Mystery Drone Update
By Michael and James Hall — authors of the popular Kindle, Audible, and Amazon books The Sword of Damocles: Our Nuclear Age.
“Long before the creation of Joint Interagency Task Force 401, DHS was already grappling with ambiguous aerial intrusions that blurred the line between foreign surveillance platforms and genuinely unexplained craft. In that sense, JIATF 401 did not create a new mission so much as formalize and operationalize a challenge that DHS, DoD, and the intelligence community had been wrestling with for more than a decade. The task force simply brought the fragmented pieces—legal authorities, technical capabilities, and legacy research lineages—into a unified operational structure.”
Art by James Hall
By mid‑2025, the Pentagon could no longer dismiss the steady rise of unidentified aerial intrusions as isolated anomalies. What began as sporadic “drone” sightings had evolved into a pattern of incursions across US and European airspace—some clearly commercial devices, others exhibiting performance or signatures that defied easy classification. The term drone became a political catch‑all, obscuring the fact that these incidents ranged from simple quadcopters to potentially sophisticated foreign systems. The mounting ambiguity finally forced a structural response.¹
On 27 August 2025, the Department of Defense (DoD) established Joint Interagency Task Force 401, replacing the slower and more limited Joint Counter‑sUAS Office and creating the first unified framework for confronting unauthorized aerial activity.² Designed specifically to address the accelerating pattern of incursions, JIATF 401 brought together agencies that had long been responding to these events in parallel but without a common operational center. Its designation is often misremembered as “402,” a small but persistent source of confusion.³
JIATF 401 integrates the CIA, FBI, NSA, FAA, DHS, and the US armed forces, each bringing authorities the others lack. The Department Of Homeland Security (DHS) plays a particularly critical role. Under the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018, it is the only civilian department with statutory authority to detect, track, and, when necessary, mitigate drones over domestic “covered” facilities such as airports, borders, stadiums, and major events. In contrast, DoD is constrained by Title 10, intelligence agencies by Title 50, the FBI by Title 18, and the FAA by its regulatory mandate. This could cause seams adversaries might exploit or benefit from just as occurred during 9-11. DHS fills those gaps while its Science & Technology Directorate collaborates on testing, data‑sharing, and interoperability across nearly fifty federal partners. JIATF 401 exists to fuse these fragmented authorities into a single operational picture capable of responding quickly to ambiguous or unattributed aerial activity across both military and civilian domains.
This is important and current information. Most Americans have assumed that if an unknown drone appears over a military base or critical infrastructure, officials can simply shoot it down or immediately investigate the operator. In reality, the legal landscape is far more constrained. No single agency possesses all the necessary authorities, and the ones that do exist are distributed across incompatible legal frameworks. JIATF 401 was created precisely to bridge these seams—ensuring that domestic mitigation powers, foreign‑intelligence authorities, investigative responsibilities, and airspace regulation can be coordinated rather than working at cross‑purposes.
In practice, JIATF 401 is far more than a policy mechanism. It is a fully staffed joint task force with its own commander, watch officers, analysts, planners, and embedded liaisons from the FBI, DHS, FAA, NSA, CIA, and the military services. (The US Army provides the core staff for JIATF 401.) It is the executive agent and lead service, meaning the task force’s commander, watch officers, planners, and most uniformed personnel come from the Army. It does not replace or override the legal authorities of those agencies. Instead, it serves as the operational nerve center that makes their combined powers usable in real time. Its watch floor integrates sensor data, intelligence reporting, and incident notifications. Its planning cells determine which agency can act under which authority, and its liaison network ensures that responses unfold coherently rather than through a patchwork of siloed decisions. In short, JIATF 401 gives the government an actual team capable of responding to fast‑moving, ambiguous aerial activity.
It is important to note, having introduced DHS, that its role in unidentified aerial phenomena is older and more complex than the public record suggests. When AAWSAP formally ended in 2010–2011, Senator Harry Reid attempted to secure follow‑on funding that would have placed DHS in a central position for studying unidentified aerial incursions—both drones and what AAWSAP called “UAPs.” Officially, DHS declined, and the proposal died. But Dr. James Lacatski, a leading figure in US UAP programs like AAWSAP for who he was the DIA creator and project manager, has recently complicated that narrative. In a public interview, he asserted that the proposed DHS‑linked program code‑named Kona Blue (KVP) was not forgotten after DHS declined to take it on as AAWSAP’s successor. Instead, he claims the project continued as a compartmented DHS Science and Technology Division effort under his leadership post 2010, carrying forward the AAWSAP research lineage in a more restricted form. According to Lacatski—now retired—Kona Blue remains an active classified program today. This contradicts the government’s documented assertion that AAWSAP’s legacy was fully terminated. His remarks suggest that the program’s legacy may actually have splintered into classified compartments rather than ending cleanly, leaving a gap between official history and insider testimony.⁴
Please note: “Official records from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and DoD indicate that Kona Blue was proposed as a DHS special access program but was never formally approved, funded, or established. No materials or data were transferred to DHS, and the program was terminated at the proposal stage.” This statement from AARP has been denied by Dr. James Lacatski.*
* For a complete history of AAWSAP and ATTIP, please see our blogs on this web site.
