➡ Jim Rickerts discusses the recent surge of drone sightings, mainly in New Jersey. He explains that while some sightings may be misinterpretations or amateur drones, many are valid and likely belong to the U.S. government. He suggests that if these were foreign drones, defensive actions would have been taken. Rickerts also mentions that these drones seem to be flying in a grid pattern, which is typically used in search and rescue operations.
➡ The U.S. government is using drones to search for something important, following a grid pattern that expands over time. These drones are not being used for minor issues like bank robberies or kidnappings, but for something critical that they don’t want the public to know about. The government’s silence suggests that the truth might cause more panic than the drones themselves. The drones could be equipped with radiation detectors, leading to speculation that they might be searching for a radiological device or stolen radioactive material, although this is not confirmed.
➡ The text discusses concerns about potential criminals and terrorists entering the U.S. through open borders, particularly from Venezuela, which is closely aligned with China. It suggests that the Biden administration is not adequately addressing this issue. The text also mentions that once Donald Trump is in office, he plans to shut the border and deport these individuals, starting with the criminals and terrorists. The author expresses concern about potential terrorist attacks, especially with the upcoming inauguration, and urges citizens to be prepared for possible volatility.

Hi, I’m Jim Rickerts. Great to be with you. This is a special report we put together on a topic that I know is of interest to many of our readers and subscribers, if not all of them, which is this rash of drone sightings that’s been reported over the past several weeks. It’s front page news, it’s headlines on the internet and your news feeds and nightly news and TV. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about it. And I have too, but there’s a lot of confusion and conflict and mystery that seems to be the actual story seems to have disappeared into a cloud of confusion, if you want to put it that way.

And what I’d like to do is try to cut through some of that and give our readers the best information available in terms of what’s actually going on. Now, before I jump into that, I want to be clear. There’s some things we know and some things we absolutely don’t know. And there’s some things that will infer. And I just want to explain inference or inferential method is a very important part of intelligence gathering and intelligence analysis. I spent a very long period of time at working with the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence. And you have certain, you know, it’s like a carpenter with a with a hammer and saw or doctor with a stethoscope intelligence soundless other on toolkit that they use.

And sometimes I always say if you have all the information you need a bright high school kid can solve the problem. But the challenge for intelligence analysis is, can you solve the problem without all the information. And there are different ways of doing that. We use these models in our newsletters and our recommendations. So it may be familiar territory to a lot of you. But we’re going to use some inferential method. But that means taking things that we know and drawing logical conclusions. You may not actually have the, you know, the smoking gun, if you will, or the hard evidence for the conclusion.

But it flows naturally and logically from the things that you do know. And then you can update as new information comes in, you can raise or lower the probabilities that that’s all part of how intelligence analysis works. So we’re going to use that, but I’ll make it very clear when we do that when we’re sort of segueing from hard facts to inference. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a good analysis. It does mean we don’t have as much certainty, but I’ll make that very clear. So there won’t be any question about what we’re saying. So with that as kind of a preface or background, let’s jump into the story.

So the story goes back over a month at this point. Some say longer. Some reports are older of drone sightings. These drones are sightings have heavily centered on New Jersey. I grew up in New Jersey, went to high school there and lived in the area of Philadelphia, New York, most of my career. So most of my life’s actually so I’m very familiar with the area, but a lot of them are centered around New Jersey. Been some sightings up in New York, north of Westchester County, but that’s kind of a subset of the bigger story. So we’ll focus on what we know about New Jersey.

Now, what the government has said, the government hasn’t said very much. They did an intelligence briefing yesterday, a couple days ago, with the House Intelligence Committee. There are other standing committees in the House and Senate that specialize in intelligence. That was a classified briefing so it’s not like anyone could walk out and tell us exactly what was said, but a few members have made a few comments about it. And what they were told, or what they say they were told, and what you’re hearing in the media and to the extent that the government is saying anything about it, kind of goes along the following lines.

That most of these settings are not drones. Some of them are amateur drones, you know, once the these kind of larger SUV sized drones were spotted. Everybody, you know, people had people who had drones in their garage or called Amazon and got one the next day these little, you know, there’s some of them are seriously cost like a thousand bucks or whatever, but they’re not the industrial sized drones that people have been reporting. But everybody got drones and sort of sending them up looking for the other drones. Some of those things were flying around. There are aircraft flying over the area.

There are stars and planets. If you look up in the sky for bright light if you’re not used to doing it, you might be surprised how bright Venus is this time of year. But the point being, so the government’s been saying, no, there’s really not much drone activity going on or not any drone activity going on these are false reports or people are getting confused they’re seeing airplanes, small, small aircraft helicopters, amateur drones, etc. And here’s the bottom line. There is some of that going on. Some people are making mistakes. Some people are looking at airplanes calling them drones.

