Phantom Swarm, Part 1: The Official Story

No credible threat, they said. What 626 public records requests and 13,500 documents reveal about the 2024 New Jersey drone wave.

On the night of December 6, 2024, two officers of the Jefferson Township Police Department answered a civilian complaint and headed to Saffins Pond Dam, a remote and heavily wooded stretch of state water infrastructure tucked into the Morris County highlands. Officers Mark Williams (badge 71) and Nolan Ryan (badge 87) arrived and approached on foot, scanning with a thermal scope. Williams picked up a figure on the scope, standing upright near the dam's edge. To the left, near the bridge, was a flashing white light. They walked the perimeter of the lake toward the subject.

As they closed in, their radios went dead. They could not transmit, could not raise anyone at dispatch. When they left the area, the radios came back online. They called for backup. Officers Wojtach and Romash responded. The Morris County Sheriff's Office came out. They searched the dam, the bridge, and the surrounding woods, and found nothing. No person, no device, nothing where Williams's thermal had picked up a figure. A Suspicious Activity Report was submitted via the New Jersey Suspicious Activity Reporting System (NJSARS) portal that night, with Morris County Communications notified.

That is from an official police report, case number 24-47664, filed by the sworn officers themselves and obtained under New Jersey's Open Public Records Act. It is one of roughly 13,500 documents I would end up pulling from all over the state.

Jefferson Twp PD Case 24-47664. Saffins Pond Dam, Dec 6, 2024.

This wasn't the first odd encounter for Officer Ryan. Two evenings earlier, at roughly 5 PM on December 4, he had stood in the parking lot of his own police station at 1033 Weldon Road and watched what he described as a fixed-wing drone, about the size of a car, gray in color, flying low over Jefferson Township PD headquarters. Officer Matthew Johnson documented the incident. The sighting was routed to Morris County Communications, the NJSP Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, and NJOHSP CTWatch. 

Jefferson Twp PD Case 24-47335. 1033 Weldon Rd, Dec 4, 2024.

This is one of the more revealing records among the many thousands New Jersey produced that winter. Between mid-November and late December 2024, residents filed over seven thousand drone sightings across the state. But the journey to obtain these records didn't actually start with records. It began with me looking up to the sky, much like the rest of New Jersey.

The Snowbird Confession

In mid-December 2024, I drove around one evening trying to get a glimpse of the fabled drones, and I convinced myself I was looking at history. I had purchased a high-end thermal monocular traditionally used for wildlife spotting with a sensor that, on a cold and clear night, paints warm objects white against a dark sky. Through that scope, over the Monmouth County sky, I saw tiny white-hot circles moving in what I was sure was a deliberate formation of intelligent objects mimicking human craft. They moved together, they shifted spacing, they flew in the direction I would have flown them. I called everyone I knew, filmed it, and was certain I had proof.

A confidant gently walked me through what I was actually looking at: migrating snowbirds. Canada geese at altitude, body heat glowing white-hot through the scope as single or double pixels on an HD thermal image. For a few excited minutes, the tiny little specks looked to me like an other-worldly formation. The "deliberate spacing" was the scatter of a flock in a crosswind. The "intelligent movement" was birds doing the thing birds do every December in New Jersey.

Reader, the embarrassment was total.

The snowbird fiasco taught me one useful habit. When a jaw-dropping drone clip starts going viral and people are swearing it proves something extraordinary, sit with it before agreeing. Start with the prosaic first. Most of what went viral during the wave has an ordinary explanation, and I will show you a specific case of that in Part 2. What kept me going is what didn't fit that pattern.

Silent Light

A few days after, I was out in the yard with the scope, and I saw something that I still, a year on, cannot explain.

Nearing civil twilight, I had just started scanning above the house with my own thermal scope, where I usually pick up the evening rush of inbound and outbound planes. But at that moment, the sky was clear to the naked eye, save for a few faint stars starting to peek out. Scanning with one eye on the scope and the other closed, I stumbled onto a solid white-hot circle, defined, noiseless, unmoving against the dark. I lowered the monocular and looked again with bare eyes. This time there was a light, extremely bright and off-white, like an oncoming headlight floating at two or three hundred feet. No sound. No airframe behind the glare. It started to move to my right, in a straight line, parallel to my roof ridge, slow, controlled, and deliberate. Then it turned, accelerated, and was gone.

I am going to resist the urge to tell you what that was. I do not know what it was. I treat my inability to classify it as a personal puzzle. What I can tell you is what sitting with it did to me.

For weeks after, I tried to reason through it. I built a thermal reference library of hundreds of comparison clips: my own DJI drone at similar altitudes and distance, commercial aircraft on approach, helicopters at traffic-report height, and the birds, bats, and insects that would cooperate. Each one has a signature on the scope and its own way of moving. I have not been able to classify what I recorded against that library. So I had to decide what to do with that fact.

