Original subtitles

Wow...

There's so many things in the sky right now.

Let's face it.

We live in a time when fear and distrust

are at an all-time high.

There are so many government conspiracies,

it can be hard to tell what's real and what's not.

The drones off of New Jersey.

Are they Chinese?

Are they Russian?

Weather control.

The death of Jeffrey Epstein.

The list just goes on and on,

and nobody knows how to make sense out of what's real...

and what's fake.

My name is Andrew Bustamante,

and I am a former covert CIA intelligence officer,

and I'm here to help you separate

fact from fiction.

Since leaving CIA,

I've made it my mission to shed light

on the lies, cover-ups, conspiracies,

and tactics used to conceal them.

Now I'm going to pressure-test the most sensational,

ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy theories out there,

and track down key experts,

eyewitnesses, and whistleblowers.

I'll analyze never-before-seen footage,

conduct eye-opening experiments.

These right here.

See the drone right there overhead, you see it?

And demonstrations.

Sleeping all the way down deeper and deeper.

It's just so fast. It's just incredible.

Nobody thinks of hypnotism as a weapon.

My mission is simple...

Is there a tunnel that connects us to Cheyenne Mountain?

...to find the truth.

Epstein was reported to have actually hung himself

from this side of the bed,

which is right here.

And arm you with the tools you need

to determine for yourself what is real

and what are you being manipulated to believe is real.

What in the world is going on

in the skies over New Jersey?

New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen

once described North Jersey's sky with the line,

"The sun's just a red ball

rising over them refinery towers,"

but now we need to add had a few drones.

In November 2024,

the folks of New Jersey started to look up

in the sky and see this.

What is that?

For nearly a month, mysterious crafts were spotted

night after night.

They're just pacing back and forth,

going very slow.

We've been looking for the past hour.

We've seen about 40 or 50 of these drones.

In fact, there's one over my shoulder right there.

With distinct running lights,

these craft were too small

to be fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters.

Whatever that is, is massive.

But they were also too large

to be standard commercial drones.

There are SUV-sized drones flying over my home,

and the government has no idea what they are,

so I'm going to make a cocktail.

Some were reported to be flying in formation.

They're all going the same direction.

Others were seen hovering in place for hours.

Oh, my goodness.

And with residents on edge,

they were getting little in terms of answers.

They have a responsibility,

the FBI and the FAA,

to brief the public more thoroughly.

And in that government silence,

conspiracy theories started to explode

all over the Internet and in mainstream media.

Really want to know what's going on in New Jersey?

Radioactive material in New Jersey has gone missing.

Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago

that contains these drones.

The third option is-- it's non-human.

I mean, you said it yourself.

The New Jersey drones quickly went from mystery to meme.

How are you, or should I say, what are you?

OK, no, we're not gonna do that.

See, I know what I am,

and I don't have to explain myself to anyone.

But serious questions still persist.

Why hasn't the government provided a complete explanation,

even a full year later?

On this episode, I'm going to apply my CIA background...

Becca, you got him?

Let's get creative here.

...to conduct the most comprehensive investigation

of the New Jersey drone mystery ever done.

This is taking what we do to a whole new level.

Ho, ho, ho, ho.

With key interviews.

Maybe there's a unit that's testing something out

that not everybody's aware of.

And real-world demonstrations.

Kivo 1 taking off.

So that we can separate fact from fiction

and understand what was really happening

in the skies over New Jersey in the fall of 2024.

Drones used to be toys.

Holiday gifts we used to film cool aerial shots of our homes

or our kids' soccer games.

Then they got useful.

They deliver packages.

They search for missing people.

They entertain us with light shows.

Convenient, harmless,

until they weren't.

We all watched as small, cheap drones became

terrifying weapons of war in places like Ukraine.

So when unexplained drones

began to pop up on the Eastern Seaboard,

people were concerned.

To dig deep into the mystery of the New Jersey drones,

I am headed to where it all started.

Northern New Jersey,

just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Here in Bergen County,

one of the witnesses who recorded

the most footage of these drones in the sky is a woman

named Lisa Puluse.

Let's count the drones.

Right there, one, two,

three, four,

five, six, seven...

