NJ Sen. Andy Kim goes on drone hunt with police with rash of ‘sightings’ across state
New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim went out on drone patrol with local police on Thursday night and believes some lights in the sky he came across were possibly drones, but most others — after “deeper analysis” — appear to have just been planes.
Despite his findings, the Democrat, who was sworn in earlier this month, didn’t discount the possibility of drone activity in his state and called out the federal government for not offering answers to the civilians who’ve been reporting sightings for the past several weeks.
“After going out with police to observe reports of possible drones, I was with help of civilian pilots and others able to do deeper analysis and concluded that most of the possible drone sightings that were pointed out to me were almost certainly planes,” Kim wrote in a Saturday update on X.
He gave one example of a possible sighting that elucidates the issues with civilians making drone sightings with incomplete information or tools.
The senator shared a video he took in the field at the Round Valley Reservoir at 9:20 p.m. that shows a craft with a white light and red blinkers crossing the clear night sky.
“While I didn’t observe a plane in the flight tracker at that moment that night, I was able to pull up more detailed flight data subsequently and spotted this one small plane taking the path of what was pointed out to me the other night as possible drone flying near us,” the Garden State senator tweeted, accompanied with a screen grab of the detailed flight tracking data.
However, Kim, who replaced the disgraced Bob Menendez, does not claim to have figured out the entire phenomenon.
“I don’t discount others that may have seen actual drone activity, and not all I saw is fully explained by flight paths, but much of it was,” Kim wrote in the Saturday thread.
“We have a lot of distrust in politics/government right now, and we need federal gov to respect the right for the public to be informed,” the senator concluded.
