Here Are the Top Five Drone Conspiracies So Far

Hundreds of drones are reportedly descending over northern New Jersey. Residents have filmed them, mayors have complained about them, and an appallingly quiet federal response has led Americans across the country to offer wild speculations about their origins, with everyone from leftists to military contractors and conservative lawmakers chiming in on the issue.

A TikTok video by John Ferguson, the CEO of drone manufacturer Saxon Aerospace, was amplified by Joe Rogan on Sunday, with the podcaster remarking that it was the first conspiracy about the aerial machines that had him “genuinely concerned.”

Ferguson didn’t believe that the “small-car sized” drones indicated any “nefarious intent” but suggested that “the only reason why they would be flying, and flying that low, is because they’re trying to smell something on the ground,” suggesting that the drones could be looking for gas or radioactive material.

“Now drones, they have no reason to be in the air at night. Unless you’re doing some type of ISR work—intelligence surveillance reconnaissance you know, looking for bad guys or a search and rescue victim,” Ferguson continued. “The only reason why you would ever fly an unmanned aircraft at night is if you’re looking for something, whether it be a person, or trying to smell gas.”

Commercial-grade drones were first spotted lingering over sections of northern New Jersey in mid-November, sparking an FBI investigation into the aerial gathering. At a Wednesday briefing between the office of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and the Department of Homeland Security, mayors from the region lamented that no one from state or federal agencies had been able to tell them exactly how many drones were flying over the state, with estimates ranging from 400 to thousands, according to NBC News.

Nick Ribaudo, a self-described “leftist Ben Shapiro” and media critic, also joined in on the conspiracy conversation on TikTok, posting a skit on Sunday that highlighted the spontaneous rise in drone activity around the same time that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination was bringing Americans together across party lines.

“Sure seems like we could be doing a lot more if we were a unified working class,” Thompson joked in a video that drew more than 1.6 million views and nearly 300,000 likes.

The drone sightings have also breathed fresh air into some of the most outlandish conspiracies from the last several decades, including the so-called Project Blue Beam, a theory invented in the 1990s by Canadian Serge Monast that claimed a cabal of the world’s most powerful people were projecting images into the sky to induce fear and confusion among the masses. Images could include alien invasions, religious figures, or, in this case, hundreds of drones inexplicably patrolling New Jersey.

Politicians also joined the chorus on the drones, with some stoking fears that the sky gathering was a visitation from a foreign adversary.

New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew suggested to Fox News on Wednesday that the drones were coming from an Iranian “mothership”—a claim that the Pentagon quickly shot down.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the same day.

Other Republicans also, perhaps a little overzealously, pointed to foreign actors as the reason behind the New Jersey drone takeover.

“The elusive maneuvering of these drones suggests a major military power sophistication that begs the question whether they have been deployed to test our defense capabilities—or worse—by violent dictatorships, perhaps maybe Russia, or China, or Iran, or North Korea,” Republican Representative Chris Smith told reporters on Saturday.

Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also got in on the drone action last week, claiming in a video rant on her X account that the government’s continued inability to ID the strange lights hovering over the Garden State was “total bullshit” that put every American “in danger.” She has since claimed that the federal government is controlling the drones.

Elon Musk’s favorite Democrat is one of Donald Trump’s top choices to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

CNN reported that Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz, who served as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Covid czar” during the pandemic, had his name floated for FEMA head. It’s not yet clear if Trump and Moskowitz have spoken about the role, but three sources with knowledge of Trump’s thinking confirmed to CNN that the Florida Democrat is definitely a contender for the role.

While the addition of a Democrat to Trump’s Cabinet may be surprising, Moskowitz has historically aligned himself with House Republicans on many issues and is familiar with many people within the Trump campaign.

Moskowitz was also the first Democrat to join the congressional caucus for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. He has advocated for crippling federal government cuts, supports Israel’s bombardment on Gaza, is one of the top recipients of AIPAC funding in the House, and was one of just 15 House Democrats to vote to give Trump the power to revoke nonprofits’ tax-exempt status.

These decisions make Moskowitz’s rumored FEMA nomination much less surprising. If Moskowitz does leave to join Trump’s Cabinet, however, his absence would make Democrats’ position in the House even more precarious. DeSantis is known to delay special elections for Democrats so that their seats may remain vacant for as long as possible.

A group of Senate Democrats introduced a bill Monday to abolish the Electoral College.

U.S. Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a constitutional amendment to install a nationwide popular vote in presidential elections. Currently, a network of 538 electors represent the 50 states, and whichever candidate secures at least 270 electors is declared the winner.

