Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Something’s going on in the night sky in New Jersey, where I live: People keep reporting squadrons of drones flying around in the dark over their houses. And at this point I’m going to cut right to the chase and cede the floor to Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a dentist who was elected to Congress in 2018 as a Democrat but is now, somehow, a MAGA Trump supporter. From the New York Post:
Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Republican, said the drones “very possibly could be” from Iran, citing confidential sources during an appearance on Fox News Wednesday morning.
“I’m going to tell you the real deal. Iran launched a mothership that contains these drones,” Van Drew said. “It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.”
Wow, the real deal! Apparently (per the Post) Van Drew has written the president a strongly worded letter about this too, and it made its way to a publication for traditionalist Orthodox Jews called Agudath Israel of America News:
Van Drew has stood by his statements, however, sending a letter to President Biden imploring him to take action and laying out “circumstantial evidence” supporting his claims.
“We have information that a sea-based Iranian drone mothership is currently missing from port, and that its embarkation timeline would align with the appearance of the New Jersey Drones,” he wrote the president in a letter obtained by Agudath Israel of America news.
“And of course, it is the policy of the Iranian government to bring about the destruction of the United States of America. While I remain open to alternate explanations, I have not been presented a single credible, cohesive narrative except for that Iran is controlling these drones,” Van Drew wrote.
If you can’t immediately understand what’s happening in a given situation, it must be a sea-based Iranian drone mothership—yes, in our understanding this is how national security analysis works. Unfortunately, the Lying Pentagon is covering up the facts about this sea-based air invasion, telling reporters that “there is no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States” and “no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign entity or the work of an adversary.”
So where is Van Drew getting this idea, which he attributed, on Fox, to “very high sources”? Trying to understand what goes on inside a dentist’s brain may be a foolish and terrifying prospect, but it’s possible that he’s latched onto some sort of speculative idea from the ex-military tech-enthusiast community, where there have been suggestions that “mothership” drones that can launch other drones—which do, for the record, exist—may have been involved in similar recent drone sightings near U.S. military bases.
In New Jersey, the state police held a briefing Wednesday for hundreds of local mayors and politicians. One state legislator who attended, Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, subsequently posted a lengthy statement on social media complaining that state police are “shackled” by federal rules that prevent them from attempting an “interception or takedown” of the aerial devices—by which she presumably means that state police officers are not allowed to run around in the dark shooting their handguns at anything they see in the air (which in my opinion is probably a good thing). Fantasia’s statement concludes that “military intervention is the only path forward.”
Personally, your correspondent has not observed any of the drones, Iranian or otherwise, but NBC New York did secure a first-person account of the phenomenon from “New Jersey residents Phil Doyle and his wife Maureen,” who “went outside to their back patio on Tuesday night when they heard loud buzzing coming from overhead” and saw “dozens of flying objects, believed to be drones, coming from the direction of Picatinny Arsenal and heading northwest.” (Picatinny Arsenal is an Army facility, for what it’s worth.) According to Doyle, the drones “were about the size of his dining room table.”
In summary, Phil and Maureen Doyle said the things were the size of a damn table!
Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.
Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company.
All contents © 2024 The Slate Group LLC. All rights reserved.
