Tag: new jersey

White House Clarifies ‘Dronegate’: New Jersey UAPs Authorized By FAA For “Research Purposes”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt provided much-needed transparency regarding the “dronegate” incident that sparked nationwide concerns over potential threats from China and Russia.

In a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Leavitt said the drones spotted over New Jersey and New York in December had been authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration for “research purposes.” 

“An update on the New Jersey drones. After research and study, the drones flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons. Many of these drones are hobbyist and recreational drones that enjoy flying drones,” Leavitt said during her press conference. 

She concluded on the drone subject: “This was not the enemy.” 

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New Jersey Teachers No Longer Required to Pass Basic Literacy Test

Aspiring teachers in New Jersey are no longer required to pass a basic skills in order to be certified.

New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy passed Act 1669 as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June to address a teacher shortage, Read Lion reports. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a basic skills test for reading, writing, and math that is administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education.

“We need more teachers,” Democratic Sen. Jim Beach, who sponsored the bill, said in May 2024 when the chamber cleared the bill in a 34-2 vote. “This is the best way to get them.”

Just a few months prior, Murphy also signed a similar bill into law that established an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement. According to Read Lion, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), a teachers union, was a driving force behind the bill and called the testing requirement “an unnecessary barrier to entering the profession.” NJEA is associated with the National Education Association (NEA).

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Drones ‘the size of buses’ are still invading New Jersey… as experts reveal why crisis has gone silent

While official reports of eerie drone-like UFOs dropped over the holidays, New Jersey residents are still coming forward with bizarre encounters.

Two witnesses in Manalapan Township, for example, videotaped a bus-sized, 25- to 50-foot-long black triangle UFO that they saw ‘pull off a high g [force] maneuver over a residential area’ just days before Christmas.

The sighting, which lasted at least one minute, ended with the object zooming ‘in the general direction of McGuire [Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst]’ — matching a persistent pattern of ‘drone’ UFO incursions over US bases in recent years.

Another New Jersey skywatcher recorded what they described as a classic ‘flying saucer’ with an ‘aura or haze around object’ just three miles off the coast of Atlantic City.

And still more Garden State witnesses now say they saw as many as 20 to 30 drones just this Wednesday night, which ‘kind of hovered and all looked like miniature aircraft,’ in an account posted to Facebook. ‘Very disconcerting for sure,’ one witness said.

Some experts attribute the drop in official reports to law enforcement to expanded drone flight bans by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) across the tristate area.

But others, including former chief of the FBI‘s counter-drone unit Rob D’Amico, believe most of the sightings were errors and ‘hysteria’ to begin with, suggesting that the decline might be nothing more than a case of the ‘mystery drone’ fever breaking. 

‘I truly think that 90 percent of these sightings are manned aircraft,’ D’Amico said. ‘People have never looked up in the sky before to notice how crowded it is.’

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Drones Run Amok

Drones, drones, everywhere drones. For a few weeks, clusters of drones of unknown provenance were recently seen flying in the skies above New Jersey. Local, state, and federal authorities claimed that they did not know whose drones they were. The expression “baseless conspiracy theory” saw an uptick in usage once again as some in the media scoffed at the proliferating hypotheses about what was going on. Incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump, opined that the machines should be shot down, but the Joe Biden administration did not agree, lending significant support to the simplest hypothesis of them all: that the drones have been used by the government itself for whatever its purposes may be. Having once recognized this very real possibility, Trump cryptically intoned, “Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don’t want to tell the people.”

State officials, spurred by their constituents, got to work attempting to find ways to halt the drones overhead, suggesting that, if the executive branch would not itself prevent certain unnameable rogue government departments from violating the Posse Comitatus Act, then at least by asserting the sub-federal authority enjoyed by states, it would be possible to stop whoever was behind whatever the operation may have been. New Jersey is not Nordstream, which U.S. citizens were quite willing to forget about and pretend never happened, despite in all likelihood having paid for the terrorist act of sabotage.

