Langley Drone Incursions

Beginning on the evening of December 6, 2023, unidentified uncrewed aircraft repeatedly crossed Langley Air Force Base, the Air Force side of Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia, and home to Air Combat Command and F-22 Raptors. A base spokesperson told The War Zone in March 2024 that the number of drones fluctuated, that they varied in size and configuration, and that none appeared to show hostile intent. CBS's 60 Minutes later reported that they came on 17 nights and then stopped. Retired Gen. Mark Kelly, the most senior officer at Langley to see them, said the smallest were about the size of a commercial quadcopter and the largest about the size of "a bass boat or a small car," and some of the base's F-22s were moved elsewhere for their protection.

The military's response showed how little authority it had. Flight trackers showed fighters and tankers patrolling over southeastern Virginia around December 12, NORAD said it had conducted flights over the state, and U.S. Northern Command said it was coordinating with the FBI. Gen. Glen VanHerck, who then led both commands, told 60 Minutes the drones were unlikely to be hobbyists given their size, number and duration, adding, "I wish I had the answer," and said they could have "a foreign nexus, a threat nexus." The services were responsible for their own bases, and no agency had clear authority over drones beyond the perimeter.

His successor, Gregory Guillot, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2024, "I wasn't prepared for the number of incursions that I see," and made Langley the centerpiece of a 90-day assessment. In October 2024 he told The War Zone he remained confident the objects were small drones and knew of no "organized or unorganized foreign nexus," and in March 2025 he said the investigation "is still ongoing." The Defense Department's own account, in an April 2025 DOD News report, described "unmanned aerial systems of unknown origin" and said the department had then had little ability to detect, track, characterize, disrupt or defeat them. Mark Roosevelt Ditlevson, the acting assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, told a House subcommittee that "those challenges from JBLE still exist" to some extent, while describing faster interagency coordination and a request to extend counter-drone authority under Section 130i of federal law to all installations.

The question of who flew the drones remains open. The Wall Street Journal's October 2024 account brought the episode wide attention, alongside the separate case of a Chinese student arrested in January 2024 after an abandoned drone near a Hampton Roads shipyard was found to hold photographs of Navy ships under construction; that case ended in a guilty plea, but authorities did not tie it to Langley. In an interview recorded on August 7, 2026 and published that October, Sen. Mark Warner said the incursions "mostly ended up being Chinese drones," then said he had not seen pictures and would "ask around." Sen. Mike Rounds told the same outlet in September, "I can't talk about that right now," when asked whether China was responsible. No agency has published that attribution, and the Chinese drones explanation remains disputed.

The case has stayed central to arguments about unidentified objects over American bases. In March 2026 journalist Christopher Sharp circulated a "Lessons Learned" slide, first published by DailyMail.com and bearing FBI and NASA logos, that he described as coming from the Langley response; it lists over-reliance on radio-frequency detection and on signal jamming as failures. Former Pentagon official Christopher Mellon said in June 2026 that the Langley objects mostly crossed the airfield in straight lines before heading out to sea and "could have been drones," while citing other cases he regards as beyond known technology, and former NASA official Mike Gold called many such sightings likely Chinese drones. Dylan Borland's 2025 testimony about a triangular craft at Langley concerns a separate claim from 2012. Whatever their origin, the Langley flights showed that a headquarters base flying stealth fighters could not identify or stop small aircraft overhead for weeks, and they became the reference point for the Pentagon's push for broader counter-drone authority at home.