kyle Breese, 36, works remotely in insurance and lives in Ocean Township, New Jersey, a quiet suburb with tree-covered streets, not far from the beaches. Last Saturday night, with his wife and two children inside their home, he let his elderly dog Bruce out into the backyard and then looked up.
There, in the sky, was an unmistakable floating object. Not high enough to be a planet or star, but about the elevation of an airplane.
“It’s not a plane that’s just floating there,” he described. “What it looked like was so high it was hard to see, but it was like a red light and a white light.”
Breese and his wife said they saw other people the day before while driving to dinner. His mother Luann, 68, confirmed seeing the same thing: white and red lights floating steadily in the night sky.
“To me they’re looking for something,” Luann said of the drones. “My concern is that we have munitions bases here in New Jersey.”
The Breese family is not the only one noticing the disturbing activities of drones or some type of aerial vehicles appearing around the state. Thousands of people have been calling local law enforcement, the FBI, and even alerting the Pentagon about relentless flocks of drones that have suddenly appeared in New Jersey airspace over the past month.
“The FBI has received tips on more than 5,000 drone sightings reported in recent weeks with approximately 100 tips generated, and the federal government is supporting state and local officials in investigating these reports,” a joint FBI statement said. , Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We have sent advanced detection technology to the region. And we have sent trained visual observers.”
So far, the authorities have remained silent: everything they can see seems to be a combination of drones, helicopters, planes or stars. But in Neighbors, created by the company behind Ring surveillance cameras, New Jersey residents spam the app (used for crime and safety updates) with videos of floating orbs and suspicious night lights.
Some say they are aliens, invading Iranian drones, emanating from a mothership off the Atlantic coast. Maybe top secret weapons testing.
A man near Ocean Township who said he was an off-duty firefighter and did not want to be identified told The Guardian: “I heard it was Al Qaeda.”
Whatever they are, citizens of the Garden State, known for its legendary rock stars Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, are abuzz with drone rumors.
The consensus is that they were strangers at first, but there’s nothing to worry about. Now, most people want answers.
In coastal towns like Asbury Park, a popular vacation destination in the summer months, sightings have become common. Rumors abound among locals: the drones don’t come out when it rains and they come from the ocean.
“We started seeing them two weeks ago,” said Garrett Openshaw, 24, who works as a handyman at the Asbury Hotel near the boardwalk. “In front of the media.”
On a cold night in early December, he went out to the hotel’s rooftop, where folding beach chairs are usually set up for sunbathers in the warmer months. Looking out over the open ocean, he saw the unmistakable red, green and white lights of what he remembers were at least 12 sedan-sized drones flying in unison.
“There’s always something going on in this city,” said Collin Lynch, 26, a food and beverage supervisor at the same hotel, who was with Openshaw when they saw the swarm of drones. “It’s hard to tell if they’re just filming a movie or something more.”
Amid debates about UFOs and government secrets, Asbury Park residents are also gossiping about celebrity sightings in town: A Springsteen biopic has been filming, starring Jeremy Allen White.
“Look at this,” Openshaw said, switching between his home drone videos before landing on a photo of him and Allen White from the beginning.
At Frank’s Deli, a popular restaurant and recent filming location for the film, the staff has been excitedly discussing the theories behind the sightings.
“They’ve been having drone viewing parties on Long Beach Island,” said Danielle Coyle, a waitress at the restaurant wearing a green and red Christmas hat. He said some of his co-workers and friends, “men in their 40s,” had gone to the coastal island in search of drone sightings.
Others in the city have more sinister questions.
At Kim Marie’s, a local Irish bar with low wooden ceilings a block from the boardwalk, people had opinions about the drones. Cassie Miller, 26, said she saw two drones in nearby Monroe, where she lives, and showed a video she captured of the encounter.
“We see two: one is closer and the other is further away, and then the second turns exactly the same corner, as if following it, 30 or 40 seconds apart,” he said when narrating his video.
Miller continued: “Then I saw two more and they all turned the same corner. I think there were five or six in total… You heard a humming noise and they were pretty low too, not even that high. Maybe 200 or 300 feet.”
Miller said his TikTok and Instagram accounts are filled with similar cellphone videos and rightly noted that he can’t say whether some of them are generated by artificial intelligence.
“It’s very difficult to know now,” he said. “There’s videos of them shooting things and I’m like, ‘Is that fake or really real?’ Now it is very easy to fake things.”
But for Breese, the lights lurking in the sky, overlooking his city, are not only very real, but also unnerving.
“I have kids, so it’s weird,” she said. “Are they filming? Or is it some idiot with a camera?