he’s interested,” the former “Fear Factor” host added.
Yeah, I agree, and I thank Joe Rogan for keeping the subject alive. If anyone knows the value of protecting trade secrets, it’s Trump.
But I don’t think he’s keeping UFO secrets because of anything having to do with space aliens. I think he’s keeping secrets about UFOs because he knows that they are top-secret Pentagon weapons.
I guess a central problem is that the people traditionally driving the whole UFO bus have always been those who are convinced that it’s E.T. … Spielberg, Leslie Kean, a whole slew of “ufologists” … there has never been a diversity of thought on this subject.
The national conversation has always been dominated by the E.T. hypothesis. It has never been centered on the terrestrial hypothesis — the idea that the UFOs have been top-secret U.S. tech going all the way back to Kenneth Arnold’s seminal encounter in 1947.
For whatever reason, people can’t accept that concept. But they’re just fine with E.T. traveling trillions of miles from another solar system only to forget how to land, crashing in the desert, or for some godforsaken reason hanging out over U.S. military training ranges and the like.
The point is, people are either fully ensconced in the E.T. hypothesis, or they just dismiss the entire subject as nonsense. There is no middle ground.
Then, you have what appears to be state-sponsored disinformation: former military officials writing books about their alleged first-hand encounters with E.T., etc.
Of course, these claims can never be verified, and that’s the genius of it. It’s always: Well, I could tell you more, but that’s classified.
But then why say anything at all, if you were so concerned about revealing classified information? Why say anything? It makes no sense.
Also, regarding the whole New Jersey drone flap: If there’s anything to it at all, chances are it has something to do with the Pentagon.
Just like all UFO flaps of yore, the sightings will suddenly stop and we’ll never receive any definitive information from the government. People will joke about it, forget about it, and that will be the end of it.
Perhaps it was some sort of military exercise and officials have gathered all the data they need. Meanwhile, people started seeing all sorts of things in the sky that had nothing to do with the initial exercise: planes, hobbyist drones, balloons, etc., etc., which is typical of past UFO flaps. This confuses the media, and journalists invariably pay more attention to these false reports than the hundred or so sightings that actually had some merit.
Is this by design?
Anyway, maybe it was nothing at all. But either way we’ll never know, and that’s how it always is.
So, I agree with Joe Rogan: Trump knows something.
So, interesting article in The Debrief about a recent meeting hosted by the National Science Foundation focusing on advanced aerospace technology.
Reading between the lines, it seems that people are seriously considering the possibility that advanced propulsion systems do exist and that we need policies addressing said advanced propulsion tech.
It would also seem at least possible that people are addressing the likelihood that mankind’s reach has exceeded his grasp, and that this does pose a potential problem. At least, that’s one of my takeaways.
I guess one serious dilemma is that we can’t devise policies if we don’t officially recognize that we have this technology. I mean, if Congress doesn’t have a need to know, how can Congress create policies about these technologies?
Anyway, here is a link to the article … excellent piece by writer Chrissy Newton.
Here are some of the most relevant bits, from my POV, at least, bolded and in quotes:
“Others in attendance included Rhodium Scientific founder Olivia Holzhaus, former fighter pilot and Americans for Safe Aerospace co-founder Ryan Graves, and Jay Stratton, the former Director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), who shared perspectives on government engagement with UAP research.
“Ryan Graves, who characterized the meeting as being “70 percent edge and deep technology and 30 percent UAP,” said he was there primarily to discuss his personal experiences involving the anomalous phenomena his organization promotes awareness of.
“ ‘I was there to talk about my experiences, both as a pilot and as someone who had to interact with these things (UAPs) for a period of time,’ Graves told The Debrief.
“ ‘I had a long career at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, where I was a Senior Technical Fellow and led the Revolutionary Technology organization, focusing on developing and transitioning breakthrough technologies,’ ” says Charles Chase, Co-Founder of UnLAB. “This experience gave me good insight into advanced technologies, military systems, and threats.’ ”
For Chase, the most promising disruptive technologies are those that he says can reduce conflict and its drivers by creating abundance.
“ ‘Falling behind could mean that disruptive technologies are developed without regard for peaceful applications, increasing global instability,’ ” Chase said. ‘Without leadership, the U.S. might lose its ability to shape the ethical use of advanced technologies, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by others.’
“However, government policy plays a critical role in how edge science evolves. Determining what comes first—policy adjustments or technological advancements—remains a crucial part of the equation.
“ ‘Investing in edge science, or what I call frontier science, is essential to maintaining national security, driving economic growth, and giving the U.S the ability to help shape the future by using technological advancements for good,’ ” said Jay Stratton, former director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) and Chief Operating Officer with QuantumFrontier, LLC, in a statement provided to The Debrief.
“Often, policies are created retroactively to manage new developments within culture and society, such as the internet, AI, social media, or nuclear weapons. Ideally, governments would anticipate cultural market trends and scientific and technological advancements to design proactive policies supporting national defense and cultural and economic goals.