One of them literally went right over my house

where you could just reach out and touch it.

This one's right above us.

I didn't believe that it could be something

that was gonna harm us,

but you would hear other people talk.

Then you're like, well, maybe-- what if?

What if?

So you're making up your own stories,

and so is everybody else.

When I look at a map of northern New Jersey,

the first thing I notice is that Lisa and her neighbors

live only about five miles outside of Picatinny Arsenal.

This is not a typical military base.

It's the US Army's main laboratory

for testing explosives, weapons,

and advanced hardware, like robots and drones.

Could there be a connection between the base

and the sightings in Lisa's town?

I'm heading over to meet with the mayor of Mine Hill

to find out.

A lot of people up in that area

started seeing them up and over

around Picatinny.

There were airspace violations.

They then put restrictions in

and some of the drones still violated that.

The one thing that got me one night,

I got a call from a resident,

"Hey, mayor, the drones are over the elementary school

and heading toward town hall."

The mayor even grabbed his phone and shot

his own video of the fleet of drones

that had residents on edge.

They were in formation,

they were kind of working together-- a team.

People started seeing them as weapons and asking questions.

I am literally freaking out right now.

Myself and a whole group of people

were trying to get real answers.

Whoever's doing this is tiptoeing

right through the federal and state laws.

Are these things up there to harm us?

Are they Chinese? Are they Russian?

But the feds wouldn't respond. The FAA wouldn't respond.

The military wouldn't respond.

And when you leave people hanging like that,

they're going to fill in the blanks.

It was November 25th when the FAA closed the airspace

above Picatinny Arsenal and then extended

that restricted zone over a golf club

owned by then President-Elect Donald Trump.

They didn't provide a reason why,

but you don't restrict airspace without a reason.

The New York Post has been on this story from day one,

so I reached out to one of the first journalists

to report on the sightings

to find out if they believe there could be any connection

between the drones and the military base.

What was it like in the middle of it all on the ground

like you were? - It was total pandemonium.

No one really knew exactly what the hell was going on.

There was several agencies that all said,

"Everything is fine, don't worry about it,

no problems."

It was like the vibes of the mayor from "Jaws,"

where he tells you everything at the beach is fine,

there's no sharks, just so that everybody

can continue swimming in peace, right?

It was incredibly frustrating.

The number-one question is, "Why didn't Picatinny Arsenal

shoot down the drones that were in their airspace

operating illegally?"

It seems to me that it wasn't exactly just commercial drones

and miss-sightings that was going on in New Jersey in 2024.

There was something else going on.

If the government

wasn't shooting down the aircraft

that were violating the restricted zone,

you have to wonder,

did the government already know what was going on?

We have footage of a formation flight that's traveling

from one side of Picatinny Arsenal

to the other side of Picatinny Arsenal.

With so many sightings, in such a small area,

it actually elevated to the level

where the President himself

had to make comments.

Is there a chance that this could be related

to some kind of secret US government operation at Picatinny?

It's an intriguing lead,

but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Before we jump to the conclusion

that these drones were part of some kind of conspiracy

or cover up,

I want to start with what my training taught me.

At CIA, we're taught to follow very strict rules of analysis,

something called Razors.

And the first Razor that we learn

is something called Occam's Razor,

which states that the simplest explanation

is oftentimes the correct explanation.

So the question is, "Was there something strange happening

"in the skies over New Jersey,

or were those lights nothing out of the ordinary?"

To answer that question, I've arranged a meeting

with a pilot from Skydio, a company whose drones are used

by police departments and first responders

all over the country.

- Hello. - Hey, Andy, how's it going?

Ken Van Hese is a former Navy SEAL

who flew drones on classified missions

all over the world.

If anyone can help me try and understand what was going on

over in New Jersey, he can.

I want to start by showing you a video that I received

from a woman named Lisa.

Lisa lives on a hill above Picatinny Arsenal.

Let's count how many drones--

we got, one, two...

three, four...

There's a lot more than I thought it was going to be.

...six... there's seven...

And as she's counting these,

you can see that she's moving her camera in one direction

- Yeah. - Which suggests that all

the drones are going in a predominant direction.