The Senate Judiciary Committee posted on X Monday that the bill advocated “restoring democracy by allowing the direct election of presidents through popular vote alone.”

A press release from the group said that 17 states and the District of Columbia had agreed to bypass the Electoral College and allocate their electoral votes to the winner of a nationwide popular vote.

“In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple. No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it,” Schatz said in a separate tweet.

But attempting to get rid of the Electoral College via constitutional amendment may prove to be a massive boondoggle for Democrats. Far easier than ratifying an amendment to abolish the Electoral College, the Democrats might be better off simply passing legislation to increase the number of House representatives, as the number of electors is determined by the number of senators and representatives.

The Founding Fathers intended for the House to continue expanding in proportion to the population of each state, but the number of representatives has been frozen at 435 since 1910. In 1910, each district had 211,000 constituents. In 2020, each district had an average of 762,000 constituents, a dramatic 360 percent increase.

Trump wants to kill the United States Postal Service.

The president-elect was asked about the USPS losing money during a press conference in Palm Beach on Monday.

“Well there is talk about the Postal Service being taken private, you do know that. Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, it really isn’t,” Trump said. “You know it’s a lot different today … between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn’t have. But there is talk about that, it’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at it.”

The comments confirm a Washington Post report from over the weekend that Trump is considering plans to privatize the entire Postal Service due to its financial losses. He has reportedly spoken about the idea to Howard Lutnick, his commerce secretary pick and head of his transition team.

USPS privatization has been in the works for some time now. Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been doing his best to corrode one of the oldest, constitutionally ensured institutions in this country.

On-time delivery rates fell when DeJoy was appointed in 2020, particularly in communities of color. He facilitated the removal and destruction of mail sorting machines that were crucial to allowing USPS to function smoothly. And he has multiple questionable investments. Last week, he even covered his ears while being grilled by congressional Republicans for dismantling USPS from the inside out.

“Louis DeJoy is the perfect example of a Trump nominee. After Trump appointed him, he ran USPS into the ground. Now, he claims it doesn’t work & will propose privatizing it,” one X commentator wrote. “Then, he, Trump & their cronies will steal the business, charge exorbitant amounts & rape the public.”

“The Postal Service is literally in the Constitution. It’s an essential PUBLIC service, and it should never be privatized. This would hurt millions of Americans, especially those in the most rural places,” Minnesota Senator Tina Smith said.

President-elect Donald Trump confirmed Monday that he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently, and warned that “all hell is gonna break out” if Israelis held hostage by Hamas aren’t returned by January 20, the day he reenters the White House.

“We had a very good talk. We discussed what will happen.… As you know, I gave warning that if these hostages aren’t back home by that date, all hell’s gonna break out,” Trump said, doubling down on threats he made earlier this month.

Netanyahu on Sunday said he had a phone call with Trump over the weekend, during which the two spoke about Israel’s next steps in Gaza and Syria.

“It was a very friendly, very warm, and very important conversation,” the Israeli prime minister said in a video on Sunday. “We discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory, and we also spoke at length about the efforts we are making to free our hostages.

“We will continue to act relentlessly to return home all of our hostages, the living and the deceased,” he added.

Around 250 Israelis were abducted by Hamas during their attack on October 7, 2023. At least 154 have been released, rescued by the Israel Defense Forces, or recovered dead. In the last year, Israel has responded by killing more than 45,000 Palestinian adults, children, journalists, and aid workers in the Gaza Strip, doing irreversible damage to the region.

Donald Trump promised Monday to launch a lawsuit against The Des Moines Register over a preelection poll that found Vice President Kamala Harris had “leapfrogged” the Republican candidate, in a state he went on to handily win.

During a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, one journalist asked Trump about his ongoing defamation cases, asking, “Could you see moving that to other people with individual platforms, social media influencers, people that—”

“Or newspapers, yeah.” Trump interrupted.

“Yeah, oh, I do. I think you have to do it, because they’re very dishonest,” Trump continued. “We need a great media, we need a fair media. We need, uh, it’s very important. And we need borders, we need walls, but we need borders and we need fair elections.”

Trump went on rambling on about how they were still counting votes in California, which is not true. The weave eventually wove itself back, and the president-elect continued his pledge to sue newspapers over alleged defamation.

“I have a few others that I’m doing, uh, I’m gonna, as an example, we’re bringing—I’m doing this not because I want to, I’m doing this because I have an obligation to—I’m gonna be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster, who got me right all the time. And then just before the election, she said I was gonna lose by three or four points, and it became the biggest story all over the world … because I was gonna win Iowa by 20 points. The farmers love me, and I love the farmers,” he said.

