| SNEAK PEEK |
— Dario assesses America’s drone sighting panic.
— What’s going on in South Korea? The rumours going around are wild.
Dear subscribers,
Izzy here, sadly demobilized by a sudden attack of carpal tunnel syndrome, which means typing is currently very difficult. Hence the delay. Hopefully, one week off will put me back in play soon enough. In the meantime, I’ve mostly handed the reins to Dario this week since the Big Blind Spot is his specialist area: mysterious drone sightings.
For those not up to speed on the topic, there’s been an influx of sightings the past few weeks across North America and parts of Europe, but thus far nobody can be sure if what they are seeing is real or a function of some sort of online hysteria. Most of the mainstream press are ignoring the story, even though U.S. officials have now acknowledged the phenomenon.
The latest speculation doing the rounds on the internet is that the drones may be secret U.S. military or intelligence drones dispatched to detect possible radiation leaking from a stray nuclear device or dirty bomb.
Adding substance to the idea it might be “us” is Palantir’s latest advert which was aired during Saturday’s Trump-attended Army and Navy Football game. It depicts a legion of drones being dispatched by a naval contingent, under the heading that “Battles are won before they begin”.
Since then, the Pentagon has confirmed the drones do not emanate from the U.S. military or from foreign adversaries. This has led some (especially on X) to speculate they must be otherworldly. However, that doesn’t reflect the substance of the comments directly and is something of a bold extrapolation.
In any case The Blind Spot’s resident UAP expert, Dario, has crunched the source material for your benefit to try and make sense of things.
We would be interested to hear what you think so please do leave a comment or get in touch directly.
Send tips to [email protected] or [email protected], or anonymously via our Haya link.
| THE BIG BLIND SPOT THIS WEEK |
WHAT THE DRONE? What the **** is that?! Residents in America’s north-east have been stunned for a number of weeks by widespread sightings of unidentified drones, with many turning to X to share their testimonies and amateur footage, ensuring a steady inflow of content depicting supposedly unidentified drones, particularly over New Jersey.
Closer scrutiny of much of this footage implies some may be rushing too quickly to extreme conclusions. In many cases, the sightings are clearly just conventional aircraft, such as this Cessna Citation X-looking plane.
This footage, meanwhile, shows C-130s from the Delaware Air National Guard, for instance.
But in other cases the footage is indeed mysterious, such as this one which appears to show hovering aerial craft falling to the ground.
The nature of the incidents also ranges widely, from mundane sightings that appear to be misidentified aircraft to swarms of unidentified drones coming in from the ocean in New Jersey. Eyewitness accounts have even described seeing unidentified lights dropping or spraying some type of chemical in the air. CBS News is among news agencies that described eyewitnesses claiming that the drones were as large as SUVs or small buses
The New York Post reported that swarms of the mysterious drones were detected over key aviation facilities, leading to the temporary shutdown of Steward International Airport in New York on Friday night — something that prompted New York Governor Kathy Hochul to demand official intervention.
Finally, some videos from Morris in northern New Jersey even claim to show shot-down drones, with police dispatch call recordings obtained via open-source means confirming the incidents were officially reported to authorities. “The caller claimed a drone fell out of the sky by the power lines behind their house… then 10 more showed up,” the call can be heard saying.
An intelligence bulletin doing the rounds on X from the New Jersey Division of Fire Safety, meanwhile, shows ‘recommendations for encountering downed UAV’s, including instructions not to approach downed or landed drones and to “be aware that electronic devices and two-way radio systems may malfunction in the immediate area.”
Some police officers interviewed by NewsNation have also highlighted that unlike regular drones, some of these drones seem to emit no heat signature.
Separately, Fox News has reported on eyewitnesses in New Jersey who claim to have experienced electromagnetic interference at the same time as a drone was spotted hovering above their car. They reported their vehicle’s clock jump forward an hour, only for it to return back to normal once the drone had gained distance. Truly eery if real.
Thus far, however, reactions from federal and local authorities have failed to clear up the confusion. After U.S. Congressman Jeff Van Drew claimed “high sources” had informed him the drone swarms were sent by Iranian motherships off the American east coast, White House/Pentagon officials pushed back on the claims saying they had no evidence these drones had a “foreign nexus”.
