The FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, office on Monday evening called on residents not to shoot or shine lasers at objects in the sky amid a spate of drone sightings across the region in recent weeks that have prompted alarm among elected officials.
In a statement, the FBI said that both the bureau and New Jersey State Police are alerting residents “about an increase in pilots of manned aircraft being hit in the eyes with lasers because people on the ground think they see an Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS),” or drones.
The Newark office did not say whether there are any recent reports of pilots being targeted from the ground.
Objects such as airplanes or helicopters, certain satellites, planets, and stars can be mistaken for drones by people observing them from the ground, the officials said.
The FBI, state police, and other law enforcement agencies have gone out “every night for several weeks to legally track down operators acting illegally or with nefarious intent and using every available tool and piece of equipment to find the answers the public is seeking,” according to the statement.
But it warned that “there could be dangerous and possibly deadly consequences if manned aircraft are targeted mistakenly” as drones by people firing weapons or using lasers.
Members of the public, the statement said, can access a multitude of websites and mobile apps through government agencies and private companies to show the flight paths of satellites, manned aircraft, or celestial bodies such as planets and stars.
Several New Jersey and New York elected officials last week raised alarm about drone sightings, with some calling for the government to shoot them down if they show nefarious intent or are being manned by a foreign adversary. Some have called for enhanced government transparency over the drone sightings and for more federal surveillance to track any unmanned vehicles.
On Monday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a news conference that the drone sightings pose no risk to public safety or national security, although he provided scant new details.
“We’ve done the detection, then the analysis. We’ve corroborated the sightings,” Kirby told reporters at the White House. “And in every case that we have examined to date, we have seen nothing, nothing that indicates a public safety risk.”
Drones are flying across the United States each night and every day, he said, adding that the sightings in the New Jersey area have shown “nothing” that “indicates a foreign adversary actor involved or any kind of pernicious national security threat.”
Meanwhile, drone sightings near military bases or installations are being investigated separately, the spokesman said.
“Now, there have been some drone sightings, I think, as you know, over some military bases. We’re obviously looking at that,” Kirby said. “That is a different category, and DOD [Department of Defense] has different authorities to deal with that.”
“To say that sightings that people in the Coast Guard in the United States Navy and Naval Air Station, Weapons Station Earl, which is in my district, they’ve seen drones at and right in close proximity to that munitions depot,” Smith told the outlet.
A number of “law enforcement people have seen it,” too, he said.
“They’ve seen it in a way that suggests formations that are being—coming off the ocean into the land.”
