I recently described how a swarm of drones flew in a restricted area at Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant on two successive nights last September. A new cache of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) reveals how 24 nuclear sites suffered at least 57 drone incursions from 2015 to 2019 – and Palo Verde itself was overflown again in December, despite new security measures.
The documents were obtained from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Douglas D. Johnson on behalf of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). The SCU’s main interest is in anomalous aerospace phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs, but Johnson uncovered a series of incidents involving something less exotic but potentially more threatening: commercial drones.
In the September incidents, a swarm of five or six large drones flew over the Unit 3 nuclear reactor at Palo Verde in Arizona for about eighty minutes, a length of time which suggested they were carrying out a thorough survey of the site. The documents released at the time referred to a similar incident at Limerick Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania.
Johnson sent a follow-up request to get more details. The response was a terse list of fifty-seven security incidents (SIDs) involving drones, running from December 2014 to October 2019. This provides little more than the date and location, with no details of the number or type of drones involved. We do not know how many involved multiple, simultaneous drone flyovers. At the time the list was generated, three of the incidents were listed as ‘Open’ and five ‘Closed Resolved.’ but the overwhelming majority, 49 of them, were ‘Closed Unresolved.’ This indicates that for 85% of the cases the NRC has no idea who the perpetrators are or what they intended, and has given up on finding them.
Article Courtesy of Forbes.com & David Hambling – Contributor Aerospace & Defense