Yet in other cases, officials seem to have corroborated the mystery by citing the claims of American public servicemen, such as Representative Chris Smith who read out reports of American servicemen seeing “over a dozen drones” following a Coast Guard boat Sunday night.
New Jersey Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia [Ed – what an apropos name!], meanwhile, publicly referred to a Department of Homeland Security briefing in which the drones were described as “larger than those typically flown by drone hobbyists.” More concerningly still, she said the drones “appear to avoid detection by traditional methods such as helicopters and radio.”
On Thursday Congressman Gonzalez made waves during a Homeland Security Committee on Capitol Hill hearing on the drone swarms when he highlighted his frustration with the fact that nobody knew what was going on. “You’re telling me we don’t know what the hell these drones are in New Jersey?” he said to Robert Wheeler Jr., assistant director of the Critical Incident Response Group for the FBI, who simply replied: “That’s correct.”
Meanwhile, New Jersey Governor Phil Murray added further fuel to the fire by claiming the drones were “very sophisticated”, and that “the minute you get your eyes on them, they go dark”.
There isn’t any shot of the drones going dark — that’s what the governor is saying. You try to look at them, then they disappear (go dark).
So what’s going on? Leaving alien theories aside, the only possible explanation for the drones is either that they represent secret U.S. military operations, hobbyist craft flights or some sort of hostile actor intrusion.
The hobbyist crafts are easy to rule out. Most airports are geo-fenced: That means regulations oblige drone manufacturers to limit the areas drones can take off and land from, including sensitive sites like airports and military bases, meaning only home-made low-power drones – and these are precisely the drones that established electronic counter-measures around airports can already keep out.
The idea that the source is the U.S. military is harder to rule out.
For example, when asked on Friday at a Pentagon press briefing, spokesperson John Kirby replied the sightings posed “no national security threat or a public safety threat”.
That said, Kirby also admitted that the origin and intentions of the drones were still under investigation.
But these sightings extend beyond New Jersey. There have been similar reports in Astoria, Oregon, notably 13+ minutes of air traffic control recordings in which multiple aircraft describe red orbs emanating and then returning to the ocean at high velocities. That’s without mentioning the drones detected over U.K. and German bases too, which we referenced in previous newsletters.
DARIO’S COMMENT: The abundance of seemingly mundane footage shared on X — most of which features commercial aircraft, ordinary stars, or satellites that lack the defining characteristics of military drones or UAP — stands in stark contrast to eyewitness accounts reported by public newscasters and authorities describing genuinely strange phenomena. This disconnect is further compounded by two unsettling realities: The ease with which modern technology, such as AI and advanced software, can fabricate convincing footage, and the Pentagon’s growing openness about its own uncertainty regarding the true nature of the UFO mystery.
The recent wave of drone sightings over New Jersey and other parts of the United States, along with the widespread misidentification of commercial aircraft and other mundane airborne objects, must be considered with certain UFO-related caveats. To understand this, we need to wade into the complex and often contentious world of UFO lore.
One prominent theory, popularized by X (and Twitter) personalities, suggests that UFOs can camouflage themselves or even “transform” into conventional objects — an idea used to explain reports of seemingly ordinary aircraft being mistaken for drones. This notion traces back to eyewitness accounts from the 1970s and 1980s, in which orbs or balls of light were described as camouflaging themselves as silent, unmarked black helicopters. Such accounts were documented by filmmakers like Linda Moulton Howe, who investigated these phenomena while covering the infamous animal mutilation mysteries of the time.
That explanation doesn’t sit well with me. As the resident UAP enthusiast at The Blind Spot, I can’t help but notice that much of the observed footage lacks a critical hallmark of UFO camouflage lore: noiselessness. Instead, the so-called ‘drones’ or UFOs in most videos sound distinctly like aircraft. However, some alleged eyewitness accounts on Reddit suggest there’s more to these sightings than meets the eye:
“It almost has the shape of a commercial jet, and it has the lights — but they’re wrong. The wings have what look like strobes, and the colored lights are in the wrong spots,” one commenter wrote. They added, “Normally, the tail of a jet swings up, right? This thing had a tail like a fish — it moved up and down as well.”
