These photos don’t show the mysterious, unidentified drones reported in New Jersey since November

An aviation mystery is in the air this holiday season, and the internet is buzzing with theories. Since mid-November, people have spotted unidentified drones flying over New Jersey, prompting news stories and an FBI investigation. 

Senior FBI officials told lawmakers Dec. 10 that the agency is "actively investigating" the New Jersey drones, but they said the FBI does not know who is responsible or if the drones pose a threat to public safety or national security. The Pentagon said the drones are not of foreign origin.

With little information available, social media posts on the topic have ranged in tone from curious to alarmed. 

"So, what the hell is going on with the drones over New Jersey?" asked a Threads user in one Dec. 11 post that included images. "Huge swarms of them, coming in from over the water, flying around with seemingly no purpose." 

It continued, saying that the drones tailed U.S. Coast Guard ships and triggered a congressional inquiry. It added that people had "spotted and recorded" five to six similar drones over Colorado’s Boulder County. 

The post also included two purported photos of the drones. One image showing a large collection of dotted, colorful lights hovering in the sky above a body of water, with a skyline in the distance. The other, which had a different skyline in the distance, showed a cluster of orange-yellow lights that were arranged into a sort of jagged line and also hovering above the water. 

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

(Screenshot from Threads)

Reverse-image search results show that neither of the images in the Threads post show the New Jersey drones that recently captured people’s imagination and sparked concern about foreign intelligence gathering. 

The first image showing the large group of multicolored lights was linked to a holiday drone show in Texas. It matches TikTok user @mermazinggame’s Dec. 7 video, which shows a collection of drones moving through the sky as their lights change color and reflect off the water below. 

@mermazinggame I tried to go live, but I had no signal! All these recent ufo sightings are now making sense. #ufosky #spacex #droneshow #southpadreisland #uaptiktok ♬ original sound - Mermazing

"What?" the video narrator said as the drones moved. "And it’s coming closer! I feel like I can touch it."

The video caption read: "I tried to go live, but I had no signal! All these recent ufo sightings are now making sense." The poster had also tagged the video with SpaceX, drone show and South Padre Island.

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The TikTok user tagged the video’s location as Starbase, the name of Space X’s rocket assembly and launch site in south Texas. (On Dec. 12, billionaire Elon Musk, Space X’s CEO, requested an election to make Starbase an incorporated city in Texas.)

News reports show that SpaceX sponsored a Dec. 7 holiday drone show. The reports said the show featured 600 drones that flew over Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island, Texas. The show lasted about 13 minutes, according to videos. 

The exact origin of the Threads post’s second image is less clear, but it didn’t show drones reported in New Jersey. We know this because the reports of drone flyovers in New Jersey began Nov. 18, and a reverse-image search of the photo turned up identical results from much earlier than that. 

For example, we found a more vibrant and slightly less zoomed in version of the same image in a YouTube video posted in April 2020. In Spanish, that video purported to show "Extraterrestrial spaceships in New York," with the caption asking: "What is happening in New York??" 

Another reverse-image search revealed these photos were first shared online as early as 2019, also well before the buzz about any New Jersey drones. Similar photos of a turquoise blue skyline at night were linked to a 2018 electrical fire after transformer explosions in Queens, New York City, but we didn’t find photo or video matching this exact skyline — either with or without the yellow-orange lights in the upper right hand corner. 

A Threads post purported to show photos of the mysterious drones that have been reported flying over parts of New Jersey in November and December 2024. 

Reverse-image search results show that neither of the images showed New Jersey drones: The first showed drones from a Dec. 7 holiday drone show in Texas and the second has been circulating online since at least 2019 — years before the first reports of unidentified drones flying in New Jersey. 

We rate this claim False. 

PolitiFact staff writers Marta Campabadal Graus and Maria Briceño contributed to this report.