Joe Rogan has weighed into the saga around mystery drones dotting the skies over New Jersey, saying he is “genuinely concerned” about claims they are looking for lost nuclear material.
John Ferguson, CEO of Saxon Aerospace—a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) manufacturer in Kansas-brought his own concerns to TikTok in a double-header of now-viral clips that have swept across X, too. His expert analysis formed the basis of the chills running down Rogan’s spine.
He essentially claims that the drones, some 5,000 of which have been reported—mainly in and around New Jersey, might be part of a covert U.S. government operation to recover a missing nuclear warhead.
“My own guess is that these drones are not nefarious in intent. If they are, they are, but I doubt it. But if they are drones, the only reason why they would be flying, and flying that low, is because they’re trying to smell something on the ground,” Ferguson said.
He also linked the operation, if it is one at all, to Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had dismantled the nuclear program. With Russia, there were countless nuclear missiles that were disarmed and disposed of... There were over 80 nuclear warheads that were in Ukraine that came up missing,” he said. “We don’t know where they are. Maybe somebody does, but nobody really knows where these are. I speak with some pretty high-level government officials on this stuff. It seems as though that is the case.”
These words were enough to capture the imagination of podcaster Rogan, who shared Ferguson’s first piece to camera and declared: “This is the first video about these drones that has got me genuinely concerned.”
Rogan, who has 14.4 million followers on Elon Musk’s platform, channeled the tech mogul and left it there, a simple message without nuance that appeared to stoke the growing hysteria around drone-gate in his comment section.
The FBI has said fewer than 100 of 5,000 or so reports were “deemed worthy of further investigation,” after a hotline was set up to comb through potential sightings, according to The War Zone.
Drones forced the temporary closure of Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio between Friday night and Saturday morning, while The New York Stewart International Airport runways shut down for an hour on Friday night for the same reasons.
There had also been sightings of the flying menaces over two military installations in New Jersey, at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle.
But despite the intense conversation around the sightings, a Pentagon spokesperson said they are actually not unusual. “This is not a new issue for us,” the Joint Staff spokesperson said. “We’ve had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It’s something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited.”
Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Tom Adams suggested to CNN that recent sightings could be due to a mixture of factors, including people sending drones up because of the coverage the phenomenon has received.