“ ‘But the problem with policy is that you can be wrong, right?’ ” Graves says.
“ ‘I expect there’ll be more,’ Graves told The Debrief.
“Indeed, as governments and private technology companies gear up for the new year, a wave of similar edge-science meetings and summits is already on the horizon. Several groundbreaking discussions are scheduled before the end of the year, and even more are slated for 2025.”
So, looking forward to more on this extremely important topic in the near future!
Finally, the media are figuring out that the mystery drones over New Jersey are probably top-secret Pentagon technology, being tested out before it is certified ready for the battlefield.
Here are the most relevant bits, bolded and in quotes:
“ ‘My first guess is these are potentially government programs kept within what’s known as a ‘Special Access Program,’ which is purposely put together to keep even the most cleared people out — it truly is to keep it secret,” said Clint Emerson, a retired Navy SEAL and owner of security company Escape the Wolf.
‘That’s why the government’s like, ‘We don’t know.’ They’re being truthful,’ he said, adding that the circle could be as small as a dozen officials. ‘They don’t even know the program exists.’
Emerson said it’s impossible to know what the drones might be doing — but he suspects the secret is the technology they’re carrying, not the devices themselves.
‘It could be different types of collection capabilities — so, different types of cameras, like high-definition, infrared or thermal,’ he said.
A second payload, for instance, could be hardware that grabs all the cellphone data in a given environment.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has said the drones over his state don’t seem to pose any threat — and experts say it could be the US government testing new tech.
‘How much data can we collect with this? Let’s say we got 10 drones, they fly in a grid, how much cellphone traffic can we pick up? Not actual conversations. But just the signature of millions of cellphones. What can 10 drones pick up going over an area?’
‘That’s a legitimate test,’ he said. ‘They’re not invading your privacy. That’s legitimate data. And that’s a f–king capability.’
And what better place to do that than New Jersey, the country’s most densely populated state.
‘That would be my number one guess: It’s a very closely held program, and they’re doing what they need to do to ensure their technology actually works,’ said Emerson.
‘The beauty of a [special access program] is they’re kinda in their own lawless little world,’ Emerson said. ‘They can go do whatever they want, and they don’t have to tell anybody.’
Kelly McCann, a security expert and former Marine special missions officer who worked for the Office of Naval Research, echoed Emerson’s comments and said he thinks the government is testing out some ‘operational capacity.’ ”
So, applying this line of reasoning to the historical record of UFO sightings and encounters going all the way back to 1952 in the United States, this means virtually all of those episodes were the Pentagon testing, demonstrating, training in the use of top-secret programs.
Everything from those saucers over Washington, D.C., while Harry Truman was president, to those UFOs that disabled nuclear missile launch systems in the 1960s, the giant triangle over the Hudson Valley in the 1980s, the Phoenix Lights in 1997, the other giant triangle witnessed by police officers over rural Illinois in 2000, the Tic Tac in 2004, the flying disc over Chicago O’Hare in 2006, etc., etc. …
It was never E.T.
It was always the Pentagon.
Anyway, thank you New York Post for finally publishing the obvious!
So, the recent episode of mystery drones flying over New Jersey is nothing, well, new; it’s just another page from the long and storied history of the UFO saga in this country, and it all goes back to the Pentagon.
It’s a story that begins with those flying saucers over Washington, D.C., in 1952, and includes that huge triangular thing over the Hudson Valley in the 1980s, the Phoenix lights in 1997 and various and sundry other UFO flaps over the decades.
As crazy as it sounds, all of these episodes have just been the Pentagon flying its top-secret toys … testing, training, psyops, sending not-so-veiled messages to the public and to our adversaries alike.
” ‘A group of Morris County mayors and other local elected officials are demanding answers and action by authorities concerning the multiple sightings of drones in North Jersey in recent weeks.
‘We look at it this way,” they wrote. “Either higher level officials know what’s going on and are not concerned or they are negligent for not apprehending and identifying one of these drones.
‘We strongly request a proactive approach be taken on the half of the residents of New Jersey and Morris County,’ they wrote. ‘These drones have to land at some point somewhere and these offices need to follow them and identify where they are going and who owns them and is operating them.’
Residents ‘pay a fortune for government,’ they wrote, and ‘right now either our government is keeping us in the dark or they are failing to act on taxpayers concerns over these unidentified drones.’ “
To this, I say, the government has been keeping us all in the dark for many decades.
Finally, we have a member of Congress acknowledging something fundamental about the entire UFO saga in this country: That the Pentagon is likely hiding the existence of top-secret propulsion technologies, even from the president and members of Congress.
“At a minimum, publicly available Pentagon information strongly suggests there is incredible aerospace technology being fielded today that the American public, and even most members of Congress, are unaware of.
