(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Forget about spy balloons. The Pentagon apparently can’t prevent swarms of drones from flying over its own U.S. bases.
The Wall Street Journal published an unsettling article on Sunday, reporting that the Pentagon is “stumped” as to who flew a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline several times last December.
“Over 17 days, the drones arrived at dusk, flew off and circled back. Some shone small lights, making them look like a constellation moving in the night sky—or a science-fiction movie …They also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them,” WSJ reported.
“Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said drones had for years been spotted flying around defense installations. But the nightly drone swarms over Langley, he said, were unlike any past incursion.”
According to the WSJ, the drones flew in a pattern: one or two fixed-wing drones positioned more than 100 feet in the air. There were also reportedly smaller quadcopters, the size of 20-pound commercial drones, often below and flying slower.
“Occasionally, they hovered,” the newspaper added.
Pentagon officials reportedly couldn’t figure out how to down the drones without endangering civilians. Using electronic signals to jam the drones, for instance, could disrupt local 911 systems, while using experimental directed energy could be a risk for nearby commercial aircraft.
Officials reportedly thought they solved the mystery in January, when a University of Minnesota student named Fengyun Shi was caught surveilling a Virginia Navy base with his drone. However, officials learned that Shi—who was eventually sentenced to six-months imprisonment for espionage—bought his drone at Costco.
Therefore, the mystery remains to this day.
Meanwhile, “U.S. officials confirmed this month that more unidentified drone swarms were spotted in recent months near Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles,” the WSJ concluded at the end of its story.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