https://www.authorshall.com/blog/the-new-modern-era-uaps-and-nhihttps://www.authorshall.com/blog/the-new-modern-era-part-twothe-history-of-aatip
This ambiguity matters because the boundary between “unidentified drones” and “UAPs” has always been porous. Many incidents that appear anomalous at first glance later resolve into drones, and many drone incursions exhibit performance or signatures that defy easy attribution. DHS—responsible for borders, airports, critical infrastructure, and domestic airspace security—was the natural civilian department to inherit this problem set. Long before the creation of JIATF 401, DHS was already grappling with ambiguous aerial intrusions that blurred the line between foreign surveillance platforms and genuinely unexplained craft. In that sense, JIATF 401 did not create a new mission so much as formalize and operationalize a challenge that DHS, DoD, and the intelligence community had been wrestling with for more than a decade. The task force simply brought the fragmented pieces—legal authorities, technical capabilities, and legacy research lineages—into a unified operational structure.
The need for such coordination had been made painfully clear when looking at the historical context.
Over the previous three years, bases such as Langley AFB and Wright‑Patterson AFB endured repeated incursions by small, low‑observable objects that evaded radar, hovered over sensitive areas, and vanished before interceptors could respond.⁵ These events exposed gaps between military authorities, the FAA, intelligence agencies, and local law enforcement.
Those are gaps adversaries could exploit!⁶
Among the most striking episodes were the December 2023 Langley AFB incursions, a 17‑night stretch of unexplained flights observed by personnel and multiple sensors.⁷ The objects showed no overt hostility but demonstrated unusual persistence and evasiveness. Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, recently stated at a congressional briefing that a large “mothership-like drone” was also observed during one of the Langley intrusions. Commanders acknowledged they had the authority to engage threats, yet domestic operations required interagency coordination that did not yet exist.⁸ Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of NORAD and NORTHCOM, later told Congress that some of the activity “may indeed have been spying,” a concern amplified in a 60 Minutes investigation.⁹
“It certainly could have a foreign nexus, a threat nexus,” VanHerck stated. “They could be doing anything, from surveilling critical infrastructure to simply embarrassing us by demonstrating their ability to operate freely in our airspace—without us being able to stop them.”
In the 2024 New Jersey drone flap—multiple aerial craft of unknown origin continually maneuvered near critical infrastructure and commercial air corridors. This highlighted how difficult it was to identify operators or act decisively in ambiguous airspace.¹⁰ Furthermore the pattern was not confined to the United States.
In the fall of 2025, Europe was hit by the Baltic and Nordic mystery‑drone swarms—dozens of coordinated systems, sometimes accompanied by a larger “mothership” platform, appearing over power plants, naval bases, offshore platforms, and airports across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states. The story only grew larger as the year closed. In the final months of 2025, Europe experienced a surge of synchronized incursions targeting airports, military installations, and critical infrastructure—including the appearance of 3–5 unidentified drones over the Doel nuclear power plant near Antwerp on November 9. Just days later, on November 12–13, Belgian forces at Kleine‑Brogel Air Base—widely believed to host US B‑61 tactical nuclear weapons—attempted to disable one of several drones during repeated overflights. Since September 22 of 2026, more than twenty civilian airports across over ten European countries have been disrupted by these incursions, forcing flight suspensions and diversions that stranded tens of thousands of passengers. The pattern has been remarkably consistent: small drones arrive first, probing communications and radar, followed by larger, longer‑endurance craft that loiter near aircraft, munitions depots, and runways. Many reports describe the drones flying precise grid‑like or “lawn‑mower” patterns over sensitive sites rather than drifting randomly—a behavior also documented in the New Jersey incidents of 2024.
