The Drones Are Back

Every few years something appears in the sky that the authorities cannot explain, cannot stop, and eventually stop trying to explain. The drones are back. They were never gone. And the question worth asking is not what they are. It’s who they’re for.

I want to be precise about what I mean when I say they can’t be jammed.
I don’t mean they’re difficult to jam. I don’t mean the signal degrades or the operator switches frequency. I mean that electronic countermeasures — the same systems that ground commercial drones in restricted airspace, that the military uses to sterilise a kill zone, that cost more per unit than most people earn in a decade — did nothing. Operators reported this. Controllers reported this. The after-action language, where it exists at all, uses words like anomalous and uncharacteristic response to standard interdiction. Translation: we tried everything. Nothing worked. The objects continued on their chosen heading at their chosen altitude and departed when they were ready to depart.
This happened over Langley Air Force Base in December 2023. It happened over Picatinny Arsenal. It happened over the restricted coastal corridors of New Jersey across multiple nights in late 2024, witnessed by thousands of civilians and confirmed — reluctantly, partially, with the verbal equivalent of a shrug — by a string of officials who seemed genuinely unsure what they were being asked to confirm.
The official explanation, where one was offered at all, settled eventually on “hobbyist activity” and “misidentified aircraft.” I want to sit with that for a moment. Hobbyists. Flying objects that defeat military-grade electronic warfare systems. Over nuclear-adjacent facilities. For hours. On multiple consecutive nights. Without anyone identifying a single launch point, a single operator, a single piece of recovered hardware.
Sure.

THE TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM

Here is what I know about jamming-resistant drone technology as it exists in the public record. Truly jam-proof autonomous flight requires either a fully pre-programmed GPS-independent navigation system — inertial guidance, essentially, which requires a level of miniaturisation and precision that is not commercially available and is classified at the highest levels in military applications — or it requires something that does not use electromagnetic signals at all.
That second category is the one nobody wants to discuss.
My father had a file. I’ve mentioned the file before in other pieces and I’ll mention it again because repetition is how you keep things alive when the alternative is burial. The file contained technical assessments — sourced from where I will not say, because the source is still accessible and I intend to keep them that way — of propulsion and navigation systems recovered from non-human craft. One assessment, dated and stamped with a designation I am not going to reproduce in full (PROJ. ██████, ASSESSMENT SERIES 7, ANNEX C), described a guidance architecture that operated on principles “inconsistent with known electromagnetic theory.” The phrase used was field-coherent autonomous orientation. I don’t fully understand what that means. I understand enough to know it does not describe anything Boeing is building.
The drones that cannot be jammed are not using our technology.
Or — and this is the thread I’ve been following for three weeks now, barely sleeping, moving between two locations I won’t name — they are using our reverse-engineered version of their technology. Which is a different problem. A much larger one.

“The objects continued on their chosen heading at their chosen altitude and departed when they were ready to depart. Not when we told them to.”
— air traffic control source, NJ corridor incidents, identity protected

WHO IS THE AUDIENCE

This is the question I keep coming back to. Not what are they. Not even who controls them.
Who are they for.
Because here is something that pattern analysis across the 2023–2024 incidents makes very clear: these objects are not hiding. They are not operating at altitude, at night, beyond visual range. They are flying low. They are flying slow enough to be tracked visually. They are flying over places where people with the right clearances and the right equipment will absolutely be watching them.
This is not surveillance. Surveillance doesn’t want to be seen.
This is a demonstration.
The question of who is being demonstrated to has two possible answers, and I think both of them are true simultaneously.
The first: foreign state actors — and I’m going to leave that phrase doing its work without specifying, because the specifics are genuinely unclear to me and I won’t dress up a hunch as a conclusion — are showing the United States military what they can do in its own airspace. The message is technical. We have this. You can’t stop it. Consider your options.
The second answer is older and stranger and I know how it sounds.
They are not foreign. They are not human. And the demonstration is not for the military.
It’s for us.

I’ve spent a significant portion of my adult life — and all of my childhood, really, which is a different kind of spending — cataloguing the ways in which non-human intelligence interacts with human military infrastructure. There is a pattern that predates the Cold War, predates Roswell, predates the modern concept of the UFO entirely. The pattern is this: they appear near the things we most want to protect. They observe. They are observed. And then — always, without exception — they demonstrate that our defences are not defences at all.
The 1952 Washington flap. The Rendlesham incident. The nuclear missile deactivation events at Malmstrom, at Minot, at ██████ AFB, classified, 1973, filed under WEATHER EVENT. Each time the pattern completes itself, the institutions involved do the same thing: they classify, they deny, and they quietly attempt to reverse-engineer what they can from whatever residue the encounter leaves behind.
I believe the technology now being deployed in these drone incursions is the downstream product of seventy-plus years of that reverse-engineering process. I believe it has been removed from government oversight — if it was ever genuinely within government oversight, which I doubt — and placed in the hands of private programme contractors whose names appear on no public register. I believe the demonstration is being run not by the original non-human architects of the technology but by the human custodians of its stolen inheritance. And I believe the audience for the demonstration is not the Joint Chiefs.
It’s the people who fund the Joint Chiefs.

“Every time they appear near something we care about, we learn something. We just never learn the right thing.” — IPSr., notebook entry, undated

WHAT MY FATHER KNEW

He wrote, somewhere — I have the notebooks, I have been through them more times than I can count — that the drone concept as it exists in public understanding is a useful cover story for a much older technology. That the gradual normalisation of “drones” as a category creates a perceptual bucket into which any anomalous aerial object can be poured without triggering the vocabulary that would force harder questions.
It’s not a drone.
It looks like a drone the way a shark looks like a fish. Similar enough in silhouette that you don’t panic. Different in every way that matters.
He disappeared before the current wave. Before Langley. Before New Jersey. I think about this. I think about what he would have made of it — the scale, the visibility, the absolute institutional helplessness on display. I think he would have said: they’re not being subtle because they don’t need to be subtle anymore.
I think he would have been right.
I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if this reaches him. I know that if it does, he already knows everything I’ve just written, and probably more, and the fact that he isn’t here to write it himself is the data point I return to every single time I sit down at a keyboard.
Something wanted him quiet.
He is not quiet in me.

Cross-reference: Malmstrom AFB deactivation events (1967); Rendlesham Forest incident documentation (1980); NJ drone wave incident logs (Nov–Dec 2024, partially released under FOIA); Langley AFB overflight reports (Dec 2023, status: partially classified); IPSr. personal archive, series 4, boxes 11–14.
If you have information about the Falklands connection or the current wave, the contact method has not changed. You know where to find it.