New Jersey Senator Andy Kim posted videos of what he described as multiple unidentified drones flying over Hunterdon County, New Jersey, on Thursday night, December 12, after he headed out with local police to investigate the widespread sightings.Storyful could not independently verify if the objects in Kim’s footage are drones or other kinds of aircraft.Kim posted four videos, with each showing two or more lights moving across the night sky.Some lights that moved low over a tree line gave off a “solid white light” while “others flashed of red and green,” and some of the unidentified objects appeared to be “moving in small clusters of 2-4,” Kim
said. “We clearly saw several that would move horizontally and then immediately switch back in the opposite direction in maneuvers that planes can’t do,” he added.Kim said he and police officers used a flight tracker app to help them distinguish drones from airplanes, and “often saw about 5-7 lights at a time that were low and not associated with aircraft we could see on the tracker app.”Police told Kim that they had used helicopters to try to get closer to the objects, but said “the drones would turn off the lights and go dark if approached.”Earlier on Thursday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a
joint statement saying they had “no evidence” that the drone sightings “pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.” They said they were working closely with New Jersey State Police to determine “whether the reported drone flights are actually drones or are instead manned aircraft or otherwise inaccurate sightings.”Kim expressed frustration over the lack of information about the drones from either federal authorities or the military.“This has gone on for weeks. It’s hard to understand how with the technology we have we aren’t able to track these devices to determine origin and this makes me much more concerned about our capabilities more broadly when it comes to drone detection and counter-measures,” he said.The Hunterdon County Sheriff’s Office on December 6
asked people to report drone sightings to the FBI. Credit: Andy Kim via Storyful