No, an Iranian ‘Mothership’ Isn’t Attacking New Jersey With UFOs
Something weird is going on in New Jersey, and it’s not just the swamp gas. Residents across the state have been calling in nighttime sightings of unidentified flying objects for the past month, including over military bases and President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course. Neither local police nor the feds can explain what is going on—but Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R–N.J.) believes he has the answer.
“Iran launched a mothership, probably about a month ago, that contains these drones. It’s off the east coast of America,” the congressman told Fox News on Wednesday, citing “sources who can’t reveal who they are.” Then he hedged his bets, saying that the “drones should be shot down, whether it was some crazy hobbyist that we can’t imagine, or whether it is Iran, and I think it very possibly could be.”
The U.S. military denied that Van Drew’s story was, in fact, very possible. Asked about the Iranian mothership theory, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh seemed almost annoyed to have to answer the question. “There is not any truth to that. There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” she told reporters.
The fact that Van Drew accused Iran—rather than China, which has actually deployed spy balloons over American airspace—may say more about the current political moment than what his “sources” know. With the fall of the Syrian government, some Israeli officials and their supporters in Washington say that the time is ripe for war with Iran.
This mix of hawkish national security panic and strange sightings in the sky is nothing new. The UFO fever of the 1940s and 1950s was always tied to Cold War paranoia; U.S. government coverups of experimental military aircraft led people to believe that the unexplained flying machines they saw were alien visitors. Van Drew is working in the opposite direction: Instead of trying to explain military technology with paranormal theory, he started with an unexplained phenomenon and turned it into a military issue.
And he isn’t the only one. “We know nothing. PERIOD. To state that there is no known or credible threat is incredibly misleading,” state Rep. Dawn Fantasia (R–Sussex) wrote on social media after a Wednesday meeting between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and state officials. “At this point, I believe military intervention is the only path forward. There will be no answers in the absence of proactivity.”
Fantasia’s own description of the drone threat, however, raises questions about how real it is in the first place. “Current radio frequencies do not pick up drone signals,” she claimed. (Fantasia was probably referring to Remote ID, the “digital license plate” that the Federal Aviation Administration requires civilian drones to broadcast.) And when the New Jersey State Police sent a helicopter to investigate a drone sighting over
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