“Close Encounters at Langley.”
Drone Wars
US military officials were disconcerted by a strange parade of unidentifiable drones flying over an Air Force base — and nobody, including the president, knew what to do about them.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, strange drone sightings over the Langley Air Force Base triggered weeks of meetings last December.
During those meetings, everyone from the Defense Department to the FBI and even the Pentagon’s UFO office joined in to figure out what was going on, and it does not seem like discussions got very far.
According to officials who spotted the bizarre flyers that plagued the base over 17 days, they would often appear around dusk and be seen flying off and returning. Some had small lights that shone like stars over the base.
It was, according to General Mark Kelly — no relation to the astronaut-turned-senator — a sci-fi-esque series of incidents to witness, causing him to give the debacle the nickname “‘Close Encounters at Langley.'”
Swarm Rattling
By all accounts, these roughly 2o-foot drones that Kelly estimated to be traveling more than 100 miles per hour were unlike any other Pentagon officials had seen. For one, they didn’t always show up on military radar, and they were also seemingly impossible to track after they left military airspace.
Compounding the issue are federal laws that bar the military — and everyone else — from shooting down drones flying over or near military bases unless they are determined to pose a direct threat. It seems that spying on a secure military base located near the heart of the nation’s intelligence apparatus does not rise to that standard, so officials were forced to stand by and contend with the bizarre show for more than two weeks last December.
As the WSJ indicates, the nightly drone swarms ended just as abruptly as they began, leaving officials stumped about their purpose and origin.
However, there was one hopeful crack in the case in January of this year when a Chinese national was arrested after being caught flying a drone near the base. But his drone had been purchased at Cotsco — and officials had already determined that whoever had been controlling the phalanx was not a hobbyist.
Bizarrely enough, there had been similar drone sightings at the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site outside of Las Vegas in October 2023, and officials confirmed to the WSJ that more had been spotted this year near Edwards Air Force Base.
If the military’s top thinkers have any idea about who was in charge of the drones or what they were doing flying near the Langley Air Force Base, meanwhile, they’ve remained — perhaps unsurprisingly — mum.
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