Would it be possible for us

to recreate what we just saw in this video?

We can take a try and see if we can do it.

- Let's do it. - Awesome.

Matt and I will be

the multi-drone remote flight deck operator.

Wes, you'll be covering down on thermal.

- Let's do it. - All right.

- All right. - Kivo 1 taking off.

Some witnesses said the crafts they saw

were much larger than these.

But what I wanted to recreate wasn't the size,

it was the visual effect.

When multiple drones move together at night,

it can trigger something called perception bias,

where a few small lights in the sky

suddenly look much bigger

and much more ominous than they really are.

I never think of flying a drone from a laptop.

I always think of it from a control.

- The future is here. - Holy smokes.

So now what we're gonna take them is right across

the horizon and see if we can recreate what she saw.

OK.

All right, three, two, one, go.

Look at that.

That is exactly what she sent us in the video.

Two, three, four.

She watched and counted them in the sky.

You can count them right now yourself as they move

across the horizon from one point to another

in one predominant direction.

So then, Ken, what's your theory about what was happening

in the skies over New Jersey?

And do you think any of it could have been Skydio technology?

I think it could have been Skydio.

We do have law enforcement customers

in the New Jersey area,

so I think they could have been flying a drone

as first-responder, uh, missions.

I don't think the average American recognizes

that police forces fly drones at all.

They don't. I think that's good for cops.

I think when people see drones in the sky,

it keeps the person honest.

The tech is here, and it's not going anywhere.

A police drone theory might not be too far-fetched.

The Jersey sightings coincided

with one of the most shocking events of 2024--

when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down

in cold blood on the streets of New York.

CEO Brian Thompson was killed Wednesday morning.

This was a premeditated,

preplanned, brazen, targeted attack.

And a massive hunt for Luigi Mangione was underway.

After a frantic, three-day manhunt,

tonight the NYPD now believes the suspect who gunned down

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson

has escaped New York City.

Coming up-- could it be that simple?

Could the Jersey drone mystery be explained by an increase

in police drones patrolling our skies

that most people are just not aware of?

2

Two weeks after the initial drone sightings,

on December 4th, 2024, everyone's attention shifted.

Federal authorities widened the urgent manhunt for a killer.

The NYPD deploying drones.

Drones played a critical role

in the manhunt for Luigi Mangione,

the suspect of the killing

of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Law enforcement drones ran grid searches over Central Park.

They helped locate early physical evidence,

and then they fanned out across the tri-state area

as he fled.

But here's the thing,

that manhunt happened more than two weeks

after the initial sighting, so that explanation falls apart.

Nevertheless, drone pilot Ken Van Hese

told me he believes the answer is police

and first-responder drone activity

the public is just noticing for the first time.

Ken's theory sparks my curiosity.

So I decided to have a little fun.

I want to see firsthand

what a drone tracking someone looks like

with a test of how my CIA evasion and escape techniques

stack up against the latest police drone technology.

So I asked Ken to set up a manhunt

with the local police department,

the target-- me.

We're going to see how long we can track and follow you.

My job is just to evade for as long as possible

and try to escape detection. - Exactly.

I had no idea that over 1,400 police departments

fly drones every day for all sorts of missions.

Check, maybe, Colorado and Nevada.

I'm going to start using my peripheral vision to try

to identify anything in the sky that's looking for me.

This is nerve-wracking as hell.

In my seven years at CIA,

I spent much of it operating overseas undercover.

I got used to people trying to follow me.

Learning how to shake surveillance

is basic tradecraft, but losing a drone

in the in the sky, that's a different game.

There's a very real instinct to run when you know somebody

is on your tail.

But a professional has to fight that instinct.

OK...

I saw the drone in the sky. All right,

let's get creative here.

I have a real chance of blending in with a crowd.

So all of these folks are hanging out.

Can I walk in here with you guys?

Alright.

Well, it's not easy to get accomplices

for this kind of stuff.

But that's not the only trick up my sleeve.

I need a place where the drone can't see me

and what I'm doing.

I'm actually going to go into an underground bar.

It's open.

We are now underground.

Um, it's a very strange question.

Is there an exit other than this from this building?

Alright.

We got our back exit out of the bar.

