Drones flew over an American base for 17 days. The Pentagon is confused

U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports of a fleet of unidentified aircraft circling over Langley Air Force Base near Virginia Beach.

Kelly, a senior and respected commander at the base, went up to the roof of the squadron to watch the spectacle for himself. He joined several other officers in charge of some of the nation’s most advanced aircraft, including the F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

For several nights, military personnel have reported mysterious intrusions into restricted airspace over an area that contains one of the highest concentrations of national security installations in the U.S. The show usually begins between 45 minutes and an hour after sunset, another senior officer told Kelly.

The first drone arrived immediately. Kelly, a professional fighter pilot, estimated that it was about six meters long and flew at a speed of more than 100 miles per hour, at an altitude of 900 to 1200 meter. Other drones arrived, one after the other, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawnmowers.

The drones headed south, across the Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Virginia, and over an area that includes the home base of Team 6 of the Sea Lions and the base at Norfolk Harbor, the world’s largest seaport.

The seniors did not know if the drone fleet, which grew to ten or more units over the next few nights, was controlled by sophisticated hobbyists or hostile forces. Some suspected that Russia or China had sent them, to check the reaction of the American forces.

Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near US military bases unless they pose an immediate threat. Aerial espionage is not considered such a threat, though some lawmakers hope to give the military more leeway.

The drone tracks discovered in the Langley base area

 

Reports of the drones reached President Biden and opened two weeks of discussions at the White House after the drones first appeared in December of last year. Officials from agencies such as the Department of Defense, the FBI and the Pentagon’s UFO office joined outside experts to offer possible explanations, as well as ideas on how to respond.

Drone intrusions into restricted airspace have already caused concern among national security officials. Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones passed over a government site where nuclear weapons tests are being conducted. The Department of Energy’s national security site in Nevada, outside Las Vegas, spotted four of the drones over three days. Workers spotted a fifth drone.

US officials said they did not know who operated the drones in Nevada, as part of the previously unreported intrusion, or why. A spokeswoman for the facility said the facility has since upgraded a system to identify and neutralize drones.

“What will the US do if this happens in Washington?”

The observations revealed the dilemma of protecting against drones on US soil, versus the ease with which they can be operated or combated abroad. Drones have become deadly and economical war tools, capable of carrying espionage equipment, explosives or deadly chemicals. However, shooting at suspicious aircraft over the US could disrupt or endanger American lives that the military is obligated to protect.

Early last year, a suspected Chinese spy balloon filled with electronic spying equipment floated around the country for eight days while senior military officials waited for it to reach a location isolated enough to be safely shot down. After the balloon reached the southeast coast, an F-22 from Langley blew it up with a missile.

Ten months later, the drone fleet appeared at Langley.

For 17 days, the drones would arrive at dusk, fly away and then return. Some of them twinkled with little lights, making them look like a constellation moving across the night sky — or like a science fiction movie, Kelly said, “‘Close Encounters at Langley.’ They were also difficult to track, and they disappeared every night, despite the many measures employed to capture them.

Gen. Glenn Van Herck, then commander of the U.S. Northern Region and North American Air Defense Command, said the drones had been seen for years flying around security facilities. But the nocturnal swarms of drones over Langley, he said, were unlike any previous intrusion.

Van Herck, who oversaw the military’s response to the Chinese balloon, ordered fighter jets and other aircraft to fly close enough to the drones to gather information. He suggested that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin authorize all electronic surveillance and spying techniques to learn more about the drones, even though the Pentagon is limited in what it can do on US soil.

“If there are unidentified objects in North America,” Van Herck said, the task is to “go out and identify them.”

It turned out that solving this mystery is easy to talk about, but even for the world’s leading power, it is difficult to do. The local police were among the first to try.

For two nights, beginning Dec. 6, police in Hampton, Virginia, chased the drones, in vehicles and on foot, exchanging brief reports and updates from Langley via police walkie-talkies: one located near Marshall Street or Gosnold’s Hope Park.

Three more appeared to land, but took off again before officers could reach them. Another one seems to have landed in the water. Finally, the police gave up.

General Kelly, now retired, said the Pentagon was also confused. What would the US do, he asked, “if this happens over the ‘Mall’ (Washington’s main avenue)?”

