Authorities Debunk Viral Explanation for New Jersey Drone Sightings
Authorities in New Jersey threw cold water Tuesday on a popular theory explaining why a spate of drone sightings over the state might have occurred.
Radioactive material that was declared missing earlier this month was revealed to have been found shortly after—debunking a viral narrative spread by the likes of Bethenny Frankel and Joe Rogan that the dozens of drone sightings across the Garden State were related to a search for the missing hazardous substance.
Earlier in December, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission posted an active alert that a shipment of Geranium-68 from the Nazha Cancer Center in South Jersey was lost in transit. But the New Jersey Department of Energy confirmed to ABC News on Monday that the missing shipment has since been “located, repackaged, and sent to the manufacturer from the FedEx shipping facility where it was misplaced.”
A doctor at the cancer facility also confirmed that the missing radioactive material—which was depleted and only contained trace amounts of radiation—had been located.
Both the cancer clinic and the Department of Energy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Conspiracy theories about the hunt for radioactive substance have proliferated in recent days on social media—Real Housewives of New York star Bethenny Frankel, for example, repeated a theory she claimed to have heard from “this guy whose father worked with the Pentagon, and NASA, and secret projects,” who told her that “these drones are ours and that they could very possibly be sniffing out something very dangerous.”
Podcast star Joe Rogan also weighed in this week on the mystery drone saga currently gripping much of the East Coast, expressing his “genuine” concern that the drones were looking for the lost nuclear material.
The federal government has been trying to calm the drone fears, insisting in a statement that the aircraft people are seeing in New Jersey and other states are a “combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones.”
“We don‘t propose to see any national security or public safety risk by these drones and these aircraft that are flying,” National Security spokesperson John Kirby said in an interview on Monday.