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NOVEMBER 2024 – JANUARY 2025 · A THIRD PERIOD, NOT MERGED INTO THE UFO RECORD
In the winter of 2024–25 the American sky filled with "drones," and the episode is tested here as its own period, the way the record insists on being read. The wave began over New Jersey in mid-November 2024 — Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle among the first seats — and spread across the Northeast and then the country, thousands of night reports of large, low, slow aircraft. The federal government answered it twice, and both answers print. On December 16, 2024, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the FAA, and the FBI stated jointly that, having examined more than 5,000 reports, the sightings were "a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones," and that they had "not identified anything anomalous." On January 28, 2025, the White House stated that the drones over New Jersey "were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons," alongside hobbyist and private flying. Indiana's own items in the period are two, and neither is northern. At Evansville, in the state's far southwest, callers reported dozens of bright, darting objects on the city's east side on December 13, 2024, and a second cluster near Saint Wendel on December 16, one witness's daughter photographing about seven craft. In Jay County, in the east-central part of the state, the county emergency management agency and police spent early January 2025 investigating repeated drone sightings near areas hit by bird flu, and shared the reports with the FBI. (The state's loudest sky story of that season was not a drone item at all: the six yellowish-orange orbs filmed near Kokomo, just south of Grissom Joint Air Reserve Base, on October 7, 2024 — a month before the drone winter began, and seated a hundred miles southeast of this ground.)
For this ground the period's finding is a clean negative at the strength searched. No drone report seated in St. Joseph County — none at South Bend, Mishawaka, or Walkerton — appears in the contemporary press record of the winter of 2024–25 or in the NUFORC drone-period record reached for this build. The county that produced an official Unknown in 1952 and two database reports in the modern era produced, in the drone winter, nothing that any record reached preserves; and the period is not merged into the UFO record to manufacture a share. The drone era had a federal disposition the saucer era never got — authorized aircraft and misidentification, stated on the record within weeks — and this ground's part in it, on the record, is an absence.
Sources: Joint statement of DoD, DHS, FAA, and FBI, Dec. 16, 2024, and White House press briefing, Jan. 28, 2025, as carried in the period record (Wikipedia, "2024 United States drone sightings," summarizing the statements); Fortean Winds, New Jersey UAP Drone Events timeline (compiled from news sources) — Evansville, Indiana, Dec. 13 and 16, 2024; WANE (Fort Wayne) via NewsLocker — Jay County EMA and police drone investigation, January 2025; New York Post, Oct. 25, 2024 — Kokomo orbs of Oct. 7, 2024.