U.S. President-elect Donald Trump contended Monday that the country’s military “for some reason” was keeping details secret about unexplained drones flying across the nighttime skies above the eastern United States, but the White House later minimized the drone sightings.
“Our military knows … something strange is going on,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in his first wide-ranging news conference since his election to a new four-year term in the White House starting next month.
For weeks now, residents in the state of New Jersey, which borders New York City, and other states to the north and south along the Atlantic Ocean coastline have reported seeing more than 5,000 supposed drones, a figure U.S. officials have concluded is wildly inflated.
They say that most of the alleged unmanned drones are manned aircraft and that fewer than 100 of the sightings need to be investigated further.
At the White House, National Security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters, “Our assessment at this stage is that the activity represents commercial, hobbyist, law enforcement drones, all operating legally and lawfully, and/or civilian aviation aircraft.”
At a Pentagon briefing before Trump’s news conference began, Air Force Major General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters there was “no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat, or have a foreign nexus.”
Ryder added, “We are sensitive to the fact that there are public concerns and many questions. … We are also committed to providing as much information as possible as quickly as possible on this.”
The military has a rationale for not shooting them down, Ryder said, offering a “loose analogy” to unexplained cars traveling near military bases.
