Mysterious Drone Fleet Breaches U.S. Military Airspace for 17 Days Without Deterrence: Bet Who's Behind This

One of the headlining stories of this past weekend: Mystery drones swarming a U.S. military base for 17 consecutive days without any type of interference.

And the incident has the Pentagon stumped.

Now retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline when pressed by the Wall Street Journal.

The drones, detected over the past year, headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.

All Bets Off

From the Wall Street Journal:

Officials didn’t know if the drone fleet, which numbered as many as a dozen or more over the following nights, belonged to clever hobbyists or hostile forces. Some suspected that Russia or China deployed them to test the response of American forces.

Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn’t qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway.

Reports of the drones reached President Biden and set off two weeks of White House meetings after the aircraft first appeared in December last year. Officials from agencies including the Defense Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon’s UFO office joined outside experts to throw out possible explanations as well as ideas about how to respond.

The shooting down of suspicious aircraft over the U.S. risks disrupting or endangering the lives of Americans the military is sworn to protect.  Jamming their signals was also ruled out in high-level White House meetings, according to the Journal — over concerns that it could interfere with 911 systems, WiFi networks and commercial airliners.

The betting market created by Gambling911.com has U.S. Hobbyists at +400 odds to be the drone operators while foreign actors come in at +150.  We'll Never Know - at least not in the next six months - comes in as the -200 favorite.  And, yes, aliens were listed at +800 odds, too short of odds for our comfort zone.

Worrisome

U.S. officials did not believe hobbyists were flying the drones, given the complexity of the operation, according to the Wall Street Journal report.

The drones flew in a pattern: one or two fixed-wing drones positioned more than 100 feet in the air and smaller quadcopters, the size of 20-pound commercial drones, often below and flying slower. Occasionally, they hovered.

The foreign actor theory seems to have some validity, under the guise of a "hobbyist".

A Chinese student studying at the University of Minnesota was caught flying a drone near the Langley base on Jan. 6.

The student, Fengyun Shi, 26, had gotten his drone stuck in a tree, and appeared to have abandoned it when he flew to California the following day.

That drone fell from the tree the same day, finding its way to the FBI, which found the device had photographed Navy ships docked at the base.

Shi was arrested a week later as he was about to board a one-way flight trip to China.

Magistrate Judge Lawrence Leonard dismissed Shi’s claim that he was just a student on vacation flying a drone for fun, with Shi pleading guilty to the espionage charges on Oct. 2.