Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1uxeyo9/nj_drones_not_a_threat_didnt_sit_right_so_i/

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The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/PhantomSwarm on 2026-07-15 18:52:45+00:00.

http://jmalaska.substack.com/

Back during the November–December 2024 drone wave over New Jersey, I had a strange experience with a strange object of light over my house that I still can't explain.

That experience eventually motivated me to try and understand what was actually going on behind the scenes during the "NJ Drone" wave. Was it really just social contagion, everyone spooking each other into seeing drones and other weird things in the sky at night? Because whatever it was, the state stood up what may be the biggest security mobilization in its recent history, and the public never got an official report explaining any of it.

So I started filing public records requests. OPRA in New Jersey, FOIA federally. Police CAD logs, dispatch recordings, inter-agency emails, intelligence bulletins, body worn camera footage -- whatever the government actually retained while it was happening. It turned into 600+ requests and more than 13,500 documents. Nobody had really done this, so I just kept going.

To make sense of that much data, I built an AI system to index and cross-reference all of it. Every incident, every agency, every name, event, and more. So the documents could be searched and connected.

Just a taste of what came back:

• A police drone whose own flight log recorded another unknown aircraft jamming it. And that data reached the FBI's WMD desk the same day the Bureau publicly said there was "no threat".
• 99 incidents that state and federal agencies quietly stamped worthy of being "Pursued Federally," with the outcome of those 99 never disclosed.
• Two officers approaching what appears to be a figure on a dam in a remote wooded area. They never find the suspect, but their radios stopped working at the location of the figure, then magically worked again when leaving the area.
• A state fire bulletin told firefighters how to handle a downed drone, and one line in it traced back to a 1992 disaster-control textbook. The chapter it came from is titled "Enemy Attack and UFO Potential."

I'm writing it up as a documents-driven series called Phantom Swarm. Parts 1 and 2 are out and Part 3 just published.

Happy to answer questions. And genuinely, if you saw something during the wave, I want to hear it!