Trump was speaking about pollster Ann Selzer, whose Iowa poll anticipated that Harris would lead Trump by three points in the state. In reality, he won Iowa by 13 points, making for a 16-point error. Selzer & Co. had previously been considered the gold standard of polling in the country.

Crucially, it wasn’t the “biggest story” all over the world, but it’s one that has been bothering Trump for more than a month now. In a post on Truth Social last month, Trump called out Selzer by name and said that an investigation into her poll was “fully called for!”

As far off as Selzer’s poll was, it’s not illegal to publish a poll that doesn’t accurately predict something. Trump’s obsession with Selzer appears to be part of the president-elect’s penchant for targeting those who publish unflattering things about him.

Buried in Trump’s incoherent rambling Monday, he pledged to make good on that threat and claimed that Selzer’s poll constituted “fraud” and “election interference.” He promised to file “a major lawsuit against them, either today or tomorrow.”

Trump also mentioned his other ongoing media lawsuits against CBS News’s 60 Minutes, journalist and author Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer Center for giving prizes to journalists who wrote about Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Trump falsely claims was a “hoax.”

Trump’s newest threat against the media comes on the heels of a $15 million settlement with ABC News in a defamation lawsuit he brought against the network—a settlement that has baffled media experts, who believe that ABC could have won the suit, and consider the network’s sudden surrender to be obedience in advance of Trump’s coming presidential term.

More than 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia invaded the Eastern European nation in February 2022. Cities have been leveled, and 370,000 injuries have been reported, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

But the scope and scale of that devastation is apparently easily comprehended by Donald Trump, who has refused to visit the country. Speaking with reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Trump repeated several times that Ukraine had been “flattened like a pancake” while comparing the war to his lucrative Manhattan real estate career.

The president-elect took a detour while responding to a question about whether he believed Ukraine should cede territory to Russia, describing areas of the country as more akin to “demolition sites” than recognizable cities.

“A lot of that territory, when you look at what’s happened to those—there are cities where there’s not a building standing. It’s a demolition site. There’s not a building standing,” Trump said. “People can’t go back to those cities.”

But that’s when the president-elect’s answer took a turn for the worse, suddenly conflating the controlled demolitions carried out by his multimillion-dollar real estate development company to the near-constant barrage of bombs dropped by Russian forces on Ukrainian cities.

“Just like when I knock down a building in Manhattan, which is actually, this is worse actually, because we do it step by step,” he continued. “This thing, this is—and by the way, in those buildings are many people. Many people are in those buildings.

“Big buildings—this is what I did, very well—these are very long buildings, 15 to 20 stories high, and they’re flattened like a pancake.

“It’s gotta be stopped, and I’m doing my best to stop it,” he added.

Trump’s other answers about his international relationships were similarly befuddling. At one point, the president-elect insisted that Chinese President Xi Jinping had not yet decided if he would attend Trump’s inauguration (Xi has reportedly declined the invitation) and claimed that leaders of hundreds of nations had phoned him to attend, dryly remarking that “you wouldn’t believe how many countries there are.”

Ultimately, any attendance by a world leader at Trump’s inauguration would be historically unprecedented. State Department records dating back to 1874 indicate that no foreign heads of state have ever shown up to the ceremony, typically over security concerns.

One of Trump’s biggest and boldest campaign promises was that he would immediately end the Russian invasion of Ukraine—though his philosophy on how to achieve that was suspiciously scant of details and, at times, veered toward solutions that would invariably aid Russia.

In June, Trump said he would be open to an increase in U.S. weapons aid to Ukraine so long as it shows up for peace talks with Russia.

Trump’s advisers envisioned that the peace talks—which Trump promised to facilitate upon winning in November—would also quietly include Ukraine ceding part of the country that is currently occupied by Russian forces. The concept was drawn up by retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, both former chiefs of staff in Trump’s National Security Council.

Trump has also threatened to initiate U.S. withdrawal from NATO, the strategic Western military and trade alliance that opposes Russia. In February, Trump claimed he once told a European leader that he’d allow Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies if other members didn’t “pay” their “bills.”

CNN announced Sunday that it has begun investigating the identity of a man who the network had claimed in a recent report was a prisoner of the ousted Syrian government, according to The Wrap.

In a story published last week, chief CNN international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her crew, escorted by Syrian rebels, discovered a man hiding under a blanket in what was the “only locked cell” in a “secret prison” at a Syrian air force intelligence base in Damascus.

The man identified himself as a civilian named Adel Gharbal from Homs, and claimed that he had been in solitary confinement for three months. He appeared surprised to learn that Bashar Al Assad’s regime had fallen.