Other commenters noted peculiarities in the sounds these objects emitted: “It wasn’t an everyday plane. Too low. Too quiet. Too off.”
These unusual observations were echoed by NewsNation reporter Rich McHugh, who described the objects as looking “like nothing you’ve seen before. Like aircraft, with multiple blinking lights, but they looked nothing like a plane.” He further noted they appeared “creepy,” moved in unexpected ways, and seemed to fly “almost inverted.”
The combination of strange visuals, unusual movements, and unconventional sound profiles only deepens the mystery surrounding these sightings.
If these videos were all there was to go on I’d dismiss them outright. We live in an era where flying aerial objects has never been more accessible, and the tools to create convincing fake videos are available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, thanks to AI. As a result, video footage — once considered the holy grail of UFO enthusiasts — has been relegated to a supporting role in the search for credible evidence.
Instead, it’s the reaction from news media, police and governmental authorities that outlines this is something out of the ordinary. With the exception of the Pentagon’s spokesperson, who appears to have gone out of his way to calm the local hysteria, most officialdom — including the New Jersey Governor — have been echoing very strange and curious claims as outlined above.
Of course, it cannot escape notice that this drone wave comes in a remarkable context, just days after a remarkable admission from the Pentagon regarding UFOs:
John Kolkoski, director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which is the Pentagon office in charge of triaging UFO data, admitted the government is stumped by “true anomalies” in certain “interesting (UFO) cases” that are not understandable.
This follows years of criticism aimed at the Pentagon’s efforts to analyze UFO data, with many accusing it of deliberately masking the U.S. government’s ignorance about the true nature of the UFO phenomenon. It also comes after more than seven decades of outright denial by American officials. Notably, the bipartisan Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act now officially defines “non-human intelligence” and mandates the government to take possession of “any and all” recovered objects, including those containing “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” that may have been transferred to private defense contractors.
The nature of UFOs means they do not describe an aerial object, but the observer’s ignorance: they are an ‘Unidentified’ type of ‘Flying Object’. This elastic definition means there’s an extent to which governmental openness, and the consequent de-stigmatization of reporting on the phenomena, is creating a sightings snowball — where many legitimately strange drone swarm sightings are rendering ordinary objects like commercial aircraft into mysterious drones.
However, contemporary military history combined with our limited knowledge of claimed American efforts to reverse-engineer craft of exotic origins (which comes from former military intelligence officer Dave Grusch’s declarations under oath, among others), means that these drones are more than likely affiliated to the United States.
Reasons may include testing military or local crisis management response time or crafting reinforced legislation that would permit the shooting down of unidentified drones over American soil. But these theories don’t hold much water either — why create a widespread panic for tests that can be achieved more subtly, or for legislation that has already been proposed? More ‘out-there’ takes suggest this is specifically about testing the American public response to a mass UFO sightings — and that the hysteria is intentional. But, as you can imagine, the lack of information we currently have on these drones means this possibility can only be speculative.
Other individuals have speculated the drones are overflying New Jersey in an attempt to scour for a stray nuke or dirty bomb. While this could explain the secrecy, since it would seek to deflect the panic, it would not explain the methodology: established procedures already exist for the detection of stray radioactive material. If you can sift for a nuke without creating a panic, why modify the procedures in a way that can clearly induce a panic? Furthermore, the concentration of high-power personalities at the recent Army-Navy games suggests authorities aren’t overly concerned about a stray dirty bomb.
Thus, the only true conclusion one can draw from the drone sightings at this stage is the level to which our technological advancements mean our increasingly interconnected society seems paralyzed by an inability to sift fact from fiction.
The Pentagon’s turning around decades of official obfuscation means the words of John Kirby, who denied any extraordinary angle to the drones, has done nothing but inflame the subject along the conventional wisdom that “nothing is true until it is officially denied.”
On the other hand, the hysteria is driving American citizens to panic about overflying drones despite their video footage seeming to show mundane objects. Some channels, like the former military intelligence analyst at the S2 Underground YouTube channel, have speculated the nefarious potential of certain videos on TikTok, which have encouraged Americans to shoot at the drones.
Considering most of the drones seem to be commercial aircraft, this means a Chinese bot farm and a good narrative is all you need for Americans to commit terrorist attacks on their own soil, unbeknown to them, S2 Underground claimed.