I recalled Lt. Ryan Graves, the F/A-18F Navy pilot whose squadron tracked UAP off the Virginia coast in 2014, and who testified about it before Congress in 2023. He encountered strange objects while flying, and after completing his Navy service he founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a pilot-led nonprofit for aircrew who have seen what he saw. I do not have his flight hours, his squadron, his nonprofit, or the training that would have told me the geese were geese. What I do have is a public records law and a state full of files nobody has read. The question was narrow and answerable: what did state and local governments know, and when, and did they write any of that down?

626 Requests

New Jersey has this wonderful little law called OPRA, the Open Public Records Act. If officers wrote anything down about these objects, any person has a legal right to request it. So I started filing.

I went for the big fish first: state and federal agencies, what I thought were requests sure to crack the mystery open. The bureaucracy was unimpressed, and peppered me with denials citing statute text that might as well have been Sanskrit. Then the municipalities started coming back. Most drops were clerical. Every so often one would stop me.

The early productions came in before I built anything. Bedminster Township was the big one: a 38-page package from the township's outside counsel. In it were: Trump National Golf Club overflights the week the wave began; red and blue strobes over 900 Lamington Road; Chief Bernardo writing that "As per the FBI, we are not to issue any press releases"; and a five-member House delegation asking Wray, Mayorkas, and Whitaker for a classified briefing. One town, that much paper. That is when I built the software, and filed at scale.

New Jersey is not one set of monolithic files. It is hundreds of custodians sitting on many of the same files. The same federal bulletin can land in fifty inboxes. One custodian releases it lightly redacted. Another produces it in full. A third refuses outright. Bedminster's outside counsel denied me an NJ ROIC intelligence brief on the grounds that he was "not authorized to even review it." Four days later, a different custodian produced it. Two more did the same in the weeks after that. Same law, up to each custodian to interpret. Filing at scale is not just an attempt to always get different documents. It is also an attempt to get the same documents many different ways.

Most custodians worked with me in good faith: records clerks who called to clarify scope, chiefs who forwarded everything they had, redacted lightly, with a note explaining what they could and could not release. A small number of custodians denied the requests, which is within their rights under OPRA's exemptions. However, challenging a denial is within a citizen's rights. For now, it is enough to note the architecture works as designed: the requester asks, the custodian answers or doesn't, and there is clear recourse through the Government Records Council (GRC) or State Superior Court. In practice, most of the work was patience. Several months of filing, waiting, and writing back, and the architecture produced what I had asked for.

And how!

The mix cut across media. Raw radio audio and 911 calls. Body-worn camera footage and computer-aided dispatch logs timestamped to the second. Internal emails never intended for public eyes, DJI flight logs pulled straight off the airframes, and note from ATC citing unidentified objects with recordings of their ground speed in knots. Intelligence bulletins, photographs, and videos.

With the help of AI, I indexed all of it into a searchable knowledge graph: 8,850 incidents, 17,480 entities, and 12,924 relationships mapped across nearly every state agency and municipality in New Jersey that might hold drone-related records. Every claim is cited and traced back to the original document for verification.

The author's review dashboard, playing back the wave as it unfolded.

That is how one question, what did state and local governments actually know, turned into a readable, sourced timeline of the wave. The rest of this series is what that timeline looks like, read in the order it was written, next to the one the public was given. Here is where it begins:

A low volume of routine drone CAD reports had been trickling into New Jersey dispatch systems for weeks. Then, starting the night of November 18, 2024, sightings began clustering nightly across Somerset and Morris counties, including over Picatinny Arsenal, the U.S. Army's R&D installation in Rockaway Township. Nightly reports continued through November 24. The earliest document in the corpus to treat them as something coordinated came out of Somerset County the next day. Eighteen days before most of us had heard the phrase "drone wave," the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office called a same-day Zoom at 3:30 PM and distributed a Drone Operator Form to responding officers. The cover email went out with the subject line "CLASSIFIED (NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE) URGENT: Suspicious Drone Activity," and the body opened: "Not for public release: currently under investigation by the federal government." A county prosecutor wrote that sentence in mid-November. In public, nothing had happened yet.

Somerset County Prosecutor's Office Drone Operator Form, Nov 19, 2024.

Howard Altman at defense-beat outlet The War Zone was the one reporter who saw it early. His November 19 story broke the Picatinny sightings publicly, and his coverage has run parallel to this project the whole way through.

Ruling Nothing In, Nothing Out

Before I go further, a few words about what this series is not. It is not a claim about what the drones were. I am not going to tell you they were aliens or foreign adversaries or a classified program, because I do not know, and as best I can tell neither does anyone else publicly. It is not a "cover-up" story either; that word promises a conclusion the records do not deliver. An absence of explanation in the records I have obtained is not the same as proof there is no explanation. The federal agencies with the full picture may have answers I have not yet received.

This series is a careful read of what government agencies in New Jersey wrote down about the wave, compared against what they told the public. The gap between those two things is the story. And: I do not claim my backyard sighting proves anything about the database. I am filing OPRA requests because officers filed reports. Those reports stand on their own, whether or not my sighting means anything at all.