“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed,” Ward wrote in a post on X.

When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper what is known “about this man and how he ended up in the prison,” Ward admitted that “we don’t know that much because you can see from the report, Anderson, that he’s in a deep state of shock.”

However, some concerns have surfaced about the veracity of the report.

A website called Verify-Sy, which states that it fact-checks stories about Syria, said that residents of a neighborhood called Al Bayyada had identified the man as Salama Mohammad Salama, or “Abu Hamza,” a first lieutenant in Syrian air force intelligence.

Verify-Sy also pointed out that the man’s behavior did not seem to match his reported conditions of confinement and torture, as he did not flinch when exposed to light and appeared well groomed and physically unharmed.

Now CNN is looking into the possibility that the man wasn’t a prisoner at all.

“We reported the scene as it unfolded, including what the prisoner told us, with clear attribution. We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity. We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story,” CNN said in a statement to The Wrap.

“No one other than the CNN team was aware of our plans to visit the prison building featured in our report that day. The events transpired as they appear in our film,” CNN said in the statement. “The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was taken by the guard—a Syrian rebel.”

CNN can’t seem to spot the difference between the assassination of a health insurance executive who made his money denying millions of Americans health care access and the death of innocent people at the hands of police.

On Sunday, CNN host Michael Smerconish lamented that the American public hadn’t rushed to memorialize the outside of the midtown Manhattan Hilton Hotel where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated earlier this month.

“I slowed my gait as I passed a side entrance to the Hilton Hotel, realizing that this was the same day in the same early morning hour in the precise location where, one week prior, a 50-year-old father of two was assassinated,” Smerconish monologued on air. “But something was missing. Any sign whatsoever of the tragedy that occurred right here, and which has captivated the nation.”

“We’ve all seen the crime scene that’s been shown many times in the media. But a week later, here’s what was left: a lone piece of NYPD crime tape affixed to a barrier. No memorial of the kind that often appears spontaneously after a similar tragedy.”

Smerconish then went on to compare Thompson’s death to some of the most tragic cultural touchstones in the nation’s recent history, including the murders of John Lennon, George Floyd, Heather Heyer, and Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

“But there was no sign of any makeshift memorial on 51st Street,” Smerconish added in a segment with the on-screen banner “a sad, new normalcy.”

What Smerconish seems to be missing, however, is the sad role that Thompson played in a system that increasingly prioritizes shareholder profits over successful medical outcomes for its clients. The public’s response to the executive’s death should be studied, not condemned, as an indictment on the sorry state and exploitative nature of America’s health care industry.

Federal data from 2022 compiled by the personal finance website ValuePenguin found that UnitedHealthcare far outpaced its competitors when it came to denying coverage, rejecting 32 percent, or roughly one in three claims. In 2024, the insurer’s parent group spent more than $5.8 million lobbying Congress on health care–related issues.

Meanwhile, Americans are paying more than ever for health insurance, with costs far outpacing the rate of inflation. A Kaiser Family Foundation report published earlier this year found that the vast majority of U.S. adults are worried about being able to afford a major medical expense, regardless of their financial position.

Lindsey Graham told Meet the Press that Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick, Pete Hegseth, plans on releasing the woman who accused him of sexual assault from her nondisclosure agreement, essentially forcing her to choose between saying nothing or going public with her story and subjecting herself to vile partisan attacks.

“He told me he would release her from that agreement,” Graham said. “I would want to know if anybody nominated for a high-level job in Washington legitimately assaulted somebody.

“If people have an allegation to make, come forward and make it,” the South Carolina senator added. “We’ll decide whether or not it’s credible. Right now [Hegseth is] being tried by anonymous sources. That will not stand.”

Despite Graham’s objections to “anonymous” allegations, the woman in question filed a police report against Hegseth, accusing him of sexual assault in 2017. The police report noted that she had bruises on her thigh. The defense secretary nominee and former Fox & Friends host later paid the woman an undisclosed sum.

Trump and Senate Republicans have done a 180 on Hegseth, from calling his allegations “very disturbing” to now being “in a good place with Pete,” as Graham said. Hegseth has been accused of sexual harassment, financial mismanagement of two different veterans’ groups, and workplace misconduct including intoxication and sexist behavior. Now the GOP is rallying around him in the same way they rallied around Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 nomination hearings. And as with Kavanaugh, they seem very prepared to make his alleged victim’s life hell.

“All of these are anonymous allegations. He’s given me his side of the story. It makes sense to me, I believe him. Unless somebody’s willing to come forward I think he’s gonna get through,” Graham continued. “Remember Kavanaugh? … We’re not gonna let that happen to Pete.”