Mystery Drones Swarmed a US Military Base for 17 Days. Investigators are Stumped

The Wall Street Journal reports on a 'suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft... as many as a dozen or more' that appeared in Virginia 10 months ago 'over an area that includes the home base for the Navy's SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval port.' The article notes this was just 10 months after the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon...

After watching the drones — some 'roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour' — there were weeks of meetings where 'Officials from agencies including the Defense Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon's UFO office joined outside experts to throw out possible explanations as well as ideas about how to respond...'

Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn't qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway...

Drone incursions into restricted airspace was already worrying national-security officials. Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments. The Energy Department's Nevada Nuclear Security Site outside Las Vegas detected four of the drones over three days. Employees spotted a fifth. U.S. officials said they didn't know who operated the drones in Nevada, a previously unreported incursion, or for what reason. A spokeswoman said the facility has since upgraded a system to detect and counter drones...

Over 17 days, the [Virginia] drones arrived at dusk, flew off and circled back... They also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them. Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said drones had for years been spotted flying around defense installations. But the nightly drone swarms over Langley [Air Force base], he said, were unlike any past incursion...

Analysts learned that the smaller quadcopters didn't use the usual frequency band available for off-the-shelf commercial drones — more evidence that the drone operators weren't hobbyists.

'Langley officials canceled nighttime training missions, worried about potential collisions with the drone swarm, and moved the F-22 jet fighters to another base... On December 23, the drones made their last visit.'

But toward the end of the article, it notes that 'In January, authorities found a clue they hoped would crack the case.' It was a student at the University of Minnesota named Fengyun Shi — who was reported flying a drone on a rainy morning near a Virginia shipyard that builds nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. Their drone got stuck in a tree, and ended up with federal investigators who found 'Shi had photographed Navy vessels in dry dock, including shots taken around midnight. Some were under construction at the nearby shipyard.'
On Jan. 18, federal agents arrested Shi as he was about to board a flight to China on a one-way ticket. Shi told FBI agents he was a ship enthusiast and hadn't realized his drone crossed into restricted airspace. Investigators weren't convinced. but found no evidence linking him to the Chinese government. They learned he had bought the drone on sale at a Costco in San Francisco the day before he traveled to Norfolk. U.S. prosecutors charged Shi with unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations, the first case involving a drone under a provision of U.S. espionage law. The 26-year-old Chinese national pleaded guilty and appeared in federal court in Norfolk on Oct. 2 for sentencing. Magistrate Judge Lawrence Leonard said he didn't believe Shi's story — that he had been on vacation and was flying drones in the middle of the night for fun. 'There's significant holes,' the judge said in court.
'If he was a foreign agent, he would be the worst spy ever known,' said Shi's attorney, Shaoming Cheng. 'I'm sorry about what happened in Norfolk,' Shi said before he was sentenced to six months in federal prison.

But 'U.S. officials have yet to determine who flew the Langley drones or why...'
'U.S. officials confirmed this month that more unidentified drone swarms were spotted in recent months near Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.