NJ Drones - A few videos and observations
Note: I posted this to /r/ufos but it never appeared in the feed, so cross-posting here.
The Ring Neighbors app has been going crazy in our area of NJ with posts about the drones. We got another notification that they were back tonight so finally went somewhere to take a look. I took a few videos which I'll link below.
The videos in question are all taken from the parking lot on the Point Pleasant side of the Manasquan Inlet. There were a LOT of drones in the 30ish minutes that we were out there and there were a handful of other folks watching too. We also kept checking FlightRadar24 and what we saw were not airplanes.
Nothing that we saw was anything other than prosaic. That is, none of them displayed any of the five observables. They simply looked like... drones. What felt weird was simply how many of them we saw while going out on a whim while also knowing they're being seen all over the state.
When far away, they just sort of look like blinking points of light. A bit closer, and the point of light resolves a bit so you can make out a separate red, green, and white light. Closer still and you can clearly see the separate lights, although I wasn't able to get a good shot of that.
Maybe the strangest video I took was the one looking out from the inlet out towards the Atlantic Ocean. In that shot, there's a drone out over the water with a REALLY bright light aimed back at me that's bright enough to cast a ray on the water, almost like the moon. From this position, the red/green lights aren't visible, but after hovering for maybe 10 minutes it finally starting going N/NW towards a few more of the drones and you could make out the red/green lights. In that shot, you can also make out one much lower in elevation with it's light bouncing around on the water like it's pivoting.
This video is looking N across the inlet towards Manasquan. I zoomed in a bit and you can make out the red/green lights.
This one is looking W in the inlet back towards the Manasquan River. As you can see, the drones are fairly far away, but you can see the blinking.
Another from the same vantage point. As I mentioned, when they're further away like this they just sort of look like a flickering light.
This one is looking out the inlet towards the ocean. At the start, there's a lamp off to the right that isn't a drone. In the first few seconds there are also larger red (left) and green (right) lights at the end of a the jetty, with a smaller red light in the middle that's a buoy. The drone is the yellowish light in the middle. Towards the start of the video you can see it casting light on the water. At around the 0:52 mark, another white light appears lower in the frame that appears to flicker and change direction at the end of the video.
Finally there's this one from the same vantage point as the last. In this one, I pan left across the inlet so that I'm looking north towards Manasquan and Sea Girt. You can see that the drone that was previously hovering offshore in the last video starts moving across the frame towards the others. As it does, the "solid" white lit starts to blink and look more like the others rather than a spotlight.
And, for the sake of completeness, we also star Starlink while we were looking. The others were not that.