So now the question is

whether or not the drone's gonna find us.

OK, we are underneath a canopy.

I hear a drone passing overhead.

There it goes.

It's going towards the opposite direction.

So we're going to continue our walk.

Hopefully that means there's a battery problem.

We are literally feet away from a place

that might be my safe haven.

How you doing? How you doing?

Ah! Cheers!

I was able to beat the drone by exploiting a weakness.

Even these expensive police drones are small in scale

and have battery limits.

But many of the drones reported over New Jersey

were seen flying for hours.

Police drones may have been part of the puzzle,

but I'm not convinced that they're the sole explanation,

which leads me to a number

of other wild conspiracy theories

that exploded on social media.

One of the first conspiracy theories to go viral

came from reality TV star Bethenny Frankel.

There are many different theories.

One, that the government, our government,

is searching for something that has been lost.

There have been many nuclear Ws

that were lost during different wars.

Something could be disassembled and then reassembled here.

Soon, people across the tri-state area started

freaking out that the drones were part of a search

for some kind of loose nuke.

There were over 80 nuclear warheads

that were in Ukraine that came up missing.

It's out there.

Nobody knows where it's at now.

And then rumors, of course,

come out on the Internet

that there may be some dire situation.

They could very possibly be sniffing out

something very dangerous.

How crazy was Bethenny's post?

Maybe not so much.

Before my time at CIA,

I was a US Air Force nuclear missile officer.

So let's walk through what would happen if there was

a dirty bomb in New Jersey.

You'd start quietly.

Radiation detection teams, aircraft with sniffers.

These are systems that already exist.

The public would in fact see more aircraft in the skies.

Helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft,

even drones flying tight-grid search patterns.

What you wouldn't hear is, "Good morning, there may be

a missing nuclear device in your neighborhood."

So what people were seeing could fit this pattern.

And a loose nuke isn't science fiction.

In 1961, a US Air Force B-52 bomber

broke apart over North Carolina

and dropped two fully armed hydrogen bombs.

We call this a Broken Arrow.

One of them nearly went off.

The public didn't learn how close that was

until decades later.

But in this case, you're probably not surprised

to learn there was no missing radiological weapon.

Energy agencies knocking down an alarming theory

saying it's just not true.

Authorities even addressed the rumor in time.

That statement goes on to say that nuclear officials

are not currently conducting any aerial operations

in that region.

What went missing was a small amount

of radioactive material that was used for testing.

It had nothing to do with the drones,

but that didn't matter.

This is what happens when national security anxiety

collides with social media,

and fear is rewarded with clicks.

Speculation takes over, and facts are forgotten.

And within days,

the New Jersey drone mystery went from a dirty-bomb scare

to a full-on invasion.

Only this time, it wasn't a real housewife

raising the alarm. It was a police officer.

2 We don't have any video from her,

but this isn't a random person with a phone.

This is a 911 call from a trained officer.

This was Ocean County,

about 100 miles south of Mine Hill,

where civilian and eyewitness Lisa Puluse was

first recording drones above her home.

A 911 call that came from a state park police officer

who wasn't sure what she was seeing.

She described it as a giant swarm of drones

coming in from over the ocean.

This sighting was one of many that happened in the region,

and the sheriff down there started to raise the alarm.

We have flight radar mapping capabilities,

and we did not see anything indicating it was a plane.

Obviously, they want us to know they're there.

They put on their lights.

Uh, so, who it is, I wish I could tell you,

but, you know, obviously, there's a lot of tension

to this matter throughout.

What struck me when I heard this 911 call

was the sheer number of drones

and that they seemed to be coming from a ship offshore.

What did your office do?

We immediately contacted the Coast Guard.

We reported back around 11:30 that night that there was

11 or 13 of them following their Coast Guard cutter.

One drone that they documented,

it didn't give a heat signal

and it needed another type of fuel source.

Nobody saw them take off or land.

And that's interesting, 'cause at some point,

you would have to take off or land.

So for us, the indication would be that it's possibly coming

off the ocean and possibly a submarine.

What the sheriff went on to tell me

is really quite alarming.

A swarm of drones tracking a Coast Guard Cutter.

