KIle Breeze, 36, works remotely for an insurance company and lives in Ocean Township, New Jersey, a quiet suburb with tree-covered streets not far from the beach. Last Saturday night, he was inside his house with his wife and two children, let his elderly dog ​​Bruce out into the backyard, and then looked up.

There was an unmistakable floating object in the sky. It’s not as high as a planet or star, but it’s about as high as an airplane.

“It’s not just an airplane hovering there,” he explained. “What it looked like, it was so high up that it was hard to see, but it was like a red light and a white light.”

Brees said he and his wife had seen others on their way to dinner the previous day. Her mother, Luan, 68, said she also saw bright white and red lights floating in the night sky.

“To me, it’s like they’re looking for something,” Luan said of the drones. “My concern is that we have an ammunition base here in New Jersey.”

The Brees family isn’t the only one noting the disturbing activity of drones and some types of airborne vehicles popping up across the state. Thousands of people have called local police, the FBI and even the Department of Defense about the relentless swarm of drones that suddenly appeared in New Jersey airspace last month.

“The FBI has received more than 5,000 reports of drone sightings in the past few weeks, resulting in approximately 100 leads, and the federal government is assisting state and local authorities in investigating these reports. ” said a joint statement released by the FBI and the department. Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and Federal Aviation Administration.

“We have sent advanced detection technology into the area, and we have sent trained visual observers.”

So far, authorities have remained tight-lipped. Everything authorities see looks like a combination of a hobbyist drone, a helicopter, an airplane, and a star, he said. But Neighbors, created by the company that created Ring surveillance cameras, allowed New Jersey residents to spam the app, which is used for crime and safety updates, with videos of floating orbs and suspicious night lights. are.

Some say they are aliens who infiltrated Iranian drones originating from a mothership off the Atlantic coast. Maybe it’s a secret weapon experiment.

“I heard it was Al Qaeda,” one man who lives near Ocean Township, an off-duty firefighter who did not want to be identified, told the Guardian.

Whatever it is, residents of the Garden State, known for legendary rock stars Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, are buzzing about drones.

The consensus was that while it was strange at first, there was no need to worry. Well, most people want answers.

Sightings are common during the summer in coastal towns like Asbury Park, a popular vacation destination. There are rumors among local residents that drones don’t come out when it rains and that they originate from the sea.

“I started watching it two weeks ago,” said Garrett Openshaw, 24, who works as a maintenance worker at the Asbury Hotel near the waterfront. “In front of the press”

On a cold night in early December, he went out onto the roof of his hotel. Folded beach chairs are usually spread out on the rooftop for sunbathing during the warmer months. As I stared out into the open ocean, I saw the unmistakable red, green, and white lights that I remember seeing as at least 12 sedan-sized drones flying all at once.

“There’s always something going on in this town,” said Colin Lynch, 26, the hotel’s food and beverage manager, who witnessed the drone swarm with Openshaw. “It’s hard to tell if they’re just filming a movie or something else.”

In between discussions of UFOs and government secrets, Asbury Park residents also gossip about celebrity sightings in the city, which is the location for a Springsteen biopic starring Jeremy Allen White.

“Look at this,” Openshaw said as he toggled through the drone’s homemade video, landing on a photo of him and Allen White from the start.

At Frank’s Deli, a popular diner and recent filming location for the film, staff members are excitedly discussing the theories behind the sightings.

“They’re having kind of a drone watching party on Long Beach Island,” said Daniel Coyle, a diner server wearing a green and red Christmas hat. She said some of her colleagues and friends, “men in their 40s,” had gone to the coastal island to look for drone sightings.

Some people in town have more sinister questions.

At Kim Marie’s, a local Irish bar with a low wooden ceiling a block from the boardwalk, people were commenting on the drones. Kathy Miller, 26, said she saw two drones near Monroe, where she lives, and showed a video of the moment.

“We’re looking at two people, one close together, one far away, and the second one turns the exact same corner 30 or 40 seconds apart, chasing it. ” she said in the video’s voiceover.

Miller continued: “Then I saw two more people, and they were all turning the same corner. I think there were five or six in total…I heard a hum, but it was pretty low, not that high. Probably 200 or 300 feet.

Miller said her TikTok and Instagram feeds are filled with similar cell phone videos, and rightly pointed out that she can’t tell if some of them were generated by artificial intelligence.

“It’s so hard to know now,” she said. “I saw a video of them firing at something and I thought, ‘Is that fake or is it really real?'” Impersonation is so easy now. ”

But for Brees, the lights lurking in the sky overlooking his town are both very real and disconcerting.

“It’s weird because I have kids,” he said. “Are they filming or is this a creepy thing happening with the camera?”