I've really nothing more to add than what this tweet is expressing, but this might be a fun story to follow.

Source: https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1858723577605873668

Since when are drone flights required to be "authorized"?

ADS-B makes an aircraft register on the flight radar app, but it's generally not required in airspace where pilots are allowed to fly without a radio on board.

Breathless claims of up to eight large drones and dozens of law enforcement officers and emergency crews yet the footage shows only one ordinary looking quadcopter and zero law enforcement.

Commenters are musing on whether it's the Russians, the Chinese or the deep state. I'm thinking most likely Chinese made and available at Walmart.

It's a flap as far as I can tell, last time I looked at it on Twitter people were breathlessly sharing photos of what looked like mars.

There's no adequately timed/dated/located footage to investigate that I know about.

Does anyone recognise this logo?

There's 2 small airports in Morris county. Maybe the drones are too close? I know there are other situations where approval is required (I think over things like music festivals), but I'm clearly not an expert and don't know a concise rule for when authorization is required.

So where's the supporting evidence these are "large" and stayed airborne for hours?

Also what is large, the difference in a Mavic Mini and an Inspire or what?

looks like a flamingo

This shows the AW139 that was looking for the drones:

Probably a rose, which is the symbol of Madison. The X thread said:
"Just outside of Madison"
and
"about 30 minutes" from Picatinny arsenal (which is NW of Madison)
[EDIT: those descriptions were for a different video]

Here's a better quality video

So the Ted's Deli video is from Rochelle park area, about 20 miles from Madison and Morris County.

There's a clock visible, and a plane flies past, so should be able to recreate it. But I'm not sure it's worth it. That's just a video of a single drone-like entity.

Looks like about 7:15 PM, and 11/18 Monday (yesterday)

Regarding flight times, the wording is annoyingly ambiguous. Superficially it sounds like each of them was up there for 2 hours, but I have a nagging feeling what they meant is that over a 2 hour period, 5 drones were seen.
Your DJI multicopters will have a flight time of not much more than half an hour, you need to start hitting fixed wing drones for significantly longer than that, and those should be distinguishable from how they fly (as they have a front with a prop, so even if they can do the up and downy for HTOL, they're still mostly forwardy (technical terms)).

it takes very little time to switch battery packs,
lose sight of it for a minute, and it could be on the next half hour

How did you manage to find this?

You can see 'Teds' in the video shared by Flarkey.

Go to the area in google maps given in the OP zoom out a bit

search Google for "Teds"

Take a look at each hit till you find the right one on streetview

And the "Deli" was visible inside the shop

a colleague at work posted this on an internal chat system (game studio):

" Drones have invaded my area of New Jersey! Last night I saw up to 30 or 40 of them flying around busy highways, and around a military research base. Parents live near it and I purposefully planned to get take out over there to drive down and see for myself. One flew over me, probably at about 500 ft, at a stop light and managed to snap a blurry picture. Looked like a car sized airplane with blinking lights. Others looked like they were up at flight traffic altitude - like 2000 ft which from what I understand is a no-no for drones. "

are we still settled on flap / planes?

That photo looks like internal reflections of the bright lights, perhaps the drone could be circled for us?

At where exactly and what date/time was it taken? the name seems to indicate 1230 but it's night, the original image file from the camera would help.

a little more context, i dont have the exact time - this is the real file name, i took a screenshot of the original photo: PXL_20241204_001305342.jpg

"What I saw looked more like a military/police drone - wings with blinking lights, and it had a spotlight pointing down. Another dimmer light on the tail. Definitely wanted to be seen"

"It's possible they were pre-programmed. They seemed to be going in random directions at random altitudes. Grabbed this airspace use for drone pilots pic. I basically saw them all along the major east to west highway in the red box on my way to pick up dinner las tnight, even in the no fly zone they imposed around Picatinny. Waypoint drop is exactly where one passed over directly above me, and there were probably another 4-5 just in the area looking in different directions so they weren't respecting those flight rules"

Send the original photo, the screenshot wipe's out the metadata.