The strange thing being that they showed no heat signature,

which suggests that possibly they were trying to cloak.

I mean, this sounds more

like advanced military-grade technology.

And that's why when a congressman went on TV

and made the following announcement

it was a New Jersey resident's worst nightmare.

I'm going to tell you the real deal.

Um, Iran launched a mothership

probably about a month ago,

that contains these drones.

- That mothership is off-- - Really?

I'm going to tell you the deal.

It's off the east coast of the United States of America.

They've launched drones.

It's everything that we can see or hear,

and again, these are from high sources.

I don't say this lightly.

Was there an Iranian mothership

launching an aerial invasion near Atlantic City?

If anyone can help me separate the facts from the fear

on this, it's my friend, Trevor Fortner,

a former US Navy counterterrorism special operator.

- Thank you for coming, brother. - It's great to see you, Andy.

What can I do for you?

So, I've been chewing on this question

of the drone sightings that happened in New Jersey

about a year ago. - OK.

And there were all these rumors circulating

about whether or not there was an Iranian mothership

launching drones into the mainland.

How would the United States

react to a foreign naval threat like that?

I don't believe that we would have allowed them to actually

get that close to the country.

So even though it's international water,

it's not really free water for anyone to just sail in?

Not from our perspective, no. We have a nautical statute.

It's 15 nautical miles.

It becomes international territory.

After that, we're still monitoring that

and observing what's happening.

Had there been a foreign threat,

what's your confidence level the US military

would have neutralized the threat before it even got

close enough to pose direct harm?

- One hundred percent. - That's where I am too, man,

'cause they would have been sunk in the water.

I believe that 100%.

Also, what would be the intent of Iran to send a mothership

so close to our shore and launch drones into our airspace

that they know that we can absolutely detect?

There's easier ways, more efficient ways

to clandestinely sneak items into the country.

Trevor's right.

A ship-based attack isn't very likely.

Boats are slow and trackable.

The nightmare scenario

for every national security professional I know

is a drone attack launched from inside

our own borders

by a group of non-state actors or terrorists.

So if it wasn't a foreign enemy, we have to test

the domestic threat idea.

How fast could a drone swarm go airborne?

And how hard would it be to stop?

2 I'm in the middle of a suburban area.

I have a white picket fence right here.

I have a petroleum depot just over there in the distance.

I have multiple schools and churches

all within the area.

This is a fantastic place to demonstrate the power

of a drone swarm.

A location like this is what we call a soft target.

And that's what the sheriff in Ocean County, New Jersey,

was so worried about when an officer reported seeing

a swarm of 50 drones.

We tried to ascertain, "Is this a government agency?

Is this the CIA? Is this the federal government?"

Obviously, we're thinking national security.

I'm going to talk to the guys operating these drones

to understand if the threat of a drone swarm

could be the key to finally unraveling

the mystery of the New Jersey drones.

That is an incredible display.

Yeah, just a little 80-drone demo

we put together.

We spent a lot of time out here just testing out

different configurations and fleet sizes.

We're operating a giant fleet of drones.

These guys aren't military contractors.

They're a private drone entertainment company.

Everything they need to launch their coordinated drone shows

fits in the back of a truck.

And with a single laptop, one person can launch

and coordinate hundreds of drones.

It's interesting to me that you describe this as a "fleet,"

but when you have to sign up for a waiver with the FAA,

it's considered a "swarm."

Is there a difference in terminology?

We refer to it "a fleet" because we have telemetry data

and communications with everything individually.

So we can control everything.

"Swarm" is a little bit more terrifying because it just

kind of speaks to, like, controlled chaos.

You know, we're in a suburban area right now.

There are some very interesting soft targets.

If you look at this very same community

through the eyes of a threat,

how easy would it be for someone to take

a commercial drone and use it for something nefarious?

- Very easy-- very easy. - , yeah.

Yeah, very easy. Could probably do it in five minutes,

honestly, at least now.

- Scary. - That is scary.

And that is what we're seeing

play out all over the world right now.

Yeah, very prevalent in Ukraine, for sure.

Very, very prevalent.

Drones have transformed the battlefield,

no more so than in Ukraine...

