COLORADO, USA — All the people panicked about mysterious swarms of drones in the skies above New Jersey shouldn't turn to Colorado for help solving the mystery because there are still no answers for the drones that showed up over the state's Eastern Plains four years ago.
The reported drones in New Jersey are strange. Residents and officials have expressed concerns after reports of dozens of unknown "nighttime flights" started last month. The story also feels strangely familiar to what we saw in eastern Colorado in 2020.
The Colorado Department of Public Safety (CDPS) tallied more than 110 reports of drones between November 2019 and January 2020. Some were determined to be small hobby drones; others were planes. The department only said there were no instances of illegal drone activity. No official final report was ever released on whether there was a large swarm of drones flying over northeastern Colorado.
There are many similarities between the drone sightings in both states, starting with reports from eyewitnesses. Four years ago, eastern Colorado resident Haley Harms described the drone's sound as a high pitch.
"Like an engine that wants to blow up," Harms told 9NEWS in 2020.
Recent reports out of New Jersey are similar.
"I look to my left and see two big drones. They were propeller-driven going very slowly," a witness in New Jersey told NBC News.
In addition to the drones' reports, the questions lawmakers are asking on the East Coast today are like the ones previously asked in Colorado.
In 2020, a drone task force led by the Morgan County sheriff that included the Federal Aviation Administration was formed to try and track down the mysterious drone sightings in northeastern Colorado. Colorado Governor Jared Polis demanded answers, though few were ever released to the public.
"To me, this is no longer a novelty. I think we need to figure out what’s going on before any accident occurs," Polis said in January 2020.
Similarly, roughly 100 mayors and state representatives met in New Jersey this week to try and get answers to questions about the drones posed by their constituents.
NBC News reports that, on Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy hosted a virtual meeting in which state officials and a Homeland Security representative briefed local officials on the issue.
At a hearing in Washington, D.C., the previous day, the FBI said it did not have many answers yet.
"We are not attributing this to an individual or a group yet. We’re investigating but I don’t have an answer for who’s responsible for that," said Robert 'Wes' Wheeler Jr. with the FBI.
So far, there isn't much information about what the mysterious drone sightings are — and there never really was an answer here in Colorado, either.
On Jan. 9, 2020, CDPS Executive Director Stan Hilkey released a statement as part of the department's "updates" about the suspicious drone activity in the northeastern part of the state.
"The public has been worried about the reports of strange drone activity. Our duty is to be responsive to community concerns and to investigate suspicious activity, and so we mobilized our teams to look into this," Hilkey said. "Despite all of the reported activity, we are still unaware of any crime being committed. While I can't conclusively say we have solved the mystery, we have been able to rule out a lot of the activity that was causing concern. We will continue to remain vigilant and respond as new information comes in."