And there are lots of amateur drones flying around these days. One of them crashed in somebody’s yard and they thought it was one of the big government drones but it was just, it was a, I’m not saying it was a toy but it was a kind of an amateur drone. But that does not detract from the fact that these larger drone sightings are valid. There were too many of them and people were quite sure of what they saw. I tend to believe that people, you know, too busy to go around and make things up. Some people do once the headlines start but these were actual sightings, they were actual drones, they were large scale.

I’ve seen, you know, in my intelligence work in a military basis, I’ve seen how big some of these drones are and some of them are the size of airplanes, they’re drones, they can fly on their own, the global holocaust and so forth but some of them are as big as commercial aircraft, some of them are, a lot of them are smaller. So they come in all sizes but these ones are spotted were quite large so what the government’s doing, they’re using the fact that there are false sightings, there are amateur drones, there are aircraft mistakes and and maybe someone looks at a planet thinks it’s a drone that is going on, but that should not detract or distract us, maybe better put from the actual drone sightings.

So it’s a little bit of a coverage, it’s true but it’s a little bit of a cover story for what’s actually going on that the government doesn’t want to talk about. So that’s number one. Number two, these are US government drones. How do we know that? Well, the answer is if they weren’t, they would have been shot down. Somebody would have done something. Now, Congressman Jeff Van Drew who represents South Jersey where where I grew up as I went to Cape May High School, Jeff represents that district, New Jersey’s Cape May County parts of Atlanta County and so forth.

He said a few weeks ago, there was an Iranian mothership offshore and it was launching these drones. That’s clearly not the case. I know, Congressman Van Drew, great guy, very level headed. He’s done a lot of good work. Who can blame him for, you know, kind of, you know, reading too much into it or, or drawing conclusions that were not correct. So I don’t really, he was wrong about that, but I really fault him. This is very early in the process and he was doing the best he could based on the information he had to make sense of it at all.

But that’s not correct. He’s a good man, but that’s not correct. There’s no Iranian mothership. These are not Iranian drones, they’re not Chinese drones, they’re US drones. And we know that because if they weren’t, they would have been shot down or one of them would have been captured somehow or you can interfere with the GPS signals. There are things you can do to defend yourself against a drone attack. We have that capability. We haven’t done any of that, which means that there are drones. Number one. Number two, to the extent that we had reliable reports in the beginning of this process, these drones were flying a regular pattern, basically a grid.

Now if you know anything about air sea rescue, I’m not a pilot, but I spend a lot of time at sea, I pilot boats and you learn sea rescue techniques, but you do the same thing from the air or someone’s lost at sea and helicopters or, you know, Coast Guard helicopters or aircraft or others go out to conduct a rescue. They do what’s called a grid pattern. They start in the place where the victim or someone, you know, person fell overboard or someone stranded, whatever the case may be. They start in the place where that individual, that victim or group of victims are most likely to be.

And then they obviously look there, but then if they don’t see what they’re looking for, they form a grid and as the process goes on, the grid gets larger and larger, kind of like the pattern I’m tracing. So you keep working in a expanding circle around the point of most likely contact. So the grid sort of expands like this, obviously looking for the person and with the passage of time, particularly at sea. I know we’re talking about land phenomena, but I’ll get back to that, but particularly at sea, you can drift, currents are strong, wind can take you where it wants, people may be paddling or whatever.

So you can drift from the most likely spot. So they don’t find you in the most likely spot. They have this expanding grid that A, maybe they got the first thing wrong, that maybe the most likely spot was a bad guess or a bad estimate. And B, even if they were right to begin with, if they didn’t find you, you might have drifted, so they’re expanding in the area. So these drones, based on reports, appear to be flying a grid type of pattern. What does that mean? It means they’re looking for something. So, and it must be something fairly important or you wouldn’t have the drones are expensive.

I’m not saying the government can’t afford to keep them up there. I am saying that the government would not be doing it unless the object of the search were somehow critical or very important. So we know a couple things. The drones are reliable. There’s just been too many reliable reports, notwithstanding all the mistakes and fake reports. Number two, these are U.S. government drones. We know that because they would have been shot down otherwise. And number three, they appear to be searching for something, and that’s a reasonable inference from the fact that they are following this grid pattern.

Okay, so we’re that far along. What are they looking for? Well, we don’t know. I’m just being candid. I’m not going to make something up. I don’t know what they’re looking for, but I do know, as I say, it must be a high-value target. It must be something of critical importance from either a national security point of view or a law enforcement point of view because the government would not be devoting these resources to something that was far less important. If there’s a bank robbery somewhere and there’s a getaway car, fine. Chase them with a state police helicopter, but you’re not going to send up a fleet of drones to find a getaway car and a bank robbery.