Mostly Right, With Residue

Here is the story you have probably heard about what happened over New Jersey in November and December 2024.

Wikipedia sums it up in a few paragraphs: mass panic fueled by social media, poor nighttime observation, planes misidentified as drones, stars mistaken for hovering craft. A textbook case of social contagion. The FBI and DHS reviewed over 5,000 reports and concluded most sightings were conventional aircraft, hobbyist drones, and celestial objects. On January 28, 2025, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the drones "were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons."

Case closed.

And here is the thing: that story is mostly right. Most of what people saw really was exactly what the official story says it was. I should know. I fell for the hype myself, loudly. New Jersey Senator Andy Kim confirmed the same pattern during a ride-along with police, pulling up Flightradar24 to identify a reported "drone" as a small airplane in real time. Reason magazine mapped sighting data against commercial flight paths and found that reported sightings in Monmouth County clustered right along the approach corridors to JFK and LaGuardia.

The TSA even prepared an internal slideshow in December 2024 that debunked several high-profile incidents with flight-log overlays, clean explanations that nobody got to see until Reason pried them loose with a FOIA five months later. I expected this.

What I did not expect is the residue. The records include an ATC primary radar return of something clocking 150 knots (172 MPH), captured in a Mercer County sheriff's report that cites the tower. Radios and cameras that stopped recording near unknown aerial objects. Civilians describing location, time, duration, and multiple witnesses in specific enough detail for dispatch logs to check.

And a timing pattern I kept re-running because I did not believe it: activity peaking at 6 PM, concentrating on Thursdays and Fridays, collapsing on Saturdays, a rhythm that nothing about social contagion or recreational flying explains. The state's own NJOEM daily reports show the same 6 PM peak and the same Thursday-Friday concentration in their aggregate data.

The Middle Township case is one I keep coming back to when I test my own skepticism. A police drone operator, flying a DJI aircraft under Part 107 rules, logged electromagnetic interference that a private consultant later confirmed by pulling the DJI flight data from the aircraft itself. I do not know what caused it. I know a trained pilot with an instrumented aircraft wrote it down, and I know the flight log says what it says. Separately, on December 14, New Jersey State Police helicopter crews radioed Trenton-Mercer ATC Brandon Dominguez to report two suspected drones at roughly 5,200 feet over the NAWCAD Lakehurst naval facility. Observations from trained aviators in an instrumented aircraft, at altitudes no one in the public messaging was describing.

I have spent months trying to explain each of these away individually. Some of them I can. Most of them I cannot. Behind all of it is a federal, state, and county information architecture built to track exactly this kind of activity, which has yet to produce a public account of what happened.

NJOEM UAS Reporting Data, Dec 16, 2024. 1,029 cumulative events.

The architecture left its own fingerprints in the records. On November 6, 2024, at 9:18 AM, the New York State Intelligence Center distributed an Unclassified/Law Enforcement Sensitive bulletin to New Jersey police departments titled "Signal Jamming Devices and their Implications for Law Enforcement." It was not a drone bulletin. Read in retrospect, it was a bulletin about exactly the kind of radio failure Officers Williams and Ryan would document at Saffins Pond Dam thirty days later.

Two weeks after that bulletin went out, on November 21, Bedminster Township Police Chief Francesco Bernardo wrote to a township official that "we have federal, state, county, and local agencies all involved investigating these incidents," and, in the same email, added a single directive: "As per the FBI, we are not to issue any press releases."

Two weeks later, on December 4, Sgt. Andrew Winter, the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office Counterterrorism Coordinator, sent a law-enforcement-sensitive email to roughly thirty-four New Jersey agencies flagging concern that "these are foreign actors" focused on "high power tension lines, the electrical grid, our military bases, and law enforcement infrastructure."

Two weeks after that, on December 18, an FBI Private Sector Advisory Report (OPE-25-SA-005) on the wave was jointly issued by the FBI Office of Partner Engagement, the Newark Field Office, the Critical Incident Response Group, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Those documents exist. I have them. I will walk through them in Parts 2 and 5. For now I want you to notice only this: what officials wrote to each other does not match what they told the public.

Bedminster Chief Francesco Bernardo to a township official, Nov 21, 2024.

FBI Private Sector Advisory Report OPE-25-SA-005, Dec 18, 2024.

What's coming

Part 2 — Pursued Federally. What the records show federal agencies actually did while the public was told there was no credible threat. (Published.)

Parts 3, 4, and 5 are in progress. The order and emphasis are still being set as records arrive and the investigation continues.

Updated May 14, 2026.

A note on AI: This project uses AI. AI helped write this article. AI drafted the OPRA template, built the filing pipeline, drafted my replies to custodians, and built the knowledge graph that indexes the 13,500 returned documents. I reviewed the documents and videos the AI flagged as interesting. Filings went out under my name and signature. The documents are real. Every one is a government record produced under a public-records request.