It’s truly bizarre in 2024, with so much surveillance technology out there, that 5,000-plus sightings of mysterious drones around populated areas have remained utterly unexplained for over a month.

It’s even more curious that our elected leaders at the highest levels of government have yet to be apprised as to exactly what the aircraft are, who’s flying them and why.

“You know, I have to say I have no idea because the government won’t tell us anything,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley – who, as a U.S. senator, is a fairly substantial part of that government – admits in an exclusive interview with The Heartlander this week.

All he can apparently do, as well as the rest of us, is merely guess. His best guess?

The military.

“It does seem like to me that some of these appear to be military drones. I mean, the fact that our own military is being very tight-lipped about it, but they’re insistent it is not the enemy – these are not Chinese drones or Iranian drones, they say. And yet they don’t seem concerned about it, despite the fact that the drones are disrupting federal airspace. 

“That makes me believe that they may well be our own military’s drones. But what they are doing and why they’re swarming over suburban areas, swarming over military bases, interrupting the flights of commercial airliners, it’s crazy. It’s absolutely crazy.”

It is, indeed, ludicrous, for a free people to be kept in such darkness by their own government.

That doesn’t help matters, as folks are left to their own devices to explain these otherworldly phenomena.

Secretive feds invite rampant speculation

As the BBC notes: “The drone reports have prompted a wide-range of baseless conspiracy theories, including that they are searching for nuclear weapons, radioactive ‘dirty bombs’ or … form part of an impending invasion by aliens.”

The thing is, given the government’s dismal track record with conspiracy theories of late – they all seem to be coming true – how can any hypothesis be totally discounted in the midst of zero information?

Nor does it help that meager federal explanations have shifted from it’s not really happening, to, well, there are a lot of drones out there today, to there’s nothing to fear. Except, of course, fear itself, in the absence of honesty and transparency from the government.

A vegetable soup of alphabet agencies in government – the DHS, FBI, FAA & DoD – issued a joint statement Dec. 17 to calm public fears, albeit sharing absolutely no new information that would be calming.

“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,” the statement read.

“Anomalous” means out of the ordinary. Trust us, even though we can’t trust you, Mr. Government: What’s been happening is out of the ordinary. Way, way out.

Hawley lays the blame for this confusion and chaos squarely on the White House steps.

“Joe Biden can’t tell the truth about anything, and that includes these drones,” he tells the Heartlander.

“And it just adds to the chaos. Nobody’s in charge of this country right now. Joe Biden can barely stand up straight, he can’t complete a sentence, he can’t open a door or walk across a hall. He is not fit to be president, and there’s total chaos in his administration, in this government, right now. 

“I think it’s dangerous. And the bottom line is, Trump needs to be president; he needs to be sworn in as quickly as possible. January 20th can’t get here fast enough.”

New information, not new laws

In the meantime and in typical fashion – why let any crisis go to waste, right? – the White House is asking for legislation giving the government more power “to deal with that growing ecosystem of drones in U.S. airspace.” Lame duck Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer even introduced a bill the Associated Press reports “would allow local law enforcement agencies to track aerial drones.”

Federal aviation officials already have restricted the use of private and commercial drones “in nearly two dozen cities of New Jersey until mid January,” the BBC reports.

In other words, what a U.S. senator has logically deduced to be government drones that the government won’t explain is cause for giving the government more authority over our private aircraft? Make it make sense.

Blessedly, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, blocked Schumer’s precipitous response to the drone mystery.

Paul is at least one elected leader unwilling, as he says, to hastily “expand federal authority to intercept communications and disrupt drone activity – powers that raise serious concerns for Americans’ privacy, civil liberties, and Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure.”

Certainly Congress may have to consider new legislation to adjust to a shifting “ecosystem of drones.” But rather than rush something through that perhaps inadvertently tramples on rights and liberties, lawmakers need to act deliberately in the next session.

And before we take away any more rights from the citizenry, how about we see just a little more transparency from the government that is supposed to be serving us rather than the other way around?