Members of Congress are rushing to give states permission to detect drones, responding to the mysterious drone sightings that have captivated New Jersey and surrounding states.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer said he will ask colleagues to approve a bill to plug gaps in the country’s capabilities, which currently give federal agencies detection and interdiction powers but deny them to states and localities.
The need for the legislation has become clear as New Jersey officials struggled to tell residents what’s been going on in the skies above the state, even as federal authorities have been coy about it.
“Federal authorities agree that they can’t respond to these incidents alone and they need help from local authorities. But unfortunately, the local authorities do not have the authority right now,” said Mr. Schumer.
He was hoping to tee up a vote late Tuesday.
Earlier, lawmakers had emerged from a closed-door briefing to say they were largely satisfied with the administration’s latest explanation that the drones are benign and, in many cases, not even drones but rather airplanes, helicopters or stars that ground observers mistook for unmanned aerial systems.
The ones that are drones are operated by law enforcement or hobbyists or are being flown for lawful commercial purposes, officials have said.
“We have no idea who owns these drones, assuming these drones are, in fact, drones,” Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. “Again, everybody who studied this has arrived at the conclusion that most of these sightings are commercial aircraft.”
But lawmakers echoed Mr. Schumer’s sentiment that the feds are stretched too thin and local officials need more power to get involved in detecting and explaining the drones flying their skies.
After days of evolving explanations, the federal government deployed cameras and drone detectors and now says it has enough information to say what they are and what they aren’t.
“We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast,” the FBI, Homeland Security, the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration said late Monday.
That did not satisfy everyone.
“People in New York and New Jersey have a lot of questions, still haven’t gotten answers from the feds,” Mr. Schumer said.
The changing answers have fueled distrust and the FBI’s office in Newark had to issue a warning Monday telling residents not to try to shoot down or disable unmanned aerial systems. In a statement on social media, the office said pilots of airplanes were being hit with laser beams those on the ground thought they were aiming at a drone.
“There is also a concern with people possibly firing weapons at what they believe to be a UAS but could be a manned aircraft,” the FBI and New Jersey State Police said in the statement.
Federal officials have said the drones — and their activities — pose no threat to the public, but their inconsistent handling of the drone sightings has not built much trust.
Last week, a senior FBI official told Congress the sightings were “concerning.”
By Thursday, though, the FBI and White House were dismissing the sightings as mistaken identity, saying most were regular aircraft operating legally. The FBI and Homeland Security specifically said there were no “reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space.”
On Monday, that latter claim was punctured when the FBI and Homeland Security acknowledged “there have been a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere, including within restricted air space.”
The agencies went on to say that those kinds of sightings “are not new.”
Most federal agencies have been consistent in rejecting speculation that the drones are being operated by a nefarious power, including perhaps an adversarial nation.
But Pentagon spokesman Patrick Ryder, an Air Force major general, refused to rule that out Tuesday.
“Is it possible that some of those drones could be up to malign activity? It’s entirely possible, but the vast majority, that is not the case,” he said.
He said some of the drones detected near military bases may even be surveilling the facilities.
He said none of the drones are Defense Department assets.