My own Pixel phone images do seem to indicate that the filename contains the time

so looking directly towards this plane from Dover...?

I put the KML for that flight into Google Earth but it seems too low to appear over the tree from the location

But I am never sure which KML to get for accurate altitude into Google Earth.

Probably.

Of the

External Quote:

...that @analiennamed's colleague reported, the one they actually photographed is almost certainly a conventional aircraft flying towards them.

Green navigation light on starboard wing, landing lights, red navigation light on port wing.

Flap, yes. Planes, partially. Once a flap is going, almost anything in the sky can be interpreted as whatever people are looking for, caught up in the excitement of the flap. So we have reports of "drones" hovering for hours that are probably stars or planets, reports hat are almost surely planes -- and probably a drone or two, possibly even some drones being sent up to look for the mystery drones, or as a prank to be mistaken for them.

What does "around a military research base" mean? As an example, Fort Meade in Maryland is less than 5 miles from BWI airport and planes fly almost right over it. The Pentagon itself is less than 1 mile from Reagan airport in DC. It's pretty normal for planes to be within mere miles of military facilities because there are a lot of military facilities scattered around near large urban areas.

Below is a screenshot from a video I took on Oct 6, 2024. Note the similarity to the photo you attached. I also was there for a while and saw dozens of such aircraft. They were all planes coming out of Boston Logan airport which incidentally is only 14 miles from an Air Force base and major center of national defense research. The photo below is Boeing 737.

There is a temporary restricted airspace NOTAM for Picatinny Arsenal, but only below 2000 ft, and it's a pretty small radius of 2 miles. Higher planes would not be affected.
https://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_4_8833.html

Settled? Probably not as in everything is a plane, but in the sense that the most likely explanation is a combination of different things in the sky, including lots of planes, suggests people are seeing things they interpret as drones. As @JMartJr noted above, there may be some drones being seen along with a lot of other stuff. Once people think there are a lot of drones, lots of lights in the sky look like drones.

As @Kyle Ferriter asked above, what "military research base" are these drones buzzing around? Saying drones are buzzing military installations seems to make it sound nefarious. Ans in what time period did he count "30-40" of these drones? All at once, or over the course of several hours?

So, they were possibly pre-programed to go in random directions at random altitudes? I've seen a number of pre-programed drone shows and they usually are programmed to create a recognizable image, like a portable toilet :

Not sure why they would be pre-programed to in essences look like they were not pre-programmed.

The one photo your coworker managed seems to be an aircraft. And it appears that New Jersy reporter Katie Corrado, posted multiple photos on X claiming they were drones, even though many turned out to be aircraft. It appears she has deleted her Xeet(?) declaring an aircraft a drone once she was informed it was in fact an aircraft. Thread here:

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ka...-as-drones-over-new-jersey.13804/#post-329330

Those darned lights have fooled us into thinking the unidentified craft is just a reflection, it's the perfect cover!

(Confession: I mostly did that as I've just installed a new drawing package, and I just wanted to know if it was more convenient to use than what I have previously used for such tasks. It wasn't. But there's no point in wasting the effort.)

I figured the plane like object was the UFO, but with so many lights and reflections I wanted to make sure what the UFO was in the op's opinion before we did some investigation, and without bias from knowing my assumption.

So apparently the drones can manipulate time, according to this Fox News clip

Source: https://youtu.be/LZcWXnFavVg?si=19TDtTYPL0yNe012

One interesting claim that could be checked is that it has been happening "every night with the exception of Thanksgiving". I wonder if the air traffic was noticeably and demonstrably different then...?

Maybe a different approach pattern? Or maybe just they didn't go outside to look for

drones on Thanksgiving, being too full to get off the couch (NOT a dig at anybody, I was certainly too full to get up and go looking for drones on Thanksgiving night and I am sure I was not the only one. )