United States.Drone Incursions · Langley AFB

Starting the night of 6 December 2023, personnel at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, in southeastern Virginia, began observing unmanned aerial systems entering the installation's restricted airspace. Langley is no ordinary base: it hosts F-22 Raptor stealth fighter squadrons and the headquarters of Air Combat Command, making it one of the U.S. Air Force's most sensitive assets. The incursions recurred over 17 nights, until 22 December, often in the evening; according to Task & Purpose, summarising the Wall Street Journal, the drones flew at about 100 miles per hour and made a noise likened to a lawnmower.

Accounts describe strikingly coordinated and heterogeneous behavior. It was not a single craft but groups of drones of widely varying sizes: from small quadcopters to large fixed-wing platforms, some estimated at around 20 feet (6 metres) in length, with steady and navigation lights. They flew on a defined heading over the base and its surroundings and, according to testimony leaked to the press, did not match recreational hobbyist patterns. The Air Force chose not to shoot them down: doing so over U.S. soil, in a populated area and without knowing what they were, posed legal and safety risks. As a precaution, the Pentagon temporarily relocated F-22 fighters to another base.

The institutional response was significant. The Department of Defense, the FBI and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) (the office created to resolve unidentified-object incidents) held two weeks of meetings to try to determine the origin. NASA deployed its high-altitude research aircraft WB-57F (registration N927NA), which flew circular orbits centered on Langley with sensor instrumentation. Despite all that effort, months later the Pentagon still publicly stated it did not know where the drones came from.

The episode belongs to a broader wave of incursions over U.S. military installations in 2023-2024. In a related but distinct case, on 6 January 2024 a Chinese national, Fengyun Shi, a graduate student in Minnesota, flew a drone over the Newport News shipyards, some 15 kilometres from Langley, until rain brought it down into a tree; he was arrested on 18 January in San Francisco as he was about to board a flight to China, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanour counts of photographing a designated installation without authorization (Navy ships under construction) and was sentenced to six months in prison. That incident, however, does not explain the massive, coordinated December incursions, which remain formally unattributed.

Two records released under FOIA describe what was happening in the surrounding area a year later, in December 2024; they do not document the 2023 nights. The first are the PHALANX reports of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which log the drones detected by their factory serial number around several bases; the agency released them on 27 June 2025 (FOIA file 25-024) and Government Attic published them. The Langley-Eustis report for 1 to 31 December 2024 says no activity was detected within 8 km of Fort Eustis and all of it occurred within 8 km of Langley, "with no detects occurring within Langley's base boundary": 56 serial numbers and 113 events, all rotary-wing craft and nearly all commercial DJI models (the most frequent being the DJI Mini 3). Thirty of those serial numbers had been detected before, and activity fell compared with November, when there were 69 serial numbers and 138 events. Thirty-seven exceeded the FAA altitude allowance and seven flew at night. The report describes the activity of craft 2, 3 and 4 as recreational, and another report in the same release, for 1 to 3 December, says craft 2 to 9 "appear recreational in nature". The two reports place a Skydio flight of 2 December differently: the monthly one says it appears to have launched from the tarmac of a private airfield some 250 m west of the perimeter, while the 1 to 3 December report puts it some 250 m from the perimeter and some 570 m from the Langley airstrip, near a possible maintenance hangar; they also give different durations (22 min 56 s and 13 min 38 s). The reports list only craft identified by serial number, do not mention fixed-wing or large drones, and do not say whether the system detects craft that do not transmit that number.

The second are the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) security reports on drones over nuclear plants, released under FOIA (FOIA-2026-000270) and published by Liberation Times in October 2026. Five concern the Surry plant in Virginia and describe events of 3, 10, 12, 13 and 17 December 2024. The 3 December report describes multiple drones at about 150 feet with blinking white lights over the plant's owner controlled area and protected area. The 10 December report counts five craft between 18:05 and 18:57 and three more around 19:49: "a larger drone with red, green, and white lights", a triangular one and a third; the two smaller ones linked up and flew in a zigzag pattern around the larger one, and all three flew off east by northeast. In the 12 December report, the Fort Eustis control tower, which the plant notified, confirmed that the drone "appeared on radar at approximately 300 feet", and Norfolk Radar Approach Control "had no additional information". In the 13 December report, the drone "did not cross into the protected area", the Fort Eustis controller said there was no military drone activity in the area and the Norfolk controller "had no information to report". The 17 December report says the three drones were believed to be the same as in the previous reports: one crossed the protected area westward over the Unit 1 and 2 containments, others passed over the plant's information center and the switchyard, Fort Eustis repeated that there was no military drone activity and, at 20:57, the North Anna plant reported that its local law enforcement had told it of drone sightings in its area. The searches that followed the sightings of the 13th and the 17th found nothing. All five carry the status "Closed Unresolved" and, at the same time, the note "This report is open pending ILTAB/ILTAT review"; none identifies the operator or attributes the flights.

Unlike the classic visual cases, here there is no doubt the objects were physical craft (drones) nor that they repeatedly penetrated the airspace of a top-tier military asset. The anomaly is not ontological but strategic and operational: how could coordinated swarms overfly the Air Combat Command headquarters for 17 nights without the United States managing to identify, intercept or attribute them. The case exposes a doctrine and counter-drone capability gap over its own soil that the authorities themselves acknowledged.

The possible explanations are: surveillance by a state adversary (the most unsettling reading and the one fitting pattern 8s), an own or allied program or exercise not communicated to the base, or incursions by civilian operators (recreational or commercial) misread as a coordinated threat. What remained open is attribution. By 2023, the phenomenon of 'unidentified objects over sensitive installations' had become a conventional national-security problem, with manifestly technological drones, and still unresolved as to authorship.