New Jersey Senator Andy Kim joined local police on a drone surveillance operation Thursday night, encountering what he suspects were some drones. However, after conducting a more thorough review, he determined that most of the lights in the sky were likely airplanes.
Despite these findings, Senator Kim, a Democrat sworn into office earlier this month, maintained that drone activity in New Jersey could not be ruled out. He criticized the federal government for failing to provide clear explanations to residents who have reported aerial sightings over the past several weeks.
“After going out with police to observe reports of possible drones, I was with help of civilian pilots and others able to do deeper analysis and concluded that most of the possible drone sightings that were pointed out to me were almost certainly planes,” Kim shared in an update posted Saturday on X.
The senator cited one specific incident as an example of the challenges in identifying drones with limited resources or incomplete information.

During the outing, Kim captured footage at the Round Valley Reservoir around 9:20 p.m., depicting an object in the sky with a white light and red blinking indicators, steadily moving across the night sky.
“While I didn’t observe a plane in the flight tracker at that moment that night, I was able to pull up more detailed flight data subsequently and spotted this one small plane taking the path of what was pointed out to me the other night as possible drone flying near us,” Kim wrote on X, attaching a screen capture of the flight tracking data to back his conclusion.

Still, Kim, who recently took office after replacing former Senator Bob Menendez, acknowledged that not all sightings are easily explained.
“I don’t discount others that may have seen actual drone activity, and not all I saw is fully explained by flight paths, but much of it was,” he said in the same thread.
The senator concluded his remarks by emphasizing the importance of transparency and accountability in government. “We have a lot of distrust in politics/government right now, and we need federal gov to respect the right for the public to be informed,” he wrote.
{Matzav.com}