‘I’m not saying share everything. Maybe there are weapons programs we’re testing that it’s a fair thing we don’t want the American public to know about,” Ms. Mace said.
In a worst-case scenario, Ms. Mace said, individuals or departments within the Pentagon, intelligence community and other corners of the government could be keeping secrets from the White House itself.
‘Are they keeping the president of the United States in the dark?’ she said.”
Anyway, I’ve been saying this for years, and it’s a point of view we might call the “terrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs, and it goes something like this:
The UFOs are not extraterrestrial and they have never been. Instead, the Pentagon has made a series of astonishing propulsion breakthroughs going all the way back to the first important sighting, that of Kenneth Arnold in 1947.
Instead of jumping automatically to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, we should first fully entertain and explore the terrestrial hypothesis. So, for example, the “Tic Tac” object encountered in 2004 by Navy pilots over a U.S. military training range, is, in fact, a U.S. military platform. That’s why it was observed there. Furthermore, the fact that this encounter took place over a training range would suggest that these are not “experimental aircraft,” but operational platforms. I would also propose that the Pentagon has likely developed various top-secret platforms, entirely unknown to the public and developed over the past seven decades or so, thanks to a burgeoning “black budget” that keeps these programs hidden from Congress.
Logically, then, the terrestrial hypothesis would suggest that a whole bizarre inventory of encounters involving U.S. military personnel and civilians alike have always been top-secret Pentagon technologies known only to a small circle with a “need to know.” Everything from those UFOs that disabled nuclear missile launch systems back in the 1960s, to the huge triangular thing observed over the Hudson Valley in the 1980s, the “Phoenix lights” in 1997, another huge triangular thing encountered by police officers in rural Illinois in 2000, the flying disc over Chicago O’Hare in 2006, the Tic Tacs, etc., etc.
Moreover, the performance characteristics of these objects were such that there is one overarching likelihood suggested by this historical record of sightings: The Pentagon has developed exotic and highly unconventional propulsion systems that it has hidden from the public all these years.
Meanwhile, it certainly appears that there has been a disinformation effort to confuse people, and the media, about the whole subject of UFOs, publishing books by former military personnel who claim to have encountered extraterrestrials. It’s a legacy that in my opinion goes back many years and includes The Day After Roswell, published in 1997. (If you are interested, please read my review of The Day After Roswell, which I regard as a masterpiece of disinformation, here, https://emilvenere.com/files/138490884.pdf)
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, this terrestrial hypothesis for UFOs leads to many follow-up questions and concerns, chief among them: Is there a shadow space program that runs parallel to NASA and the Space Force that is far more capable than either of those entities? If so, how far have we gone? Do we have military bases in deep space? Are any of these top-secret platforms nuclear-powered?
At any rate, bravo Rep. Nancy Mace, bravo! Better late to the party than not at all!
Reading this article from CBS News about the most recent UFO report from the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the cynic in me says something isn’t quite right here.
Interesting comments from Ryan Graves. He notes that, although AARO showed the UFO in the “GOFAST” video wasn’t going fast, they never explained what the heck it was. Hmmm …
And, regarding those 21 still-unsolved cases in the report, the AARO director, a brainiac physicist and engineer, says he’s stumped.
Maybe the reason he is stumped is because these are all top-secret Pentagon weapons and AARO doesn’t have a need to know. Even if Dr. Kosloski did know, he wouldn’t be permitted to divulge this because people go to prison for revealing top-secret U.S. weapons to the world at large.
Just saying.
What if the UFOs are all ultra-classified U.S. weapons? No government agency including AARO would be able to reveal this, so isn’t it a bit ridiculous to expect them to?
Like most tabloid fare, this article about veteran Area 51 researcher Joerg Arnu contains very little useful information. Yet, it is important because Arnu expresses his opinion that the base does not harbor extraterrestrial technologies. The article appeared recently in The Sun newspaper.
Area 51 has been central to alien conspiracy theories over the years. It is crucial to unfounded claims that the U.S. government is hiding technologies captured from crashed alien spacecraft. In fact, you could argue that without space aliens at Area 51, the whole connection between UFOs and extraterrestrials falls apart.
If anyone were to detect evidence of E.T. at Area 51, you would think it would have been Arnu, who has dedicated decades to pursuing the truth about what goes on at the base.
Here are some relevant excerpts from The Sun article:
“While Arnu believes the base primarily focuses on military technology – he respects others may have different interpretations.
“He said: ‘Who am I to say that my opinion is the right one?‘
“I think it’s military, but the alien people think there are 21 underground levels of torture facilities for aliens …
“From his analysis of hundreds of satellite images and his visits to the secret site, Arnu believes the government is developing cutting-edge stealth aircraft, advanced drones, and experimental weaponry – that could revolutionise modern warfare.
“Over his years of research, Arnu has observed several indications that cutting-edge military technologies are being developed at Area 51.“
Well, there you have it. The UFOs are still not E.T.
Emil Venere 