...helping the smaller country bog down

their Russian invaders into a near stalemate.

And what terrifies my national security friends most...

is an attack like this.

Tonight, the Kremlin's seeing the biggest drone attack yet

inside Russia.

Back in 2025,

Ukrainian operators hid armed drones

inside specially camouflaged truck beds.

Then those trucks were driven

thousands of miles deep into Russian territory.

The operators remotely activated the drones,

and a coordinated swarm lifted off,

striking multiple Russian military airfields,

taking out scores of planes

before the Russians even understood what was happening.

The lesson wasn't the drones.

The lesson was the tactic--

an attack that launched from inside an enemy's homeland

that was nearly impossible to stop.

So this is our new warehouse.

We just outgrew our last one.

Ho, ho, ho, ho.

This is our new system, which is basically taking

what we do to a whole new level.

These drones will fly out of the box,

do their whole show, finish, and they'll land

exactly back inside of the spot that they took out of.

I'd say out of 2,000 drones, maybe one will miss their slot.

That's how accurate these drones are.

Now, when I was in the military

and when I served at CIA,

the drones that we were dealing with were gigantic.

They were the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

And they would carry out

reconnaissance missions, surveillance missions.

They would drop missiles from high altitude.

So this is the whole motherboard.

This is what the brains are of one of these drones.

This is it. This is a drone.

They barely are heavy enough to have to be registered

with the FAA. That's how light they are.

When I see the drone light shows

coming in, especially from Asia.

I can't help but be intimidated by what could be done

with a military grade drone.

Is there a one-to-one correlation there?

A lot of the components are the same.

Those are the same drones that could be used

in a military application.

When you take all of this

and you apply it to New Jersey...

It's not so much that we saw

some amazing technological advancement

that we'd never seen before,

but I think it was more that it was happening in a space

and in a pattern that people had not seen before,

but I think there is a weak point

in our airspace, low altitude.

You know, we don't see a lot of things

operate in that airspace.

You know, zero to a thousand feet is,

maybe if you live near an airport or a helipad,

you see activity,

but otherwise you don't see anything.

Graham is right.

We've all seen the movies where drug runners skim the ocean

to avoid Coast Guard radar.

So when it comes to tiny five-pound drones

operating at treetop levels,

you can imagine how hard it would be

to track these.

But remember,

a lot of the sightings were craft

much larger than this.

What do you think was happening in New Jersey

as experts in drones?

I go back and forth on whether it was our own government,

you know, maybe a radar detection,

jamming technology,

or maybe it's even a social experiment.

Like, how are people going to react to weird stuff

they start seeing at low altitude?

I got one more thing I want to show you.

The guys had something up pretty crazy for you.

So why don't we step back outside again?

Absolutely.

- Alright, let's go. - Ready.

It's just incredible to think

that every one of those lights in the sky

is being controlled by one single operator,

somebody who's on our side.

But just imagine what would happen

if somebody with hostile intentions

took control of those drones.

What kind of damage could they inflict?

Russian drones were spotted within NATO airspace,

this time in Romania.

If the government was running exercises

to prepare for such an attack,

they'd keep it under wraps.

But before we jump to this conclusion,

I need to pressure-test a more otherworldly theory.

They're not just like regular drones.

They're UAPs.

That's the UFO.

At Malmstrom Air Force Base,

ten of our nuclear ICBMs were rendered inoperable.

At the same time, a glowing red orb

was observed overhead.

Coming up, UFOs, government preparedness tests,

or police drones?

We may finally get our answers to the mysterious drones

flying over New Jersey.

2 Driving home, I keep replaying it.

Takes a lot to scare me, but the New Jersey...

- The rumors... - Radioactive material in New Jersey

has gone missing. - ...the confusion.

Iran launched a mothership.

Weeks of theories about Iran,

missing weapons, manhunts that spread

across New Jersey from November into December 2024.

Right there. Oh, my goodness.

Like Lisa Puluse said at the beginning...

Nobody's giving us answers.

Your mind goes...

all over the place.

Residents across the state were spiraling.

Bro, this is crazy man.

It even got to the point

where they were wondering if it was human at all.

These drones are mysterious and they're UAPs.

