Led by New Jersey resident and star co-host Steve Doocy, Fox & Friends has gone wall-to-wall this week with coverage of the mysterious drones haunting the Garden State, with some of the show’s co-hosts suggesting the clandestine involvement of the federal government.
Doocy lives in Bergen County, which since late November has been the epicenter of a series of unexplained sightings of large drones—with some described as “car-sized” by witnesses.
Along with his co-hosts, Doocy has participated in no less than a dozen segments of their Fox News morning chat show about the aerial enigmas this week, diving deeper and deeper into the (increasingly reasonable?) belief that the feds must be up to something.
On Tuesday’s broadcast, Doocy said the drones had flown over his home at low altitudes of 100 yards.
“The scary part is when they stop,” he said. “They just kind of hover for a little while.”
But he reasoned that they could simply be evidence of a private sector company carrying out a practice run for a drone delivery service.
His co-host Lawrence Jones, who has played Fox Mulder to his colleagues’ Scully all week, had a spookier take: “I kinda feel like the feds have some involvement with this.”
By Thursday—with increasingly unsatisfying or outright absent answers from authorities and drone flights unabated—Jones’ co-hosts had come around to his reasoning.
Doocy was outright baffled that federal authorities, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, have acknowledged the drones, maintained that they don’t know anything about their origin, and yet also claimed they do not pose an immediate threat.
“If the feds say people don’t know anything, people are going to freak out!” said Doocy, noting, “I see them with my own eyes.”
Upping his X-Files bonafides, Jones replied by all but declaring there must be a government conspiracy.
“They’re saying they don’t know but also saying they do know,” he said. “They’re saying ‘it’s not a threat’ but we don’t know where—they know something! They know something and don’t want to tell us what it is.”
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) claimed Wednesday that Iran or China has a “mothership” stationed off the U.S. East Coast which is launching the drones, a theory the Pentagon immediately denied.
Police reported that a cluster of the drones arrived from offshore Tuesday, including one that tracked a U.S. Coast Guard lifeboat.
Van Drew also released a statement calling for the drones to be shot down.
If the state does look for someone to do that, they could ask Doocy’s co-host Brian Kilmeade, who has taken a more cavalier approach to the mystery drones all week, volunteering to shoot them down himself and “apologize later” on Tuesday’s broadcast.
Commissioners in Monmouth County demanded Wednesday that Gov. Phil Murphy declare a state of emergency. Murphy has also said the drones, which have flown near a military research facility and prevented a medical helicopter from picking up a seriously injured patient, do not pose a threat.
Meanwhile, another Fox personality who lives in New Jersey, Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy has witnessed the phenomenon, with her children even filming the drones above their home.
She, too, suggested that there’s a grand conspiracy at work.
“I just think we’re in this era where people want more transparency from government and they are so tired by the lies being told by the government,” she told Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt on Monday’s broadcast.
Noting the tight-lipped feds, she compared the ongoing drone mystery to purported classified government records on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 9/11 attacks, and sex trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Campos-Duffy said some people have even reached out to her because her husband, former Rep. and former Fox Business host Sean Duffy, was announced as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for transportation secretary.
Duffy, she said, doesn’t know anything.
For now, the truth remains out there, somewhere.
