The Pentagon has batted down a claim from a New Jersey lawmaker that the SUV-sized drones being spotted all over New Jersey come from an Iranian “mothership” located just off the East Coast.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) said he received information from “very high sources, very qualified sources, very responsible sources” that the mysterious drones were identified as coming from Iran. He said the “military is on alert” to the drones and should be prepared to shoot them down.
“I’m gonna tell you the real deal,” he said in a Fox News appearance Wednesday. “Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones. It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. It’s everything that we can see or hear.”
He addressed three possible explanations for the drone sightings: It was either the United States government, a hobbyist or group of hobbyists, or an “adversarial country.”
Van Drew said, “We know it’s not our own government because they would have let us know,” and it couldn’t be hobbyists because “they don’t have the technology.” On the prospect of the drones coming from a U.S. adversary, he said that “Iran made a deal with China to purchase drones, motherships, and other technology in order to go forward.”
Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh responded to Van Drew’s claims in a Wednesday press briefing.
“There is not any truth to that,” she said. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there is no so-called mother ship launching drones towards the United States.”
Singh said there is “no evidence” the drones come from an adversarial country but confirmed that they are “not U.S. military drones.”
“These drones should be shot down,” Van Drew said in his interview. “We’ve gotta bring them down, and we’ve gotta find a way to bring them down. I don’t know exactly where they’re landing.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Van Drew for comment about whether the drones that have been spotted are being tracked and how they penetrated U.S. airspace undetected.
“We’ve gotta determine how they function, what they do … they’re probably extracting information,” Van Drew said. “This is a clear and present danger to the United States and to our president-elect.”
He said the U.S. government doesn’t “even have anything like this” drone technology.
A New Jersey state senator called for a limited state of emergency in the wake of the drone sightings, and Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) said he is taking the matter “deadly seriously.”
Murphy said the drones are using “very sophisticated” technology, making the tracking process extremely difficult.
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“The minute you get eyes on them, they go dark,” he said.
The Newark, New Jersey, FBI field office did not have any answers when asked about “what is going on in New Jersey” at a congressional hearing last week.