In late 2024, people all over New Jersey started looking up and seeing lights in the sky they couldn't explain. Sightings were reported starting November 18, and by one Sunday in December, Gov. Phil Murphy said 49 had come in over a single day. Some were near Picatinny Arsenal, a military research site. Some were near Donald Trump's golf course in Bedminster. Nobody had a good answer yet.

People were nervous. What they needed from their congressman was a straight answer, or an honest "I don't know."

What they got from Jeff Van Drew was Iran.

"These are from high sources. I don't say this lightly."

On Wednesday, December 11, 2024, Van Drew went on Fox News and told a national audience that a hostile foreign government had parked a warship off the coast of the United States and was flying drones over New Jersey from it.

"That mothership... is off the East Coast of the United States of America. They've launched drones into everything that we can see or hear."

He wasn't hedging. He said the information came "from high sources." He said, "I don't say this lightly." And he said the drones should be "shot down."

That is about as serious a thing as a member of Congress can say. He was telling his own constituents that a foreign adversary was conducting an active operation in their airspace, right now, and that our government either didn't know or wasn't telling them.

The Pentagon knocked it down the same day

It took the Defense Department a matter of hours. At a briefing that same Wednesday, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh was asked about Van Drew's claim.

"There is no truth to that. There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there's no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States."

The Pentagon's assessment, Singh added, was that "these are not drones coming from a foreign entity or adversary." The next day, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said there was "no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus," and that a lot of what people were seeing was ordinary manned aircraft.

Van Drew's response to being told he was wrong was not to check his sources. He went back on Fox the following day and said "we aren't being told the truth," and accused the Pentagon of "dealing with the American public like we're stupid."

What the drones actually were

Five days later, on December 16, 2024, four federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and the Defense Department — put out a joint statement laying out what they'd found after chasing down more than 5,000 tips and roughly 100 leads.

"Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that 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."

Stars. Some of it was stars. There are more than a million drones legally registered with the FAA, and thousands are in the air on any given day. The agencies said flatly: "We have not identified anything anomalous."

And this wasn't a Biden-administration brush-off that a new government later overturned. On January 28, 2025 — a week into Trump's second term — his own press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the same thing: the drones were "authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons," plus hobbyists and private citizens. The whole thing, she said, "got worse due to curiosity."

No mothership. No Iran. No adversary. A busy sky and a panic.

The panic had a body count risk, and he told people to shoot

Here's the part that should stay with South Jersey voters. Van Drew didn't just guess wrong in public. He told frightened people that enemy aircraft were overhead and that they should be shot down. Firing at an aircraft is a federal crime, and some people were already close to trying.

Reported laser strikes on pilots in New Jersey jumped 269% that December compared with the year before — 59 incidents between December 1 and 16, versus 16 in the same stretch of 2023. A laser in a cockpit can temporarily blind a pilot. The FBI's Newark office had to release a video begging people to stop.

"We're also concerned people will take matters into their own hands and fire a weapon at an aircraft," Acting Special Agent in Charge Nelson Delgado said. "Not only is this act against the law, but it poses an incredible danger to the pilots and passengers on those aircraft."

That is a federal law enforcement agency asking the public to please stop doing the thing a sitting congressman had suggested on television.

The correction nobody was supposed to see

On Friday, December 13, Van Drew quietly changed his story in a written statement:

"While it has been verified that Iran does have three drone ships, new satellite images show they are currently stationed off the southern coast of Iran. This new information only brings us closer to figuring out what is really going on."

Read that again. The ships he said were off New Jersey turned out to be off Iran, on the other side of the world. And somehow that "brings us closer" to the truth. There is no apology in that statement. There is no "I was wrong." There isn't even an acknowledgment that he had told millions of people something false.

The National Iranian American Council, which had written to him the day before asking him to correct the record, made exactly that point. "Spreading misinformation to scare Americans into fearing a so-called Iranian threat is profoundly reckless," said policy director Ryan Costello, who noted the mismatch: "Congressman Van Drew's initial false statement was broadcast to an audience of millions while his retraction was buried in a Friday news dump posted to his website."

Then, when the government finally delivered the answer he had spent weeks demanding, Van Drew put out a statement praising Trump for transparency — "This is what transparency looks like" — and pivoted to warning that "we are nearly a decade behind China in our drone technology." Iran does not appear in it. Neither does the mothership.

This is how he operates

The mothership wasn't a one-off. It's a habit: hear something, say it on Fox as fact, and never circle back.

In January 2026, after federal agents killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street, Van Drew went on Fox and said, "Peaceful protesters don't have 9mm weapons with two extra magazines." POLITICO noted what he left out: that was a concealed handgun Pretti had a permit to carry, and eyewitness video showed no evidence he ever drew it. Republican senators were calling for independent investigations. Van Drew was on television building the case against a dead man.

He is also, right now, demanding subpoenas and sworn answers from New Jersey over a voter registration foul-up created by a 2018 law he himself voted for. He is very good at demanding accountability from other people.

And the Iran fearmongering had a sequel. When the actual war with Iran started in 2026 without a vote in Congress, Van Drew called the question of war powers "a judgment call". In July 2026, when the House voted to order U.S. forces out of that war, he voted no.

The bottom line

A congressman's word is supposed to mean something. When Jeff Van Drew says "these are from high sources, I don't say this lightly," South Jersey has every right to expect that he checked. He didn't. The Pentagon corrected him in hours, he accused the Pentagon of lying, and when the facts caught up with him he pushed out a walk-back on a Friday and moved on.

Two years later he is asking those same voters to trust him again — while sticking to telephone town halls. As of March 2025 he had no plans for an in-person one, the kind of room where somebody could ask him about all this to his face.

We deserve better.

Source

Pentagon says mystery New Jersey drones not from Iranian 'mothership' — BBC News, December 13, 2024. Photo: Reuters, via BBC.