The wave eventually reached the Île Longue naval base, home to France’s ballistic‑missile submarine fleet, elevating the issue from nuisance to strategic concern. Whether these flights represent Russian probing, covert NATO exercises, or something less easily categorized, ambiguity itself has become the weapon—eroding public confidence, magnifying risk, and leaving Europe’s skies contested.¹¹ No public attribution followed, but the cross‑border synchronization alarmed NATO and underscored the need for a unified response.¹²
Christopher Mellon stated: “I don’t think the public is aware of the extent of our airspace vulnerabilities and failures, and the degree to which they’ve already been exploited and are being exploited today, and the challenge that we face in trying to sort this out.”
Although most recent public attention has focused on military bases and critical infrastructure, nuclear‑related facilities have faced their own pattern of unexplained aerial activity—a pattern that stretches back to the late 1940s and remains strikingly current. In recent years, both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy have acknowledged multiple reports of unauthorized drones near sensitive US sites, including power plants and national laboratories. Some incidents involved small quadcopters hovering over restricted areas; others featured fixed‑wing platforms flying precise, deliberate patterns suggestive of surveillance. While officials have not publicly attributed these incursions to foreign actors, the reports were serious enough to trigger coordinated notifications to the FAA, FBI, DHS, and DOE security teams. The 2024–2025 Northeast drone wave added to these concerns, with unauthorized systems maneuvering near weapons‑related installations and critical infrastructure in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Taken together, these episodes underscored a broader vulnerability: the United States lacked a unified mechanism to detect, attribute, and respond to low‑observable aerial intrusions across the full spectrum of sensitive sites, from military bases to nuclear facilities. This vulnerability further reinforced the need for an integrated structure like JIATF 401.
Against this backdrop, JIATF 401 was designed to close the seams. Its mandate focuses on aerial systems operating above 400 feet—the altitude where military, intelligence, and civilian jurisdictions overlap and where previous incidents revealed dangerous blind spots. In essence, JIATF 401 is the institutional answer to a new era of aerial activity: unpredictable, technologically sophisticated, often unattributed, and capable of probing national defenses in ways traditional air‑defense structures were never built to handle.¹⁴ A further complication is that today’s aerial intrusions are not a single, tidy category. Some incidents clearly involve manmade drones—whether domestic hobby craft, criminal platforms, or foreign intelligence systems—while others resemble the long‑standing class of unidentified anomalous phenomena that have been reported for decades. In practice, these streams often blur together: small, low‑observable drones can mimic the behavior once associated with UAP, and genuinely unexplained events are sometimes dismissed as drones. As a result, government agencies have begun treating “unknowns in the sky” as a mixed problem set, where conventional unmanned systems and anomalous objects must be analyzed side by side. JIATF 401 and the FBI’s updated terminology reflect this shift toward a unified approach, acknowledging that the challenge is not one phenomenon but an overlapping spectrum of them.
Just look at all the categories now of flying vehicles. What once seemed like a simple divide between “drones” and “UFOs” has expanded into an entire taxonomy of terms that reflect how complex the air domain has become. At one end are the unidentified classes—UAP, UAO, NHI, and the legacy term UFO—used when an object or phenomenon cannot be immediately explained. Then come the unmanned and remotely piloted systems: UAS and UAV for the aircraft themselves, sUAS for small platforms, and the international RPAS/RPA framework that emphasizes a human pilot on the ground. Beyond those are the autonomous and robotic categories such as AUS and AAV, along with the broader AAM sector shaping future air mobility. The picture widens further with maritime and cross‑domain systems like UUVs, USVs, and the umbrella term UxS, which capture how unmanned platforms now operate across air, sea, and land. Even civil aviation adds its own layers—BVLOS, VLOS, and UTM—governing how these systems move through shared airspace. Taken together, the vocabulary itself shows how rapidly the landscape has evolved, and how many different kinds of “flying vehicles” now occupy the modern sky.
UNIDENTIFIED / ANOMALOUS CATEGORIES
UAP: Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. Current U.S. government term for anything observed in the sky that must be immediately classified.
UFO: Unidentified Flying Object. Legacy term no longer used.
AUTONOMOUS / ROBOTIC SYSTEMS
AUS: Autonomous Unmanned System. Broad category, including air.
AAV: Autonomous Aerial Vehicle. Fully autonomous flight, often used in advanced operations.
AAM: Advanced Air Mobility. Not a vehicle type but a sector including autonomous passenger transport.
UNMANNED MARITIME & CROSS-DOMAIN SYSTEMS
UUV: Unmanned Underwater Vehicle. Includes autonomous and remotely operated vehicles.
USV: Unmanned Surface Vehicle. Surface-level maritime drones.
UNMANNED / REMOTE-OPERATED AIRCRAFT
UAS: Unmanned Aircraft System. The full system including aircraft, communications, and support.
UA: Unmanned Aircraft.
sUAS: Small Unmanned Aircraft System. Under 55 lbs.
