‘They’re looking for something’: rumors abound over disturbing drone sightings in New Jersey | New Jersey

Kyle Breese, 36, freelances in insurance and lives in Ocean Township, New Jersey, a sleepy suburb with tree-lined streets not far from beaches. Last Saturday night, with his wife and two children inside their home, he let his aging dog Bruce out in the backyard and looked up.

There, in the sky, was an unmistakable floating object. Not high enough to be a planet or a star, but about the height of an airplane.

“It’s not a plane that’s just hovering there,” he described. “What it looked like, it was so loud it’s hard to see, but like a red light and a white light.”

Breese and his wife said they saw others the day before while driving to dinner. His mother Luann, 68, confirmed she saw the same, white and red lights floating in the night sky.

“To me, they’re looking for something,” Luann said of the drones. “My concern is that we have ammunition bases here in New Jersey.”

The Breese family isn’t alone in noticing the unsettling activities of drones, or some sort of airborne vehicle, popping up across the state. Thousands of people have called local police forces, the FBI and even alerted the Pentagon about relentless swarms of drones that suddenly appeared in New Jersey airspace in the past month.

“The FBI has received tips on more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the past few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated, and the federal government is supporting state and local officials in investigating these reports,” said a joint statement from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, 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 been mum: everything they can see looks like a combination of hobbyist drones, helicopters, planes or stars. But on Neighbors, made by the company behind Ring surveillance cameras, New Jersey residents spam the app — used for crime and safety updates — with videos of floating bullets and suspicious night lights.

Some say they are aliens invading Iranian drones coming from a mothership off the coast in the Atlantic. Maybe top secret weapons testing.

A man near Ocean Township, who said he was free of fire 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 full of rumors about drones.

The consensus is that they were strange at first, but still nothing to worry about. Now most people want answers.

In coastal towns like Asbury Park, a popular vacation destination during the summer months, sightings have become common. Rumors abound among the locals: the drones don’t come out when it rains and they originate from the sea.

“We started seeing them two weeks ago,” said Garrett Openshaw, 24, who works on the maintenance staff at the Asbury Hotel near the waterfront. “Before the news media.”

On a cold night in early December, he went out onto a hotel roof terrace, where folded beach chairs are usually spread out for sunbathers in the warmer months. Staring out into 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, the food and beverage manager at the same hotel who was with Openshaw when they saw the swarm of drones. “It’s hard to tell if they’re just shooting a movie or something else.”

Between debates about UFOs and government secrets, Asbury Park residents also gossip about celebrity sightings in town: a Springsteen biopic starring Jeremy Allen White has been shot on location.

“Watch this,” Openshaw said, flipping through his homemade videos of drones before landing on a photo of him and Allen White from the start.

At Frank’s Deli, a popular eatery and recently filmed location, the staff has been excitedly discussing the theories behind the sightings.

“They’ve been having, like, drone watch parties out on Long Beach Island,” said Danielle Coyle, a server at the diner wearing a green and red Christmas hat. She said some of her colleagues and friends, “men in their 40s” had gone to the shoreline to hunt for drone sightings.

Others in town have more sinister questions.

Over 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, told of seeing 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 other turns the same corner, following it at 30 or 40 second intervals,” she said, narrating her video.

Miller continued, “Then I saw two more and they all turned the same corner. I think there were five or six in all… You heard a hum and they were pretty low too, not even that high up. Maybe 200 or 300 feet.”

Miller said her TikTok and Instagram feeds are filled with similar cell phone videos, rightly pointing out that she can’t tell if some of them are generated by artificial intelligence.

“It’s so hard to know now,” she said. “Videos of them shooting things and I’m like, ‘Is it fake or is it real?’ It’s so easy to fake things now.”

But for Breese, the lurking lights in the sky, overlooking his city, are not only very real, but unsettling.

“I have kids, so it’s weird,” he said. “Are they filming? Or is it some creep with a camera?”