I experienced some of the hysteria myself. Watching the Marbella skyline last week, my eyes became glued to several red orbs of light emerging from the sea and floating up towards the sky. But the curiosity gave way to understanding when these red orbs flickered away into the night and I gathered they were simple Chinese lanterns.
But it made me think how strange it is that this drone wave and the allegations of camouflaging means our society has become so susceptible to turning known objects into unidentified ones.
| BUSINESS, ECON AND FINANCE |
MILEI TO MAKE ARGENTINA NUCLEAR: Javier Milei announced his “Plan for a Nuclear Argentina”, that will empower the construction of nuclear plants offering clean energy to AI-dedicated data centres. Milei is seeking to make the effort dual use: first, he wishes it to cheapen Argentinian access to clean abundant energy and second, he wishes to make the country a central player in AI development (like every other country these days).
While Argentina already has a long-standing plan to produce and place different types of small modular reactors in its southern region of Patagonia, the novel part of this initiative is Milei’s desire to integrate the energy sources into AI data-centre infrastructure.
| GEOPOLITICAL HOTSPOTS |
UKRAINE HELPED JIHADISTS: Hayrat Tahrir al-Sham, the Syrian jihadists that took over the Syrian government last week had help from Ukrainian intelligence operatives, the Washington Post reported. These Ukrainian intelligence agents, ostensibly seeking to undermine Russia’s power in the region, also included around 20 experienced drone operators and at least 150 first-person-view drones to the HTS headquarters in Syria around four to five weeks before the invasion.
While Ukrainian involvement in Syria has been an open secret, American officials continue to deny their role in supplying and funding HTS militias, despite the active and overt involvement of two close allies (Turkey and Ukraine) in their training and offensive actions.
TURKEY BRINGS ETHIOPIA AND SOMALIA TOGETHER: Recent talks between Somalia and Ethiopia hosted by Turkey in Ankara resulted in seemingly successful peace initiatives, which Turkish President Erdogan called “the first step towards a new beginning based on peace, cooperation between Somalia and Ethiopia.” Though details of the compromise have not yet been made public, Erdogan claimed the deal would ensure that Ethiopia would eventually gain sea access, and it’s suggested that this may lead Ethiopia to pause or renege on its deal to use a Somaliland port.
TRUMP WILL RECOGNIZE SOMALILAND. Semafor argued Republican US-Africa policy leaders, as well as right-leaning DC think tanks, are set to encourage Trump to recognize the region upon his inauguration. Semafor said the move would allow U.S. intelligence to set up long term operations near the crucial horn of Africa, which would help them keep an eye on Chinese activity in neighbouring Djibouti. Experts acknowledge that such an agreement would likely rattle the geopolitical affairs of Somalia, though the impact of the recent Turkish-brokered talks between Ethiopia and Somalia suggests a peaceful resolution on Somaliland may be achieved without necessitating American recognition.
KOREAN GOVERNMENT WANTED TO TRIGGER WAR: South Korean Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun’s bid to instigate a state of war between North and South Korea is said to have been motivated by a desire to declare martial law, according to local reports citing South Korean opposition members.
The government allegedly wanted to provoke a North Korean response by sending drones over the border last October, or by striking the zones that North Korea was using to launch their trash-filled balloons.
While the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said “no orders intending to escalate conflict took place”, they have not denied that they were attempting to strike North Korea’s balloon-launching platforms.
Even wilder allegations were made by Kim Byeon Joo, an opposition party member who is also a former 4-star general, who claimed in a national assembly hearing that South Korean special forces units were planning to disguise themselves as North Korean assassins to kill opposition members.
Should this plan have failed, Byeon Joo claimed, the ‘rescuing’ Special Forces were to conduct the assassination of the opposition members themselves.
| WHAT WE’RE PROCESSING |
— San Francisco spent $1.52 billion this fiscal year on about 8000 homeless people.
— The U.K. is continuing to generate more than 80 percent of its energy by burning natural gas or firewood.
— Why voters gave the Biden administration a failing grade on the economy despite it growing faster than any other G7 state.
— The BIS says negative swap spreads are signalling pressure in government debt absorption.
— What the NATO innovation fund has been up to.