RPAS: Remotely Piloted Aircraft System. Refers to the aircraft component of an RPAS.
RPS: Remote Pilot Station. Refers to the control element of an RPAS.
RPAF: Remote Pilot Aircraft Facility. Less common; refers to infrastructure supporting RPAS.
MILITARY-SPECIFIC TERMS
ISR UAV: Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance UAV. Mission-specific design.
MALE: Medium-Altitude Long Endurance. (e.g., MQ-9 Reaper)
HALE: High-Altitude Long Endurance. (e.g., RQ-4 Global Hawk)
CIVIL AVIATION TERMS RELATED TO DRONES
BVLOS: Beyond Visual Line of Sight. Key regulatory category for advanced drone operations.
VLOS: Visual Line of Sight. Standard for commercial and hobbyist flights.
As JIATF 401 took shape, the FBI moved to strengthen the reporting and classification side of the problem. In October 2025, the Bureau’s Office of the Private Sector issued updated guidance urging defense contractors and critical infrastructure operators to report any suspicious activity involving “unmanned systems.”¹⁵ This expanded terminology—UxS, encompassing drones, UAVs, UAS, UUVs, RPVs, and UAPs—reflects the increasingly blurred line between known technologies and anomalous behavior.¹⁶
The FBI’s goal is to reduce stigma, encourage timely reporting, and ensure that even mundane sightings contribute to national situational awareness. To that end, the Bureau directs partners to use a new stystem called eGuardian, which is a secure, web‑based reporting platform for suspicious‑activity.¹⁷ This eGuardian allows federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, and select DoD partners to document and share potential threats. It is not accessible to the general public and if citizens have a sighting, they need to report it to local law enforcement or the FBI in person; which can only then then enter the information into the eGuardian system.¹⁸
Crucially, the Bureau emphasizes that it is not discouraging reports. On the contrary, it warns that adversaries may be using civilian‑grade or improvised platforms to test US defenses.¹⁹ Vigilance and transparency are now considered essential components of national security.
JIATF 401 and the FBI operate as complementary arms of the same mission. The FBI standardizes terminology and reporting, while JIATF 401 handles technical analysis, attribution, and operational response. Shared definitions, secure information channels, and embedded liaison officers ensure that credible sightings flow quickly from civilian reporting streams into the defense apparatus—closing the gaps that earlier incidents so clearly exposed.
Now, real‑world tensions have government officials looking not only at historical patterns but at current events and their potential repercussions. This goes far beyond anomalous activity. The ongoing geopolitical strain with Iran has sharpened concerns across federal agencies. Iran and its proxy groups have repeatedly used drones for reconnaissance, harassment, and targeted attacks in the Middle East, and US officials worry that similar tactics could be adapted by sympathetic actors or exploited during periods of heightened tension. In this environment, even small or ambiguous aerial intrusions near federal buildings, energy infrastructure, or transportation hubs are treated as potential indicators of probing or pre‑operational surveillance. Agencies such as DHS, the FBI, and regional fusion centers have quietly elevated their posture, emphasizing rapid reporting and cross‑agency coordination for any unusual drone activity. This heightened vigilance underscores a broader reality. In an era when state actors, proxies, and lone extremists can all leverage low‑cost unmanned systems, the United States cannot afford fragmented or slow responses. The logic behind JIATF 401 becomes even clearer—its unified structure is not merely bureaucratic reform but a necessary adaptation to a threat landscape in which drones have become a central tool of asymmetric pressure.²⁰
Endnotes
U.S. Department of Defense, Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 2022–2024 (Office of the Director of National Intelligence). These reports document the rise of “unattributed” and “uncharacterized” objects, including many initially labeled as drones.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” 2022–2024.U.S. Department of Defense. “DoD Establishes Joint Interagency Task Force 401.” Press Release, 27 August 2025.
Its designation is often misremembered as “402,” a small but persistent confusion that emerged from early wire‑service reporting, pre‑announcement shorthand circulating in interagency planning documents, and the intuitive but incorrect assumption that the numbering might simply follow an altitude‑based sequence. Because “401” refers to the 400‑foot threshold where federal airspace authorities begin to overlap, some observers casually inferred that “402” or similar variants were equally plausible. The result is a minor but enduring discrepancy that occasionally surfaces in secondary sources and illustrates how quickly new counter‑UAS structures entered public discourse before their terminology had fully settled.
