After weeks of drone sightings, New Jersey remains on edge

The day after Thanksgiving, Susan and Lorelai Woodruff saw about 10 brightly lit objects banking and turning quickly in the night sky above their home in Elsinboro, in southern New Jersey.

Every night since, they say, the objects have been back, emitting a strange, humming whir and flashing red, green and white.

“I think it’s like an invasion,” said Lorelai Woodruff, 52. “I feel like our privacy is kind of invaded.”

A month after reports of mysterious flying objects began spreading across the state, investigations by federal, state and local agencies into what they are and where they are coming from are ongoing. Many residents, like the Woodruffs, believe the objects are drones and have been left frustrated and perplexed at the lack of answers from authorities.

Emily Ferguson, 49, said a rash of sightings near her home in Mendham, in northern New Jersey, had been the talk of the town, and that her three children had started asking questions about them that she could not answer.

“The kids are all asking, ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘Why do we have to close all of our blinds?’ which is something we never do,” Ferguson said.

Many residents who have seen the purported drones have said that, while they do not feel afraid for their safety, the experiences have left them unsettled and on edge.

“It’s unnerving when you walk out your door, and this is what you see,” said Kieran Kelly, a 55-year-old technology consultant in Morristown, in the northern part of the state.

Jenna B. Keen, a portrait photographer in Elsinboro, said she had seen as many as 15 of the objects in the sky at the same time.

“I don’t feel threatened, but it is weird,” said Keen, 33.

She started a Facebook group Friday night dedicated to tracking the sightings in southern New Jersey. By early afternoon the next day, it had more than 600 members.

“It’s literally growing by the hour,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

Tens of thousands of people curious about the mystery in the skies have taken to social media to swap theories and share videos of the objects. Some people have suggested that they could be extraterrestrial spacecraft, while others have shared links to large-scale drones that they think match observers’ descriptions.

David Whitely, of North Bergen, said he thought misinformation about the sightings had been rampant.

“What’s real and what isn’t?” said Whitely, 35. “Personally, I’m exhausted.”

Michael Ash, a 45-year-old lawyer who lives in Westfield, in northern New Jersey, thinks all the chatter about the purported drones had been mostly proportional to the situation, “because it’s such a widespread phenomenon,” he said.

“I saw three of these things with my own eyes in the span of 20 minutes last night,” Ash added.

Talk of the sightings even made its way onto “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, where comedian Michael Kosta poked fun at the Garden State in a segment on Thursday.

“Don’t worry guys, New Jersey’s on the case,” he cracked.

Ferguson, who has been seeing the objects near her home since late November, was not amused by Kosta’s jokes.

“People are saying a lot of things about New Jersey and it’s just so insulting,” she said. “If anyone else saw this outside of their private property, they would freak out.”

Federal officials have said that there is no evidence that the sightings pose a threat to public safety, or that a majority of them are even drones. Many of the sightings have actually proved to be manned aircraft mistaken as drones, according to officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

But official assurances have done little to quell public concern in New Jersey, and many residents say they feel frustrated by the lack of information from state and federal authorities.

“I think that’s completely unacceptable,” said Ramy Makary, 38, of Howell. “It’s just generating more chaos, and more people are worried.”

Ferguson knows what she’s seen, and she said she felt that officials were “trying to gaslight” her and her neighbors, brushing them aside as cranks or conspiracy theorists.

Lawmakers in New Jersey and other states in the region where sightings have been reported have echoed their constituents’ dissatisfaction with how federal agencies have communicated about the sightings.

Several Republican lawmakers have sharply criticized the Biden administration’s response, describing it as dismissive and lax. In a social media post Friday, President-elect Donald Trump suggested that the federal government was purposefully concealing information.

Democrats have also expressed frustration with federal officials. Speaking to reporters Friday, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said he thought there should be “a lot more transparency” about the sightings.

On Saturday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, where sightings have also been reported, said in a statement that runways at an airfield in New Windsor had been shut down for roughly an hour on Friday because of drone activity nearby.

“This has gone too far,” she said, and called on the Biden administration to send law enforcement officers to New York to help protect residents and infrastructure.

Ferguson said that, when she first heard reports about the sightings, she dismissed them as overblown or overstated. But now that she has seen the objects, the situation has become impossible to ignore.

“In town, everyone is talking about this, and no one has any answers,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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