A Pattern of Incidents Worldwide

The New Jersey airspace incursions were among the most publicly visible instances of a recurring pattern of events. New Jersey did not begin that pattern, but it brought the pattern into sustained public view; comparable episodes preceded it and have continued since, across military installations and civilian infrastructure in both North America and Europe. What links these events is less any single explanation for the objects themselves than the response sequence each one set in motion. (See Appendix G: “Drone Wave” Timelines for a comprehensive timeline of recent ‘drone incursions’ or ‘waves.’)

• North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) Shootdowns after Chinese Balloon Incident: In February 2023, the military shot down three objects over North American airspace; those three were declared likely benign, but despite a major mobilization little further explanation ever followed. They came amid heightened sensitivity after NORAD tracked a Chinese surveillance balloon from Alaska to South Carolina, drawing days of national attention before an F-22 shot it down off Myrtle Beach.

• Langley Air Force Base: In December 2023, unidentified aerial objects conducted sustained incursions over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, home to the Air Force’s first fighter wing, over roughly 17 days. The objects operated at night, exhibited flight characteristics inconsistent with standard commercial or recreational drones, and evaded identification despite the base hosting some of the most advanced aerospace sensor systems in the DoD inventory. The Wall Street Journal reported that the incidents prompted the temporary relocation of F-22 Raptors to Naval Air Station Oceana and affecting air coverage of the U.S. Capitol [9]. No public attribution has been made.

• Denmark Drone Wave: In Europe starting around September 2025, a wave analogous to the “NJ wave” of unknown objects were seen across NATO member-states’ military bases and civilian infrastructure in Europe [10], prompting shutdowns and precautionary measures and disruptions even at public airports. These public safety issues mixed with geopolitical ones in the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, leading to suspicion and presumption of Russian involvement despite no evidence being presented on either side.

• Barksdale Air Force Base: In early March 2026 unknown objects were reported over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, a nuclear-capable bomber base. This prompted a response from the Air Force Global Strike Command [11] although as of this writing no official explanation has been provided. This is despite an internal Air Force briefing document, quoted by ABC News, warning that “drone incursions at BAFB pose a significant threat to public safety and national security” because they require flight-line shutdowns and place manned aircraft already in flight at risk [12].

The same structure repeats across these incidents:

1. an object appears,
2. existing systems fail to identify it,
3. institutional communication fractures, and
4. the public is left with contradictory narratives and residual distrust.

Figure 2 below shows the geographic and temporal clustering of major incidents across U.S. military and critical-infrastructure sites, focusing on late-2024 incidents.¹Footnote 11 We are focusing on higher-profile events that have been publicly reported. Ongoing public records investigations indicate a number of events over critical infrastructure of analogous severity to the ones we list, except without comparable media coverage. See [13], for example — we thank its author, John Malaska, for sharing a number of valuable details, many of which will be available in his forthcoming articles. Figure 3, further below, shows additional late-2024 incursions over U.S. sites in Europe, as well the European wave of 2025 over many nations’ critical civilian and military infrastructure.

Figure 2 is a timeline of major incursions between 2019 and 2024 of unknown objects or drones over the US involving critical infrastructure or significant response by military or law enforcement, with particular attention on the late-2024 concentration over New Jersey. Figure 3 is a timeline of the European wave of recent major aerial incursions, mostly reported as ‘drones’, over military and civilian critical infrastructure across Europe, with particular attention paid to the late-2025 wave, and incidents in late-2024 coincident with the so-called NJ Wave.