So what you’re even, you know, an Amber Alert or kidnapping, this wouldn’t be the way you would go about it. Number one. Number two, if it were something less critical or less vital to national security and getting to the point that it is, but if we’re less vital than that, they would engage the public. You know, you know, when you’re driving down the highway, if there’s a kidnapping, they’ll put up an Amber Alert, so-called, and engage the public. Here’s the license plate number. You know, don’t confront the perpetrator, but if you see this license plate number, this colored car, you know, call the police.

So that’s smart. I mean, you’re basically deputizing a large population of tens of thousands, maybe more, of motorists to help in the search. Well, that’s the way you do a search when you’re looking for something like that. That’s not what they’re doing here. They’re not informing the public. They’re not engaging the public. That means that not only is this a high value target that they’re looking for, a critical target, but it is of such significance that they don’t want to get the public involved. They don’t want the public to know. Why would that be? Well, the answer is, look, there’s a lot of mystery about these drones.

Right now, as I see it, they’re downplaying it. They’re saying, oh, people don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re amateurs. Again, some of that, but we can discount that. There are actual drones up there. But why not engage the public if you’re looking for something? Because there’s a lot of, if not quite as stereo, there’s some genuine fear. There’s a lot of mystery. There’s a lot of angst. People are like, why won’t they tell us? It must be pretty bad. Well, that’s actually a reasonable inference. It might be pretty bad. But the point is, the government must feel that the panic that would result if they told you the truth is greater than the panic or fear that is resulting from the drones themselves.

Now, there’s whatever mystery, whatever angst, whatever tension is being caused by the drones. One way to alleviate that is just to level with the public, say, hey, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why, et cetera. They’re not doing that, which means that the actual cause must be something that would cause a worse panic. Okay, so now, again, we’re using inferential method, but they are government drones. They’re searching for something because they’re flying a pattern. They’re not telling the public. They’re kind of blowing smoke in terms of false sightings. Yeah, there’s some of those, but that’s more of a distraction than anything else.

And whatever it is, is worse than letting the mystery continue, which means it must be pretty bad. It must be pretty serious. It’s also not something you can find either on foot or by car. Why do you need drones in the first place unless perhaps this is a moving target or you need special equipment. Now, what kind of drone do that? Maybe it’s more difficult if you’re a truck or a car, state police force or whatever. Well, they have radiation detectors. When I say radiation, it’s not exactly the same as a Geiger counter. It’s more the case that everything throws off some degree of radiation, some microwaves or some other heat waves or has some sort of output that can be detected, and it varies depending on what it is.

And so you can actually, some of you may have had consultants come in and check out your house for leaks or drafts, and you get these photographs back. I’ve seen them where most of it’s kind of yellow, but there’s a dark purple spot. Well, that’s a leak. You need to put some insulation on. I mean, this stuff is fairly sophisticated, but it’s also quite common, but the drones can have high-powered versions of that. Of course, they can have cameras. That’s the easy part, but these heat or radiation detectors I’m talking about can be put into these drones.

So that’s as much as we either know or can reasonably infer. I’ll take that one step further. And again, I want to be clear. I don’t know this for a fact. I don’t want to engage in loose speculation, but using the inferential method I described, I’ll take it one step further. But again, to be clear, this is a guess. They may be looking for some kind of radiological device, some kind of what’s called a dirty bomb or some stolen or hijacked radioactive material. Now, let me explain what a dirty bomb is. It’s a radiological device weapon, really, a weapon of mass destruction, WMD.

It’s not an atomic bomb. This is not something that could even like Hiroshima scale or Nagasaki scale, let alone much larger than that. That’s not what I’m talking about. If that were missing, I think it would have shut down the whole state of New Jersey by now. But what you can do, you can take radioactive material and you can get it from a dentist office. You can steal it from some industrial commercial user. You can get it from a nuclear waste site. There are plenty of ways to get this. And then take conventional explosives. So you put the conventional explosive in a bomb, you wrap it in this radiological material, you detonate it, and then this radioactive material goes off.

It’s not a nuclear explosion, just to be clear. But it will cause radiation to spread, and that area may be a no-go zone. Obviously, extremely harmful to health, but it’s worse than that. It would make that area, not talking quite as bad as Chernobyl, but it would make that area off-limits basically radioactive. Plus, the terror effect is huge. Obviously, we can understand that. So this could be a terrorist plot to detonate a radiological device, or one step short of that, perhaps some radioactive material is missing that could be used in such a device. And they’re trying to find that.

And what they’re doing is they’re using these drones with detectors to just try to locate it, and obviously they could converge on that and confiscate it or stop the terrorist attack. Again, everything I’ve been saying for the last couple of minutes is an inference from what we know, but I want to be clear that we don’t know this for a fact. We have to wait and find out. Now, you can take that, just to put it in context a little bit, and say, oh, by the way, we’ve had an open border for the last almost four years.

