Like many, I’ve been following these mysterious drone sightings in New Jersey and New York. Disclaimer: I’m not a drone expert. However, last September, I bought a hobbyist drone with a 4K camera to help me get started with my vlogging.

Then a week ago, my sister Renee who lives with me, saw some unexplained activity in the backyard here in north Georgia, and when she called me to come outside, I saw it too.

Personal Backyard Sightings

My sister Renee, who lives with me, likes to smoke. She smokes on the back deck outside which is the ‘designated smoking area.’ Because she goes out to smoke often at night, she is more fortunate to see the deer, hear the coyotes, and observe other neighborhood activity. 

Last week around 10:30 pm, she said that she saw a drone. “Is it still there?” “No.” I didn’t think much of it because we occasionally get some planes and helicopters flying through here as we’re just 12 miles east of an air base.

However, the next night, around 10:30-11pm, she was out there smoking and suddenly tapped on the side door. ‘Come look!’

I grabbed a pair of binoculars that I use for ‘dawn and dusk’ birding—the 10×50 ultra-wide ones which are good for low lighting—and scanned the sky. Looking upward past the trees, I saw a squarish object with 4 lights. It was sitting lower than where I would normally see planes or even helicopters flying. At one point, I spotted a plane, which was flying higher than the drone. The drone didn’t move. It sat there for 40 minutes. Most hobbyist drones and commercial drones hover at a max of 30 minutes.

We saw three more sets of lights that appeared to also be drone-like. Two hovered like the first one and the third moved slightly erratically. During this time, we heard no sound from the drones–none of the normal humming. Only the plane that passed by earlier made a sound.

Renee began telling me about some white lights she had seen, but interrupted herself. “Wait… there’s another one! Did you see it?” “No,” I said. As we continued talking though, a few minutes later, I saw a large white ball of light move very fast, like a super-fast smooth glide across the year, and disappear among the trees. It was a good-sized bright white sphere with a trail of light behind it. 

The drones were intriguing, but the white sphere was unsettling. After 40 minutes, with the first drone still not moving, we left and went indoors.

Initial Hobbyist View: Where’s Remote ID?

Since 2021, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) requires that all drones flown in the US must have Remote ID. Remote ID enables the FAA to identify unauthorized or suspicious drone activity.

When I got my drone, it came with built-in Remote ID. I had to then register the drone with the FAA–providing name, address, and Remote ID.

My hobby drone, sitting on the back deck

Whenever you fly your drone, it transmits its unique Remote ID. The FAA can identify the drone from this transmission and match it to the Remote IDs in its database and identify the owner and registrant. If you’re caught flying your drone illegally, fines can start at $27,000.

Considerations for Most Drones: Commercial and Hobbyists

What if someone has an older drone? They can buy a Remote ID module to attach to the drone so that it’s FAA-compliant.

Does this mean that every single drone flown in the US has a Remote ID? No, there are still some drones out there that don’t have Remote ID. However, these drones can fly only within a FRIA (FAA-Recognized Identification Area). Currently, there are over 2400 FRIAs, but they’re very small.

For scale, here’s an example of a FRIA:

The pilot and the drone must operate within the boundaries of this area. Now if you look at the red dots on this map, there’s a lot of space–most spaces actually–where you can’t fly without Remote ID.

Are all drones required to be flown within Visual Line Of Sight (VLOS)? Yes, all drones must be flown within the pilot’s visual line of sight, unless the pilot has special permission (a BVLOS waiver) from the FAA. This means the pilot must be able to see the drone without any visual aids (other than corrective lenses). As a result, many drones can be flown only within 1500 feet of the operator.

If there’s a need to monitor these drones, it can be done.

There are products available for all these tools, but they require special licensing.

You can use radar to send out a signal and use the reflection / bounce back from the object to identify its direction and position. You can use these at night and you can identify hundreds of targets long-range at the same time.

You can use radio frequency analysers to detect radio communication between the drone and the control–identifying the make and model, and in some cases, even the MAC address of the drone and controller.

There are cameras that sense optically, collecting light at a range of wavelengths as well as thermal radiation. There are microphones that collect the sound of the drone and can calculate its direction (although these are usually very limited in range).

Can drones be jammed?

There are handheld devices that can direct a large amount of RF energy toward the drone and jam the radio frequency. It can force the drone to land at its current location, send it to its target, send it off in some random direction or make it fall to the ground.

Another option is to spoof the GPS sending a new signal to the drone, causing the drone to think it’s in a different location.

There are also high power microwave devices that use EMP, but these would cause a lot of disruptions with other electronics in the area.

Drones can also be destroyed with high energy lasers, although this could result in collateral damage or injuring people’s eyes–which is unfortunate, because it would make for an awesome light show.

Whose Drones Are These?

Hobbyists

There are over one million legal drones registered in the US. Some say that the increase in hobbyist drone users is making drones more visible in the sky. This is nonsense and it’s a smoke screen to cover up something else that is going on.

Hobbyists fly drones to capture aerial views or to perform stunts. There’s no reason to fly your drone at night when you can’t see much. Also, there are too many deterrents here for the hobbyist: easy drone identification (traced from the transmission and back to the registrant), having your drone jammed or shot down, and very high fines.

Also, given the number of drone sightings, it would also be implausible for thousands of hobbyists to organize themselves in such a way and beyond the eye of social media–and just saying, I never got a memo.

There might be a few random hobbyists or copy-cats who now want to send their drone up to get closer to these mysterious drones, but very few will do this. The risks are too high for hobbyists.

Foreign Countries

If these are foreign drones, then FAA requirements don’t come into play; the question becomes one of capacity. Are there drones capable of being launched and controlled outside the borders of the US? If the capability is there, consider that the ‘footprint’ for supporting the infrastructure for that would be quite large and noticeable. If these were foreign drones appearing on US military bases, they would be easily identified as ‘not ours’ and destroyed.

US Government

The simplest explanation–and the most likely–is that it’s the US government. Consider that:

The public was first told that the government didn’t know what it was, but that we had nothing to worry about.

These drones continue to fly around military bases and sites of nuclear interest without having been jammed or shot down.

The public has been told that no one is allowed to shoot them down and that only someone authorized by the government can recover the drone wreckage if one crashes or lands.

Some say that the drones are being used to search for missing nuclear material that is believed to the now in the US. However, how would this explain the large number of drones that have been spotted in the UK and Germany as well?

One last question I have and this is what I find most unsettling: Why is it that whenever these have drones started appearing, there are sometimes sightings of mysterious spheres or orbs? What are these things? What is the connection between the drones and the orbs? Are the drones deployed in reponse to the orbs?