A private aerial contractor has finally fessed up to being the mastermind behind the bizarre drone swarms that had New Jersey residents looking to the skies in late 2024 with equal parts awe and alarm.
Turns out, those mysterious lights buzzing over neighborhoods weren’t UFOs or some shadowy government plot, but rather a contractor’s manned aerial craft testing its chops over the Garden State during November and December of 2024, as revealed at a military summit in 2025, as Fox News reports.
Let’s rewind to November 13, 2024, when the first sightings kicked off over Picatinny Arsenal Army base in Morris County, sending locals into a tailspin of speculation.
Hundreds of these drones—or so they appeared—zipped through the night skies for weeks until mid-December, fueling mass hysteria and every conspiracy theory from alien invasions to secret military ops.
Who could blame residents for wondering? After all, the eerie quiet and odd movements of these crafts didn’t exactly scream “hobbyist pilot having a lark.”
Now, fast forward to August 2025, when this unnamed contractor dropped the bombshell at the Army’s UAS and Launched Effects Summit held at Fort Rucker, Alabama, admitting their role in the whole fiasco.
During the summit, the company even rolled out their 20-foot aerial craft for a live demo, showing off its four-winged design and peculiar flight patterns that likely spooked more than a few onlookers back in New Jersey.
They claimed the flights were simply exercises to “test out their capabilities,” a convenient explanation that raises eyebrows when you consider they weren’t obligated to inform the public due to a government contract.
Sure, national security matters, but shouldn’t taxpayers get a heads-up before their skies turn into a sci-fi movie set?
“You remember that big UFO scare in New Jersey last year? Well, that was us,” an employee of the contractor reportedly quipped, as cited by The New York Post.
That’s a cute way to shrug off months of public panic, but it doesn’t quite erase the unease of folks who watched these crafts vanish mid-flight, a trick one observer described with, “When it turned, you almost completely [lost] sight of it,” according to The New York Post.
While the contractor may chuckle at the “UFO” label, the lack of transparency here smells like the kind of bureaucratic sidestepping that fuels distrust in government oversight.
Adding to the murkiness, the summit at Fort Rucker required strict approval for all demos, including a ban on crafts with Chinese-made parts, and attendees noted that such operations would “definitely have to be cleared” by someone in charge, per The New York Post.
Yet, earlier in 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration under the Trump administration tossed out a red herring, claiming the drones were just hobbyists and recreational pilots—a narrative that clearly didn’t hold up.
With the Army and Fort Rucker staying mum on inquiries from Fox News Digital, it’s hard not to wonder who’s really calling the shots when private contractors can buzz over suburbs without so much as a public memo, leaving Americans to grapple with more questions than answers about what’s flying above their heads.
