(NewsNation) — New details are emerging about drones that flew over U.S. military bases last year, though there is still no explanation for where they came from.
Air Force officials confirmed several drones flew over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in December of 2023, an incident that has been brought up in a number of congressional hearings and even brought to the attention of President Joe Biden.
Langley houses one of the Defense Department’s largest and most important military infrastructures and is home to some of the nation’s most advanced fighter jets.
It’s still not clear exactly what the objects were, and if the Pentagon has an answer, it has not released that information publicly.
A recent Wall Street Journal report says that the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is tasked with studying reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, was involved in the investigation alongside the FBI.
That means the Pentagon had at least some indication that these might be something we can’t fully explain.
Exclusive video given to NewsNation by someone who lives near the base shows lights in the sky with the person who took the video describing the drones being the size of cars. Some of the new reporting has corroborated that description.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, Pentagon officials who have seen the drones in person say they were about 20 feet long, traveling at around 100 mph or faster and at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 feet.
Some speculate that the drones were not part of intelligence-gathering efforts by a foreign adversary like China or Russia, in part because they were out in the open with no apparent effort to hide them.
Former Air Force pilot Ryan Graves, an advocate for pilots who have seen UAPs, told NewsNation the objects don’t fit usual patterns.
“We are seeing these objects blinking with white lights, not in the strobe pattern that one would expect due to FAA regulations, but patterns that don’t seem to meet anything I’m aware of,” he told NewsNation. “Additionally, the objects apparently have been lit up while they’re operating over the base itself. So it did not appear, at least from the information I received, that these objects were trying to conceal their location or presence.”
Senators who spoke to NewsNation also said they are not sure what the objects are either.
NewsNation has reached out to the Pentagon for comment but has not received a response.