By late January, the incoming Trump administration would assert that the entirety of the New Jersey drone wave had been benign, with each and every UAS “authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons.” Their surety, however, stood in stark contrast to the warnings from top military brass, including the Air Force general at the head of NORAD, Gregory Guillot. In February, he testified to the Senate that approximately 350 drone incursions had been reported over a hundred different US military installations in 2024 alone, stating that many of these cases were unsolved, albeit with “evidence of a foreign intelligence nexus in some of these incidents.”
Lacking better coordination, or much clarity from the White House, the Pentagon, or the US intelligence community, some in domestic law enforcement—including members of the FBI’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism divisions—have turned to an unlikely source for help cracking the case of these mystery drones: two UFO hunters out on Long Island in New York, John and Gerald Tedesco.
The Tedescos, twin brothers, each spent about three decades in the private sector working in electrical engineering and instrumentation design before they decided to kit out an old RV with an array of homemade signals collection equipment. Their aim was to create a mobile field lab for investigating UFO hot spots. Intrigued by their efforts, members of Harvard’s alien-hunting Galileo Project began talking with the Tedescos in 2021 and asked them to join as research affiliates. Since then, aviation safety advocates, astronomers, physicists and other researchers, and at least one journalist (I, myself) have made the trek out to Long Island’s South Shore to kick the tires on the roving aerial surveillance unit they’ve dubbed “the Nightcrawler.”
John uses a homemade millimeter-wave radar device. MARCO GIANNAVOLA
Chris Grooms, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran who was a deputy sheriff in Nebraska during an earlier multistate wave of mystery drone sightings from December 2019 to January 2020, gushed when I asked him about the Tedescos: “I don’t know how much you’ve talked to those guys. They’re freaking awesome.”
Grooms joined the Tedescos last January, when the brothers publicly shared some of their findings from training the Nightcrawler’s sensors on a few of these unidentified drones. “They do look like commercial air traffic for the most part,” John said during the virtual town hall, moderated by a former Illinois state police lieutenant, “but they also exhibit unexplained or unusual phenomena.”
As an example, the Tedescos described some cases they had documented and passed along to law enforcement, in which they caught a mystery drone appearing to go dark to evade closer observation (a common complaint from New Jersey police during the wave). Using their suite of cameras and sensors, which can handle light well outside the visible spectrum, the Tedescos discovered that these craft weren’t so much switching off their lights as switching the frequency of their lights.