On December 19, 2024, the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) issued a one-month ban on the flying of UAVs over swaths of New Jersey, declaring the areas to be “national defense airspace,” and oddly claiming that “deadly force” could be deployed in response to violations of the ban. It is unclear what the use of “deadly force” against inanimate machines might mean, but it ominously suggests that the persons behind the drones might be subject to summary execution. Or perhaps the reference to “deadly force” was just part of a cover story composed in order to dispel the most plausible available hypothesis, undoubtedly made even more popular by Trump’s pronouncement that, “The government knows what is happening.” Having himself been the object of attempted assassinations by figures with rather bizarre back stories and curious connections, Trump understandably canceled a planned trip to New Jersey. The terrifying truth is that, with the advent of clusters of weaponized drones the size of insects, there really is nowhere and no way to hide from a determined killer with access to the latest and greatest lethal technologies developed by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—fully funded by U.S. taxpayers).

Regardless of who may have launched the mysterious drones, the implication for U.S. citizens is that at long last they have been subjected to the specter of insecurity and danger posed by the hovering overhead of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which may or may not bear lethal payloads, and which may or may not be monitoring the movements of specific targets, whose names may or may not be found on government “kill don’t capture” lists.

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New Jersey Mom Targeted by Military and Homeland Security for Questioning LGBTQ+ Poster at Elementary School

Within the spectrum of overreactions, few can rival what unfolded in New Jersey when Angela Reading, a mother and former school board member, dared to question a poster at her daughter’s elementary school.

The poster, innocuously crafted during a “Week of Respect” event, celebrated “LGBTQ+” themes, including the term “polysexuality.”

That’s a term describing an attraction to multiple genders — though the seven-year-olds likely gleaned little understanding of this.

What they did glean, however, was enough for Reading’s daughter to come home curious, which set off a chain reaction of Facebook posts, military involvement, and, yes, counter-terrorism reports.

Angela Reading’s ordeal is a cautionary tale of how questioning the wisdom of mixing elementary school art projects with complex identity politics can snowball into government surveillance, a federal lawsuit, and a First Amendment debate that feels like it was pulled from the pages of Orwell.

The Poster That Launched a Thousand Emails

It all started with a simple question. During the North Hanover Township school’s celebration of acceptance and respect, students created posters featuring LGBTQ+ flags and terms, one of which included the word “polysexual.” When Reading’s daughter innocently asked what it meant, Reading did what many parents might: she turned to Facebook to vent her frustrations.

Describing the content as “inappropriate for young children,” Reading argued that elementary school wasn’t the place for discussions about sexuality. Her post, written as a private citizen, quickly gained traction. And like clockwork, the backlash began.

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Police Data: N.J. Drone Sightings Concentrated Along Airport Flight Paths

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a UFO! It’s an Iranian mothership! It’s a radiation probe! Or maybe it’s really just a plane. The wave of alleged noctural drone sightings in New Jersey has led to some wild theories about what the mysterious lights in the sky could be.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R–N.J.) claimed that the drones were coming from an Iranian “mothership” in the Atlantic Ocean, then retracted his claim after the Pentagon denied it. (The Iranian navy does have a sort of aircraft carrier for drones—and publicly-available satellite imagery shows that it’s still sitting in the Persian Gulf.) The mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, claimed the drones were part of a secret search operation for missing radioactive material, although the materials have already been recovered. Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) even asked whether it could be aliens from outer space.

But there might be a simpler explanation. Gov. Phil Murphy has suggested that at least some of the sightings were just normal air traffic misidentified by over-eager drone spotters. Police documents obtained by Reason under the New Jersey Open Public Records Act back up that theory. A map of drone reports produced by the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office shows a dense concentration of sightings along the flight path of airliners leaving New York City.

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Drone Detection System Used in Ukraine War May Be Deployed to East Coast

The state-of-the-art Robin Radar System, currently being used in the Ukraine war to detect drones, may soon be deployed to investigate the perplexing mystery drone sightings throughout the East Coast.

ABC News reports that to help crack the enigma of mystery drones spotted all around New England, officials have requested the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy the cutting-edge Robin Radar System.

Developed by Robin Radar USA, the drone detection radar system has its roots in technology designed to detect flocks of birds near airports to prevent collisions with aircraft. Since 2014, the company has focused on creating drone-detecting technology that not only locates drones but also classifies small moving objects, distinguishing between drones, rotary, fixed-wing, and even filtering out birds or large insects.

Kris Brost, general director of Robin Radar USA, explained that the radar works by bouncing radio waves off objects, tracking their flying patterns in real-time, and beaming data back to a laptop computer with a 360-degree, 3D view of the airspace. The system has a range of about 3.1 miles and can detect objects flying at altitudes of up to two miles.