They're not just, like, regular drones.

Are the drones being controlled

by an extraterrestrial intelligence?

The idea that the drones could have been UFOs

became one of the big memes.

That is a yes.

And once again, officials were not denying it,

even though the drones were using FAA running lights,

and showed no characteristics

of out-of-this-world technology.

All of this got me thinking about something at CIA

that we call "narrative control."

In the intelligence world, this means shaping how people

understand events.

Not deceiving people or hiding secrets per se,

but steering perception in the direction that you want.

There's no better example of this than an incident

that happened 50 years ago

when a UFO story was used to cover up a classified test.

In 1967, unidentified objects were reported

over nuclear missile control centers

at Malmstrom Air Force Base.

Around the same time,

multiple intercontinental nuclear missiles

suddenly went offline.

Missileers on duty would later go on to tell the story

of the day UFOs turned off our launch capability

to anyone who would listen.

And that lived on in UFO lore for decades.

At Malmstrom Air Force Base,

in which 10 of our nuclear ICBMs were rendered inoperable.

At the same time, a glowing red orb

was observed overhead.

But last year, declassified documents

told a very different story.

The missiles being disabled had nothing to do with aliens.

It was all the result of a top-secret US military test.

An electromagnetic pulse experiment

designed to see whether an EMP

could knock our own missiles offline.

It worked!

And because it worked so well, the Pentagon stayed silent

because it didn't want the Soviets

to know what had really happened.

And the government allowed the story about aliens

to go unchecked for more than half a century.

What is that?

The government did not create the Jersey UFO story,

but they did allow it to live.

The fact that the federal agencies responsible

for briefing the public have not come forward

in a clear way is unacceptable.

Why it is that they're not being forthcoming

with this information is confusing to me

and very frustrating.

It seemed like we may never get an actual answer

to this mystery.

But then I get a major scoop.

The New York Post reports that they may have the answer

to what was actually flying in the skies in 2024.

A private company with a government contract

was testing out their newest tech,

a car-sized aircraft.

Does that ring a bell?

And residents have compared some of them

to the size of a small car.

There are SUV-sized drones flying over my home,

so I'm going to make a cocktail.

The reporter who broke the story?

My man, Shane.

We got a tip from a source who was former military

that some people were taking credit for setting off

some of the scares over there in New Jersey,

and they were debuting this manned aerial craft

that was about the size of a car.

This is from a company called Pivotal,

and it's a BlackFly.

Now, on the record, they said that they had

nothing to do with it,

but they did not rule out the fact

that they could have sold to somebody

on the East Coast.

So, Shane, what's your net takeaway from all this?

I do think that I keep coming back to, um, Picatinny Arsenal.

It could be, like, a field experiment, essentially.

It doesn't solve the whole mystery,

but it at least plugs something in

so that we can figure it out.

Even if this eases fears that what people were seeing

wasn't an invasion,

but rather advanced car-sized aerial technology,

the question still remains, why?

What is the government not telling us?

But then I heard this

from the White House press secretary.

After research and study, the drones that were flying

over New Jersey in large numbers

were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research

and various other reasons.

"Research and various other reasons."

Words that explain everything, but say nothing.

Unless it wasn't just a test of the technology,

but a test of us.

What is that?

Specifically, how we, the public, would respond.

Of all the places to carry out a test like this,

of course you would pick a dense,

heavily populated, urban location like New Jersey

to test what would happen, how would people react,

how would the rumors spread, how would authorities respond?

How would elected officials speak out?

Dozens upon dozens, every single night,

and nobody's doing anything.

It's plausible this test

was as much from an offensive perspective

as defensive.

If you think about the future of conflict,

it's going to be about reaching people where they live,

where they feel safe.

And when you look at how the public reacted

to these strange lights in the sky,

their reaction went from curiosity

to terror in an instant.

Holy crap.

What is going on in New Jersey?

Look at that.

Modern wars aren't won by weapons alone.

They're won by shaping perception.

The anxiety that people are just feeling.

I don't know. I don't know what to think.

Because the side

that can take control of the narrative

doesn't have to win the fight

to win the war.

Cheers, everyone, and stay safe out there.