Top Pentagon officials have been baffled by a swarm of mystery drones that flew over Langley Air Force base for 17 nights in a row.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which revealed the news on Saturday, the phalanx of drones flew in a precise pattern over more than two weeks in December 2023 over the base in east Virginia, an area with one of the largest concentrations of national security and defense facilities on American soil,
One or two fixed-wing drones flew more than 100ft in the air as smaller quadcopters, the size of 20lb commercial drones, flew slower and below them and occasionally hovered over the 17-night period.
Defense officials did not know for certain whether the drones belonged to curious hobbyists or rogue actors, with some suspecting they came from Russia or China to test an American response.
But analysts did learn that the quadcopters didn’t use frequencies available for most off-the-shelf commercial drones, which they believed indicated they weren’t operated by hobbyists.
They knew they had to respond quickly, and reached out to the White House to discuss their options to combat the potential surveillance.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said: ‘If there are unknown objects within North America [we need to ]to go out and identify them.’
One official suggested using electronic signals to mess with the drones’ navigation systems, though this was shot down to the risk of disrupting Wi-Fi networks and local emergency response systems.
Another wanted to use directed energy weapons, an emerging war technology, to shoot down the drones. But an official with the Federal Aviation Authority said a weapon like this carried too high a risk for commercial planes flying over during the holiday season.
A third official said the US Coast Guard could shoot net into the air to capture the drones, though it was also suggested that the security service wouldn’t have the authority to use a tool like this. On top of that, tracking the exact location of the speedy drones was already too difficult.
Though the investigation into who was responsible for flying the drones over the militarily-sensitive area, they found a lead in January of this year when a Chinese student was arrested as he was about to fly back to China, and charged with unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations.
Fengyun Shi, a student at the University of Minnesota, was found flying a drone outside a shipyard run by HII, the company behind the US’ nuclear submarines and Navy’s newest generation of the Ford Class aircraft carrier.
Investigators who accessed his drone, which had crashed into a tree, found he was taking photos of Navy vessels in a dry dock at around midnight. Many of the ships in were still under construction.
His attorney said during his appearance at a federal court: ‘If we was a foreign agent, he would be the worst spy ever known.’
The drones over Langely came just two months after drones were spotted at a government site used for testing nuclear weapons.
The Energy Department’s Nevada Nuclear Security Site outside Las Vegas detected four of the drones over three days, while employees spotted a fifth.
It also came after a Chinese spy balloon drifted over Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana, where nuclear assets are stored.
The US found evidence that contradicted China’s claim it was used for weather monitoring and not spying.
An investigation revealed the balloon contained a combination of off-the-shelf American equipment, some of which was available for purchase online, along with specialized Chinese sensors and other tools designed to gather and transmit data. The presence of both types of equipment suggests the balloon was intended for surveillance purposes rather than being scientific observation.
On 4 February last year, the Air Force sent an F-22 fighter jet armed with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile to take the balloon down over water.
Officials described the Chinese spy balloon as a clever attempt by Beijing to conduct surveillance using a combination of readily available and specialized equipment.
During its eight-day journey traversing the country over Alaska, Canada and the lower 48 states, the balloon gathered data but apparently did not transmit it back to China, officials told the Wall Street Journal.
It remains unclear whether this was due to a malfunction or if countermeasures deployed by the US military prevented the transmission of information.
This incident added further strain to the already tense US-China relationship.