One of the key advantages of the Robin Radar System is its lightweight and mobile nature, allowing it to be installed on police cruisers or other vehicles for use on the move. While the system cannot determine if a drone has been weaponized, it can help investigators track the drone’s movements and potentially obtain its remote identification, even if operators attempt to modify their drones to avoid detection.

The Robin Radar System has already proven its worth on the battlefield in Ukraine, aiding Ukrainian military forces in locating incoming Russian weaponized drones. Brost noted that the war in Ukraine was a turning point for the company, highlighting the compelling needs and valuable data collected from the environment.

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FAA Restricting Flight Areas …Will Shoot Them Down If Necessary

The federal government is drawing a line in the sand — or, more accurately, the air — when it comes to the mysterious drones zooming around New Jersey … restricting the areas where they can fly and promising deadly force to those presenting a threat.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced the news this week … putting the ban into effect beginning Wednesday and running through at least January 17, 2025.

According to the new rules, drones are restricted from flying within a nautical mile of specified airspace outlined in the department’s official Notice to Airmen.

These include areas around Jersey City, Elizabeth, Camden, North and South Brunswick and many more highly populated areas of NJ.

We reached out to the FAA … and they say they published “22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure” at the behest of their federal security partners.

According to the FAA, those who violate this airspace could have their drones intercepted and operators themselves could be detained and interviewed.

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Biden’s Three Weasel Circus Enables Drone Chaos

The three most vacuous and misleading personalities of the Biden Team are now mad at the American People for not accepting their explanations of what is going on in the National Airspace System (NAS).

When Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and John Kirby, the Spokesman for the National Security Council get together, at best, nothing happens – or worse, nothing good happens.

There are other minions involved in this public affairs fiasco beyond these three, but these three are the poster children for U.S. Government mis, dis, and mal information.

After the debacle of the Chinese Spy Balloon in 2023 they have an enormous credibility gap and are only resurrecting this lack of trust with the current drone chaos.

The discombobulated explanations coming out of these three changes almost hourly.  “Give states the power to shoot down drones”, It’s the FAA’s fault for recent flight rule changes, Nothing indicates a Public Safety Risk, and there is no Iranian involvement.  

Yet from December 2023 over Virginia Beach to the United Kingdom to multiple regions and military installations in the U.S. the drone swarms continue.

Biden Team has failed to establish clear roles and missions for domestic counter-drone operations

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Why Is The Media Being So Quiet About The Radioactive Material That Has Gone Missing In New Jersey?

Something extremely strange has been happening in New Jersey, but the mainstream media has been eerily quiet about some of the most important threads of this story.  It turns out that an “air restriction alert” banned flights over Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway, New Jersey for “special security reasons” from November 21st through December 26th.

Many people don’t realize this, but counter-terrorism drones have been getting tested at Picatinny for years.  In addition, we have learned that radioactive material was reported missing in New Jersey in early December.  The following comes directly from the official website of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission…

AGREEMENT STATE REPORT – SOURCE LOST IN TRANSIT

The following information was provided by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) via email:

“The licensee reported to NJDEP on December 3, 2024, that a Ge-68 pin source that they sent for disposal has been lost in transit on December 2, 2024. The source is a Eckert & Ziegler model HEGL-0132, with current approximate activity of 0.267 mCi. The shipping container arrived at its destination damaged and empty. The licensee has filed a claim with the shipper. If the source is not located within the 30 days, the licensee will follow-up with a full written report to include root cause(s) and corrective actions.

“This event is reportable under 10 CFR 20.2201(a)(1)(ii).”

New Jersey Event Report ID number: To be determined

THIS MATERIAL EVENT CONTAINS A ‘Less than Cat 3’ LEVEL OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL

The big corporate news sources in the United States are saying very little about this.

But others are reporting about this incident.  For example, the following comes from a British news source…

A piece of medical equipment used for cancer scans was shipped from the Nazha Cancer Center in Newfield on December 2 for disposal, but the ‘shipping container arrived at its destination damaged and empty.’

The device, known as a ‘pin source,’ contained a small amount of Germanium-68 (Ge-68) that is used to calibrate a medical scanner’s accuracy. If handled without proper gear, it can cause radiation poisoning.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an alert for the missing shipment deemed ‘less than a Category 3,’ meaning it could cause permanent injury if mishandled.

A search for this radioactive material is being conducted.

In fact, Belleville Mayor Michael Melham has confirmed that New Jersey state police have issued an alert about the radioactive material that is missing.

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