Joe Biden says East Coast residents seeing odd aircraft in the sky have nothing to worry about.
In an early morning chat with reporters on Wednesday, the president said that there was “nothing nefarious” behind the rash of reported drone sightings. His answer followed a similar tack to several federal agencies who spoke on the drones earlier this week: providing no concrete answers while trying to strike a calming tone.
“They’re checking it all out…there’s a lot of drones authorized up there,” he said. “I think one started and… everybody wanted to get in the deal.”
Biden added that his administration was “following it closely” and that there was “no sense of a danger” coming from the unmanned aircraft.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, and the Department of Defense issued a joint statement stating that the seeming rush of drones was a conflation of disparate events and misidentifications.
“The sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones,” they wrote. “We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the Northeast.”
Biden’s response came two days after President-elect Donald Trump brought up the drone sightings in his first post-election press conference. He told reporters that he would avoid traveling to his New Jersey golf club until the drones were sorted out.
“Something strange is going on,” he said. “For some reason, they don’t want to tell the people.”