BURSTFormer Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a former military pilot, said on Sunday that all of the mysterious drone sightings that he has seen have been airplanes.
“Honestly, every video I’ve seen, and I’ve spent the last couple of days looking at every one of these videos, every video I have seen on Twitter, on the Internet are all airplanes. They’re literally all airplanes,” Kinzinger said in an interview with CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield.
“Some of them will show an airplane that’s kind of stable out there and says that’s a drone and actually, it’s an airplane flying towards you at 30,000 feet. And I can see the lighting on it.”
“If any of these pictures that they have shown are actual drones, these drones then are complying with FAA lighting requirements: a green on the right, a red on the left with a strobe,” Kinzinger said.
“And so it’s not Iran. It’s not aliens, if there are drones. My guess is, if there are drones again — because, again, all I’ve seen her airplanes — then it is more than likely some company that’s testing drones or something like that and has no requirement to tell the public that they’re doing it because they’re actually operating these things legally.”
Kinzinger said if the public does not want to be reassured, then they won’t be, but he noted that authorities have said that there is no threat.
“I mean, look, if you’re, if people don’t want to be reassured, then the answer is no,” Kinzinger said about whether enough is being said to reassure people that there is no threat. “And, you know, look at what I’m hearing from Homeland. And what I’m hearing from FBI is we don’t see a threat here.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Sunday there’s “no question” that the drone sightings are real, but that his agency has seen no evidence of foreign involvement.
“There’s no question that people are seeing drones,” Mayorkas said. “And I want to assure the American public that we, in the federal government, have deployed additional resources, personnel, technology, to assist the New Jersey State Police in addressing the drone sightings.”
He also said there are several explanations for the uptick in sightings.
“Let me set the record straight here,” Mayorkas said. “There are thousands of drones flown every day in the United States, recreational drones, commercial drones. That is the reality.”
“And in September of 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, changed the rules so that drones could fly at night,” he continued. “And that may be one of the reasons why now people are seeing more drones than they did before, especially from dawn to dusk. And so that is the reality.”