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen government officials and other people familiar with the events, as well as police records, legal documents and drone footage.

flying blind

The swarm of drones was reported to the Pentagon’s Office of the National Military Command Center, which is responsible for sending emergency messages to US military commands around the world. A report was sent to the White House situation room, and the president learned about it in his daily briefing.

American officials did not believe that amateurs were operating the drones, given the complexity of the operation. The drones flew in a specific pattern: one or two larger fixed-wing drones flew more than 100 feet in the air, while smaller quadcopters, such as 20-pound commercial drones, flew lower and slower. Occasionally, they hovered instead of.

The drones approached from the north around six o’clock in the evening to get close to the base, which is on a peninsula at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and then continued south, beyond radar range. They repeated this pattern and were usually gone by midnight.

National Security Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall led brainstorming sessions at the White House. One of the seniors suggested using electronic signals to disrupt the drones’ navigation systems. Others warned it could disrupt local emergency systems and Wi-Fi networks.

One proposal was to use directed energy—a technology under development—to disable or destroy the drones. An FAA official said such a weapon poses too high a risk for commercial aircraft during the December travel season.

Others have suggested that the US Coast Guard use nets to capture the drones. An official noted that the Coast Guard may not have the authority to use such a weapon in this case. Besides, it was too difficult to follow the drones closely.

Langley officials asked US Navy and Coast Guard ships to search for the drones, but they had little success. They were much smaller than military aircraft and did not always show up on the radar. Military personnel had to recalibrate their radar systems, which were tuned to ignore anything resembling a bird.

Analysts learned that the smaller quadcopters did not use the normal frequency band available for typical commercial drones—further evidence that the drone operators were not hobbyists.

Officials at Langley canceled night training missions out of fear of potential conflicts with the drone swarm, and moved the F-22s to another base. Residents of the base shared their sightings at the local Starbucks, posting blurry photos of the drones in private Facebook groups.

Intelligence officials spotted a ship floating in international waters off the coast of Virginia and suspected a connection. Coast Guard crews boarded the vessel, but found no computers or other equipment to support the suspicion.

On December 23, the drones made their last visit.

In January, authorities found a clue they hoped would help crack the case.

“The Worst Spy Ever”

On a rainy January 6 morning, Fengyun Xi parked a rented Tesla near 65th Street and Huntington Avenue in Newport News, Washington, about two miles from the Langley base. The car was parked outside a shipyard operated by HII, a company that builds nuclear submarines and the Navy’s latest ‘Ford Class’ aircraft carriers.

Shay, a student at the University of Minnesota, told residents in the morning that his drone was stuck in a tree. While trying to free him with his air traffic controller, a neighbor called the police in Newport News, Washington. The officers asked Shay why he was flying the drone in such bad weather, and suggested that he call the fire department for help.

Instead, Shay returned his rental car an hour later, and took an Amtrak train to Washington, DC. The next day, he flew to Oakland, California. Coincidentally, the drone fell to the ground that day and was eventually picked up by federal investigators. FBI agents discovered that Shay had taken photos of Navy ships in dry dock, including several taken around midnight, with several ships under construction at a nearby shipyard.

On January 18, federal agents arrested Xi just as he was about to board a flight to China with a one-way ticket. Shay told FBI agents he was a ship enthusiast and did not realize his drone had entered restricted airspace. Investigators were not convinced, but found no evidence linking him to the Chinese government. They learned he bought the drone at a sale at Costco in San Francisco, the day before he went to Norfolk.

US prosecutors accused Xi of illegally photographing classified naval facilities, marking the first case involving a drone under the US Espionage Act. The 26-year-old Chinese national pleaded guilty and appeared in federal court in Norfolk on October 2 for sentencing.

Judge Lawrence Leonard said he did not believe Shay’s story – that he was on holiday flying drones in the middle of the night for fun. “There are significant holes in the story,” the judge said in court.

“If he was indeed a foreign agent, he was the worst spy in history,” said Xi’s lawyer, Xiaoming Cheng.

“I’m sorry for what happened in Norfolk,” Shay said, before being sentenced to six months in federal prison.

US officials have not yet determined who flew the drones at Langley and why.

“It’s not a problem for tomorrow, it’s a problem for today,” said Tom Craco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank in Washington. “It’s not a problem of name – it’s a problem of name, here and everywhere.”

American officials confirmed this month that additional swarms of unidentified drones have been observed in recent months near Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles.