The Pentagon is reportedly stumped about a swarm of mystery drones surveilling U.S. military bases, unsure of who is flying them over sensitive U.S. national security installations or how to stop them in the future.
One 17-day swarm of drones over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia's shoreline piqued the curiosity of former senior commander U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly, who oversaw the most advance U.S. fighter jets, including F-22 Raptors, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"This isn't a tomorrow problem, this is a today problem," Center for Strategic and International Studies Senior Fellow Tom Karako told the Journal. "It's not an over-there problem — it's an over-there, over-here, and everywhere problem."
The "Close Encounters at Langley" issue, as Kelly called it, is in addition to reported drone swarms near Edwards Air Force Base north of Los Angeles, according to the report.
Kelly was informed of the nightly drone swarms around 45 minutes after sunset, sounding like a parade of "lawn mowers," flying at more than 100 miles an hour at altitudes of 3,000-4,000 feet, he estimated.
The installations exposed included Navy's SEAL Team Six home base and Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval port in the world.
Notably, federal law prohibits the U.S. military from shooting down drones unless they possess and imminent threat, which effectively permits aerial spies – something lawmakers have been concerned about after the Chinese balloon controversy during the Biden administration and might be inclined to sign legislation to change.
President Joe Biden received intelligence on the 17-day drone swarm, the Journal reported, but this swam and others (including in Nevada and near Los Angeles) have left the Pentagon officials stumped on whom is flying them and what they are doing.
"If there are unknown objects within North America," Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command during the Chinese spy balloon incursion, the job "is to go out and identify them."
The sophistication of the drone swarms suggest it is not merely hobbyists, U.S. officials told the Journal.
While Kelly, a former Air Force fighter pilot, told the paper one drone he observed was 20-feet long, the craft are still much smaller than military aircraft and skirt radar detection.
Like with the Chinese sky balloon, the U.S. military has recalibrated its detection systems to pick up anything larger than a bird now, according to the report.
Notably, after the cessation of that 17-day swarm in December 2022, University of Minnesota student Fengyun Shi, a Chinese national, was discovered that Jan. 6 to have been flying a drone that got stuck in a tree in Virginia. That drone found by law enforcement, had photographed Navy vessels and some under construction.
Shi, 26, was ultimately arrested having fled on a flight to Oakland, California, and was booked on a one-way trip to China. The FBI investigation reportedly found no ties to the Chinese government, and Shi bought the drone in San Francisco the day before he traveled to Norfolk, Virginia.
"If he was a foreign agent, he would be the worst spy ever known," Shi's attorney, Shaoming Cheng, said at his Oct. 2 sentencing after pleading guilty to unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations, the first charge of espionage by drone under U.S. law, according to the Journal.
"I'm sorry about what happened in Norfolk," Shi said at his sentencing to six months in federal prison.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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