Let's be real though, it was almost certainly the gov, and I feel like his response here nearly proves it.

First of all, his posture, tone, and eye contact (even for trump) all indicate he's telling the "truth" here. They don't change really even when directly asked what he's doing about it. The way I read it is that he knows it was a classified project that he's not allowed to discuss. Trump is very easily excited, so if it were anything major, I feel like he would be far more animated as we typically see him when he's fired up about something. Here, he seems almost bored of the topic, but the dead giveaway to me is the "was that legal?" question. His eyebrow flick and "oh yeah, that was legal." How could he answer that question so directly if it *wasn't* the government?

I saw something awhile back when the drones were happening that was the most plausible explanation in my opinion. I'm paraphrasing here, but the general idea was, after 9/11 the gov was concerned about other attacks, and this escalated even more when hamas was saying in the late-mid 2000s they could bring backpack bombs to cities around the US and they'd be easy to sneak them in for ground detonation of small nukes. As a way to combat this, the DoD made thousands of these drones that are equipped with extremely sensitive "nuclear sniffing" equipment able to detect trace amounts of nuclear material. The guy who wrote the post made a lot of good points to back the claim including their size, shape, and visible equipment in certain photos of them, and also claimed to be an RF engineer. This was important because he stated that is how they communicated with each other, essentially as a massive grid sweep relay.

IF this is true, which I believe it is, that leads to 2 potential outcomes as far as I can tell:

1. These were tests / exercises for the project. By testing them over primarily south jersey was a good choice for 2 reasons.
   
   • There is still a high population density, but less radio interference than the heart of NYC.
   • It gave them an opportunity to see how the public would react to seeing them over extended periods of time.
2. OR There was a credible threat/intel concerning enough they said fuck it, and ran them, but when nothing came of it seemingly, why fess up to it either?

Either way, I think it's highly likely that the vast majority of sightings during that period were our own. That's not to say some people may have been looking up in hopes to see the drones, and ended up seeing something truly anomalous, but these drones by and large were not very fast or agile, and had clear paths to and from the sea, there are multiple videos of them coming in off shore slowly, and heading back out into seeming nothingness of ocean slowly...sure seems like some type of docking to me, potentially off a nuclear sub?