IncidentNew Jersey / Northeast Drone Sightings (November 2024 – 2025)

Beginning the night of 18 November 2024, sustained reports of unidentified nighttime aerial vehicles — described variously as large multi-rotor drones, formations of bright lights, and slow-moving fixed-wing-shaped objects — began across the New Jersey suburbs of Morris, Somerset, and Hunterdon counties. Within ten days the reports extended across New Jersey statewide, into the Hudson Valley and Long Island in New York, into Bucks and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania, and into Maryland. By 10 December 2024, the volume of reports had drawn national news coverage and direct public statements from Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ), Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ-2), and the Mayor of Belleville, NJ Michael Melham.

Specific locations of repeated reports included the airspace over Picatinny Arsenal (a U.S. Army research, development, and testing facility in Morris County), the Round Valley and Spruce Run reservoirs, the airspace over former Naval Weapons Station Earle, and the airspace over the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster (occasioning a temporary FAA flight restriction). Multiple regional airports — Stewart International, Westchester, Morristown Municipal — closed runways for short periods due to drone activity in December 2024.

Federal response over the December 2024 cycle was unusually visible. The FBI and DHS held joint state-governor briefings on 12 December 2024; the FAA imposed temporary flight restrictions over several New Jersey areas; the Pentagon held three on-the-record press conferences (Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, 11, 13, and 18 December 2024) stating that the Department of Defense had assessed the activity and concluded the drones were not of U.S. military origin and not, on the available evidence, threats — while declining to identify the operator. The White House (Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, 16 December 2024) stated that the federal government did not know the origin of “many” of the reported drones.

By January 2025, sightings continued at a reduced cadence; the FAA’s temporary flight restrictions were extended into early February. The Trump administration, beginning 20 January 2025, made several additional statements, with President Trump asserting on 28 January 2025 that the drones had been “authorized” — a statement contradicted the same week by an unnamed Pentagon official to The Wall Street Journal. As of June 2026 no public determination of the origin or operator of the late-2024 sightings has been released.

What the public record establishes: a sustained, geographically concentrated, multi-month wave of reports across a heavily populated and heavily surveilled airspace; visible federal response at the press-secretary level across multiple agencies; the documented involvement of military installations and reservoirs as repeated report locations; no public attribution of the activity. The 2024–25 wave is the largest and most extensively covered U.S. UAP/drone incident-cluster of the post-2017 disclosure cycle.