The New Jersey Media Melee

What To Do, What To Say?

1. How did institutional communication break down during the New Jersey wave, and what can we learn from the breakdown?

2. Why do anomalous aerospace events keep producing the same communication failures across decades?

3. How can institutions communicate explicit uncertainty without amplifying speculation?

4. What does an aligned response look like in the first hours of the next incident?

Part III: Respond & Explain turns from objects to institutions. Communication failures recur across decades of responses to anomalous events. This Part examines that breakdown, and what a disciplined response, one that conveys uncertainty without feeding speculation, would look like in the first hours of the next incident.

As of the publication date of this paper, additional information regarding this incident is still being released into the public domain. However, the incident highlights the communication challenges of anomalous aerospace events. When there is no central institutional voice to speak clearly about unknown (or classified) events, the information void is quickly filled with conspiracy theories, disinformation, and speculation which can quickly escalate into public panic. There has been a century of challenges around government and media communications regarding anomalous aerospace events dating back to the Cold War. These include files now on the public record stating a formal policy to deny, stigmatize and debunk anomalous phenomena.

The lack of formalized acknowledgement of anomalous phenomena produced four interlocking failures: no vocabulary for explicit uncertainty, an active stigma against reporting, dismantled inter-agency protocols, and an information environment that now outpaces institutional response. The following section summarizes and breaks down this breakdown step-by-step.

• On December 8, 2024, Ryan Herd, the mayor of Pequannock Township, circulated a letter to Governor Phil Murphy. Within days, twenty-one mayors across Morris County had signed it. “Our efforts to address these concerns have been hindered by the lack of information available to us,” the mayors wrote. “This situation is untenable.” The letter was prompted not by the objects but by weeks of procedural non-answers from every level of government.

• The governor’s office convened a classified briefing at the state emergency operations center in Ewing Township within forty-eight hours. Roughly 185 mayors attended, alongside representatives from the State Police, FBI, DHS, and DoD. The briefing produced the opposite of clarity. Colonel Patrick Callahan of the New Jersey State Police acknowledged that officials did not know what the objects were, even as they insisted there was no threat. “How do you know they’re not a danger if you don’t know what it is?,” Mayor Ryan Herd remarked.

• Craig Robertson, a retired Army major and counter-UAS specialist who had served in the Pentagon’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, offered his expertise to the State Police and FBI directly. The initial reception was positive, but “every time I tried to dive deeper, the conversation just went cold,” commented Robertson. The institutional posture Robertson observed was the same one that functions in classified environments but becomes corrosive when applied to domestic airspace: “they don’t really owe answers to civilian people.”

• Herd’s question exposed the logical incoherence of simultaneous “no threat” and “we don’t know” claims. Robertson’s experience demonstrated that reflexes designed for classified environments suppress useful expertise in domestic incidents. The Ewing briefing showed that assembling every relevant federal agency in one room does not produce answers when none of those agencies has the detection architecture, identification methodology, or communication authority to provide them.

When Different Explanations are Circulated, It Encourages Conspiracy Thinking

Viewed from an intelligence officer’s perspective, the force of different concurrent narratives may encourage a breakdown in social cohesion in response. While that may be useful in other settings, for marshalling a useful response these are to be avoided.

Table 10. New Jersey drones: four explanatory narratives in the media.

The coexistence of these narratives demonstrated that no institutional actor had the credibility, information, or communication infrastructure to narrow the hypothesis space in real time.

From Watching to Lasering: The Escalation Ladder

Journalists reporting from the field during the ensuing media melee of the New Jersey drones incident in 2024 [8] documented three categories of community response, each escalating in risk:

1. Observation. Neighborhood watches organized to track the objects. Citizen scientists deployed personal electro-optical sensors (the Nightcrawler Research system) and shared data with both law enforcement and the press [43], [44].

2. Interception. Local police and private individuals launched personal drones to photograph or intercept the objects.

3. Neutralization. Individuals shone high-powered lasers at the objects, striking several commercial aircraft, a federal offense and prompting FBI response.

Open-hardware platforms such as the UFO Data Acquisition Project [45] complement institutional systems by providing standardized, low-cost sensor packages that citizen scientists can deploy for persistent monitoring; UFODAP rigs integrate visible, infrared, and radio-frequency sensors with GPS-timestamped data logging.

The escalation from observation to interception to armed engagement is what an information vacuum produces. Communities improvise when institutions go silent, and improvisation in this domain includes lasers aimed at commercial aircraft. Rebuilding communication infrastructure is the precondition for not repeating the pattern.

The conventional model treats communication as the end of the pipeline: an event is detected, identified, and then communicated. The New Jersey case inverts that sequence: each institutional response generated new signals more consequential than the original detection and the inversion is traceable step-by-step as follows:

• starting in late November 2024, residents across Morris County called their mayors about low-flying objects;

• the mayors contacted the county sheriff, State Police, and governor’s office. The answers were procedural and inconclusive: no confirmed operator, no identified launch site, no clear line of authority;

• that vacuum, weeks of non-answers, was the signal that prompted twenty-one mayors to send their letter on December 8.

The letter was not a response to contradictory statements but rather a response to the absence of any substantive statement at all and what followed accelerated the cycle:

• the classified briefing at Ewing Township, intended to reduce uncertainty, instead produced a new and more powerful signal: the officials assembled in the room, representing every relevant federal agency, could not explain what was in the airspace they were responsible for;

• Herd’s subsequent media tour amplified that signal to national reach within hours.

Then the contradictory cascade followed:

• The state senator’s emergency call (December 10);

• the FBI/DHS joint statement (December 12);

• “Shoot them down” (Trump, December 13);

• “Nothing nefarious” (Biden, December 17);

• cumulative 22 FAA flight restrictions (December 18).

Each response contradicted or undercut the last. By mid-December, the dominant information environment was no longer just about unidentified aircraft but also about institutional failure. As Scaduto wrote, “Reassurance without explanation is a debased currency: it circulates briefly, then collapses.”[8]

The response-to-signal loop operated on two timescales simultaneously. On the fast timescale (hours to days), individual statements became raw material for media narratives. Van Drew’s Iranian mothership claim, issued[15] and retracted[46] within 48 hours, seeded a threat narrative that persisted online for weeks after retraction. On the slow timescale (weeks to months), accumulated institutional incoherence generated legislative action: New Jersey’s A5712, Vermont’s H.654, renewed federal proposals. The objects triggered the first response. Every response after that was triggered primarily by prior responses.

This dynamic is not unique to New Jersey. In February 2024, at a routine budgetary meeting of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, state representative Ben Waxman asked PEMA Director Randy Padfield about UAP tracking near nuclear power plants. Padfield confirmed that past reports came through county 911 calls, that tracking was “really under the FAA’s purview,” and that most sightings were “unfounded, or they’re attributable to some other mechanism.” State representative Jordan Harris interjected: “You said ‘most.’ So what about the un-most?” Padfield’s answer trailed into procedural language. In Pennsylvania, as in New Jersey, the institutional response communicated more about the system’s limitations than about the phenomena it was asked to explain.

The implication for framework design: communication cannot be treated as the terminal stage of a linear pipeline. When institutional communication fails, the resulting vacuum does not merely leave the public uninformed; it actively degrades the next detection cycle by redirecting political pressure toward premature closure (the Leavitt statement) or performative action (calls to shoot down the objects) rather than better sensing.

How do you know they’re not a danger if you don’t know what they are?