Some number, millions of people across the border, estimates vary, five, six, seven, eight million. A lot of them, they’re all illegal, but a lot of them are illegal immigrants. Maybe they’re just looking for a better life or a better job, all kinds of political issues around that. I don’t want to get into that. That’s a separate debate. But we know for a fact that a substantial number of these people are criminals, and some of them are terrorists. They’re on terrorist watch lists. They have not been vetted. There’s no control. The Biden administration has almost said, yeah, we’ll take a certain amount of terrorists.

We want so many people coming in if some terrorists are in the crowd too bad. I mean, that’s literally their attitude. Well, they’re here. These people are not predominantly Mexicans or even Guatemalans or Hondurans. They’re Venezuelans, which are closely aligned with China. China, this would be a golden opportunity. In fact, it is the case that China would have its agents come across the border, as would Iran, as would terrorists in Afghanistan, et cetera. It’s an open border. So as I say, it’s not confined to the Central American farm workers or people looking for entry-level jobs. There are some hardcore terrorists who are coming in in the process.

We just described. They’re here now, just to add one more fact again. We’re using imprints, but it has to be fact-based. Donald Trump is going to be sworn in on January 20th. What’s Donald Trump going to do? We already know he’s going to shut the border, number one, but he’s also going to deport these people. Tom Homan is the border czar. He’s made his plan clear. They’re going to have the resources. Everyone’s in agreement on this. Democrats may not be, but they don’t have any. Once Trump’s in office, they’re not going to have any say.

And Tom Homan, the border czar, has said, we’re going to start with the criminals and terrorists. You know, trying to deport 8 million people, that’s not going to happen. I can tell you that it’s too many. But a million? Yeah. And or some large number? Yes. And they’re going to start with the terrorists. So if you’re a terrorist and you’re in the country and you have reason to believe that the government knows who you are, even though they may not care, and you’re ready to carry out a terrorist attack, the clock is ticking. What I mean by that is starting January 20th and then the months that follow, you may be deported.

You probably will be deported. They’re going to come and get you. And so if you want to carry out a terrorist act, now’s your chance. So it’s sort of, you know, you have the bar and it’s late and you’re thinking you might want one drink and the bartender says, last call is a bartender pour me a beer. But this is last call for terrorists because Trump’s going to arrest them and kick them out. So they may view this as their opportunity. So I’m going to I’ll leave it at that. Again, they are U.S. drones. They are flying a surveillance pattern.

They’re looking for something. Whatever it is, we don’t know. But whatever it is, disclosing it would cause more panic than the drones themselves. That means it must be pretty serious. It’s something you could most easily or most likely find using the drones. And they do have this radiological heat detective microwave detection equipment I described much more effective than trying to do it from the ground. And as I said, whatever it is, it’s not something they want to share with the American people or enlist the help of the American people because they’re worried that telling people what’s going on would actually cause more panic than just letting them speculate about the drones.

So that’s where we are. Let’s hope that I’m wrong. Number one, let’s hope that if I’m right, they apprehend or catch or interdict this material before anything else happens. We can’t be certain of that. But just as an everyday American, as a citizen, certainly people in that area. When I grew up, we always heard the story of how Orson Welles and his American Playhouse did a radio reenactment of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. But they updated it for the 1930s, which is when they did this in New Jersey. And growing up in New Jersey, you always heard about the panic, people running out of their houses and getting in the cars.

They didn’t know it was a dramatization. They thought it was a real invasion of Martians in New Jersey. Well, we’re not quite at that stage, but let’s hope we don’t get there. But I would be attentive to this just as an investor, always keep a little dry powder, keep some cash, maybe a little gold on the side or a slice of gold, or just be prepared for the kind of volatility that might result. Is this something that would happen on Inauguration Day? That’s not a prediction. That’s not a forecast. I do know from having done a lot of counterterrorism work that terrorists do think about significant dates.

I don’t want to go down the whole list, but the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 were on the same dates that the first US troops arrived in Saudi Arabia, going all the way back to the first Gulf War. That anniversary was not a coincidence. The terrorists picked it for that reason. There are many examples like that. Would they pick Inauguration Day? I don’t know that. And if the Inauguration is over and everyone’s at the Inaugural Ball and nothing blew up, let’s hope that’s the case. But again, I wouldn’t necessarily assume it has to happen before Inauguration Day.

I do assume that the terrorists, if they’re going to do anything, now’s their chance. So I’ll leave it at that. Hopefully this is helpful. We’re going to be watching it. Again, hopefully this all comes to an uneventful conclusion. But I think it would be remiss if we didn’t at least point out some of these dangers. So I’ll leave with that. I’m Jim Rickerts. And by the way, for all of our viewers and readers, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Hope everyone enjoys the holidays. Thank you. [tr:trw].

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