NEWS ALERT: Unknown drone fleet reportedly breached US military base airspace for 17 straight days

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From Fox News: A mysterious fleet of drones entered restricted airspace and swarmed a U.S. military base along the Virginia coast for 17 days late last year, stumping the Pentagon, according to a new report.

For several nights last December, U.S. military personnel reported witnessing a fleet of unknown unmanned aircraft breach restricted airspace over a stretch of land at Langley Air Force Base along Virginia’s shore, the Wall Street Journal first reported.

The drones would start to arrive about 45 minutes to an hour after sunset each night, one official reportedly told U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly, who joined several other officers responsible for the country’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors, on a squadron rooftop.

Kelly described the first drone he saw as roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. As many as a dozen or more drones followed, flying across Chesapeake Bay, and then traveling toward Norfolk, Virginia, and through a space overlooking the base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port, according to the Journal.

“Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers,” the WSJ wrote.

The WSJ explained that U.S. officials were uncertain if the drone fleet belonged to hobbyists or hostile forces, and some even suspected that Russia or China deployed them to test the response of American forces.

However, bizarrely, “federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat,” the report states.

When the fleet of drones first appeared last December, Joe Biden was reportedly informed, and a flurry of meetings took place at the White House over the next two weeks that involved officials from the Defense Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Pentagon’s UFO office and outside experts, as they searched for an explanation and debated over how they should respond.

The officials reportedly considered using electronic signals to jam the drones’ navigation systems, but were concerned that might disrupt local 911 emergency systems and Wi-Fi networks.

They also considered using directed energy, an emerging technology, to disable or destroy the drones, but an FAA official said such a weapon carried too high a risk for commercial aircraft during the December holiday travel season, the WSJ reported.

Another suggestion was for the U.S. Coast Guard to shoot nets into the air to capture the drones, but a concern was noted that the Coast Guard might not have the authority to do that.

The WSJ wrote:

Over 17 days, the drones arrived at dusk, flew off and circled back. Some shone small lights, making them look like a constellation moving in the night sky—or a science-fiction movie, Kelly said, “‘Close Encounters at Langley.’” They also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them.

Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said drones had for years been spotted flying around defense installations. But the nightly drone swarms over Langley, he said, were unlike any past incursion.

During the drone barrage, Langley officials canceled nighttime training missions, worried about potential collisions with the drone swarm, and moved the F-22 jet fighters to another base, the WSJ reported.

Below is another chilling excerpt from the WSJ report:

U.S. officials didn’t believe hobbyists were flying the drones, given the complexity of the operation. The drones flew in a pattern: one or two fixed-wing drones positioned more than 100 feet in the air and smaller quadcopters, the size of 20-pound commercial drones, often below and flying slower. Occasionally, they hovered.

They came from the north around 6 p.m. to traverse the base, which sits on a peninsula at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and continued south, beyond the reach of radar. They repeated the pattern and then disappeared, typically by midnight.

The drones were last spotted over the Langley Air Force Base on December 23.

All this happened just two months after five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments at the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site outside Las Vegas in October 2023 – a previously unreported incident. U.S. officials also said they don’t know the source, or the reason, for those drones as well, but have “since upgraded a system to detect and counter drones.”

In another drone incident, U.S. officials confirmed this month that more unidentified drone swarms were spotted in recent months near Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles, the WSJ reported.

ONE SMALL POTENTIAL CLUE

On January 6, Fengyun Shi, 26, a Chinese national and a student at the University of Minnesota, showed up in a rented Tesla in Newport News, Virginia, 11 miles from the Langley base, the Wall Street Journal revealed, explaining that “the car was outside a shipyard run by HII, the company that builds nuclear submarines and the Navy’s newest generation of the Ford Class aircraft carrier.”

Shi reportedly was trying to free a drone stuck in a tree, and a nearby resident called the Newport News police, who asked him why he was flying a drone during bad weather. Shi gave up and left, returning his rental car an hour later and then took an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C.  The next day, he took a flight to Oakland, California.

In the meantime, the drone fell out of the tree and FBI investigators seized it. They discovered that Shi had photographed Navy vessels in dry dock, some of which were under construction, including shots taken around midnight. The agents discovered he had purchased the drone at a Costco in San Francisco the day before he had traveled to Norfolk.

Federal agents arrested Shi on January 18, as he was about to board a flight to China on a one-way ticket. Shi claimed he was just a ship enthusiast and hadn’t realized his drone crossed into restricted airspace. He claimed he was simply on vacation and was flying drones in the middle of the night for fun.

A judge didn’t buy his story, and sentenced him to six months in federal prison.

However, Shi’s one drone still doesn’t explain the fleet of over one dozen drones seen flying over the Air Force base.

“Weak to allow this to happen without shooting them down!” declared former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), responding to the WSJ report.

Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro also commented on the report, writing, “This story is psychotic. Honestly, it ought to be impeachable. The president of the United States was briefed as drones — almost certainly spy drones — hovered over American military assets for 17 DAYS. And then authorized precisely nothing.”

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