The New Jersey drone sightings were a wave of reports of drones and unexplained lights over New Jersey and neighboring states from mid-November 2024 into early 2025. Beginning around Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County and the Trump golf club at Bedminster, the reports spread to dozens of communities, prompted federal flight restrictions, and became a national argument over whether the government could identify what was flying over its own territory.

The Morris County Prosecutor's Office first described the activity publicly on November 19, 2024, and the Federal Aviation Administration restricted flights over Bedminster and Picatinny. On December 18 it imposed temporary drone bans over 22 New Jersey municipalities through mid-January. A medevac helicopter was turned away over reported drones, Rep. Jeff Van Drew suggested Iran was responsible, and in January 2025 an email from Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber Matt Livelsberger claimed the craft were Chinese "gravitic" vehicles; the FBI confirmed he sent the email but not its content.

Official explanations converged on the ordinary. On December 12 the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said there was no evidence of a security threat or foreign nexus and that many sightings were manned aircraft operating lawfully. Four days later, a joint statement with the FAA and the Pentagon described a mix of commercial, hobbyist, and police drones, manned aircraft, and stars, found nothing anomalous, and asked Congress for broader counter-drone authority. In January 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the drones had been authorized by the FAA for research and other purposes. An internal TSA briefing later obtained by Reason showed analysts had matched the most publicized sightings to aircraft by mid-December 2024, and in 2025 an unnamed contractor reportedly said its own test aircraft had started the scare.

The episode remains a reference point in 2026. Researcher John Malaska filed 626 public-records requests and reviewed about 13,500 documents, concluding that the official account was mostly right but left a residue of unexplained cases, and pilot advocate Ryan Graves said the incident was far from resolved. The wave's lasting significance is what it exposed: how quickly misidentified aircraft, slow official communication, and real gaps in domestic counter-drone authority can combine into a mass-sighting event.