“He Ran The Pentagon’s Secret UFO Program - And Says We’ve Been Played: Dr. James Lacatski (PART 1)”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu8pudJk_-A&t=1158s; and In one of the most surprising disclosures to emerge from the U.S. government’s long and tangled UAP research lineage, Dr. James T. Lacatski—founder and program manager of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s AAWSAP program—has now publicly asserted that the project known as Kona Blue did not die when AAWSAP was shut down. In a recent interview, he described a very different internal history: one in which Kona Blue quietly continued under his leadership, even after the Department of Homeland Security declined to participate and even after AAWSAP was officially closed. According to Lacatski, the public narrative—that AAWSAP ended cleanly in 2012 and that its proposed successor program never materialized—is simply incomplete. He states that while DHS formally rejected Senator Harry Reid’s request to join a follow‑on effort, the underlying project was never actually terminated. Instead, it shifted into a more restricted, compartmented form, with Lacatski himself still involved. In his telling, Kona Blue became the true successor to AAWSAP: the place where the most sensitive technical investigations, material analyses, and anomalous aerospace assessments continued long after the public paperwork suggested otherwise. Lacatski goes further, implying that later Pentagon offices—AATIP, AOIMSG, and even AARO—were never given full visibility into this continuation. He characterizes the official story of cancellation as a kind of bureaucratic sleight‑of‑hand: a surface‑level truth that conceals a deeper, ongoing effort. In the same interview, he alludes to highly sensitive case material, including an incident involving a recovered craft whose hull was allegedly breached by U.S. personnel—details he says he was cleared to discuss, and which he frames as part of the Kona Blue research portfolio. Taken together, Lacatski’s statements sketch a parallel, largely unacknowledged lineage of UAP study inside the U.S. government. In this version of events, AAWSAP did not end—it migrated, changed shape, and continued under a different name, with a smaller circle of access and a more tightly controlled mission. Kona Blue, in his telling, is not a footnote but the hidden bridge between the early DIA program and whatever classified work persists today.
Witness accounts and sensor‑based reporting from Langley AFB and Wright‑Patterson AFB, 2023–2024.
FAA, DoD, and DHS assessments on domestic counter‑UAS coordination gaps.
Publicly acknowledged Langley AFB UAS incursions, December 2023.
DoD guidance on domestic counter‑UAS authorities and interagency constraints.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, testimony to Congress; 60 Minutes reporting on UAS incursions, and Drone swarms inside the U.S. could be spying — and the ability to detect, track them is lagging, 60 Minutes, March, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_aIqISaVKo; and Mystery drone swarms breach US military airspace—and Washington is unprepared, The Economic Times News, March 24, 2025, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/mystery-drone-swarms-breach-us-military-airspaceand-washington-is-unprepared-why-cant-the-military-stop-them/articleshow/119118700.cms?from=mdr; and General Gregory Guillot, who succeeded VanHerck, acknowledged that the incidents exposed vulnerabilities in drone detection and response systems. He is now committed to enhancing security measures; and Gordon Lubold, Sara Seligman, Aruna Viswanatha, Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. The Pentagon Is Stumped, The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/drones-military-pentagon-defense-331871f4.
FAA and state‑level reporting on the 2024 New Jersey drone incidents.
Nordic and Baltic government statements regarding coordinated drone activity in 2025.
NATO briefings on cross‑border UAS incursions and attribution challenges.
DoD explanation of the “401” designation referencing operations above 400 feet.
Pentagon assessments comparing emerging UAS threats to earlier air‑defense vulnerabilities; and Brandi Vincent, Commenting Former defense officials raise concerns about unexplained drone and UAP threats to U.S. airspace, DefenseScoop, May 2, 2025, https://defensescoop.com/2025/05/02/former-defense-officials-raise-concerns-about-unexplained-drone-and-uap-threats-to-u-s-airspace/.
FBI Office of the Private Sector, unmanned‑systems reporting guidance, October 2025.
FBI and DoD adoption of the UxS taxonomy for standardized reporting.
FBI documentation describing the eGuardian suspicious‑activity reporting system.
FBI public guidance on citizen reporting and access limitations to eGuardian.
FBI counterintelligence advisories on adversarial use of commercial UAS platforms.
Interagency coordination frameworks linking JIATF 401, FBI, DHS, and FAA; and See Eric Schmitt and Ronen Bergman, “U.S. Officials Warn of Increased Drone Threats from Iran and Its Proxies,” New York Times, January 28, 2024; Ellen Nakashima, “Federal Agencies Heighten Vigilance Over Potential Drone‑Enabled Attacks Amid Middle East Tensions,” Washington Post, February 2, 2024; and Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis, “Potential Domestic Security Implications of Escalating Iran–U.S. Tensions,” DHS Intelligence Note, January 2024.