Jim Rickards - Drones over the East Coast... Here’s What YOU Need To Know

Summary

Highlights

• Jim Rickards addresses the rising mystery of drone sightings over New Jersey. 🌐
• Reports suggest these drones are likely US government-operated and searching for something. 🤫
• Inferential methods are used to hypothesize a potential national security threat. 🚨
• There's speculation about radiological threats, but nothing confirmed so far. 🗣️
• Rickards warns of possible terroristic threats, urging preparedness. 🔍

Key Takeaways

• The surge in drone sightings has been linked to a potential US government operation. 🤔
• Drones are reportedly flying in a grid pattern, indicating a search for something significant. 🚁
• Potential risks involve national security concerns, possibly a dirty bomb or radioactive material. ☢️
• Public panic is being avoided by keeping details under wraps; the truth might be alarming. 🕵️‍♂️
• Citizens are advised to stay vigilant and prepared amidst escalating tensions. 🛡️

Overview

Jim Rickards - Drones over the East Coast... Here’s What YOU Need To Know Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hi I'm Jim Rickards great to be with you this is a a special report we put together on a topic that I know is of interest to uh many of our readers uh and subscribers if not all of them which is the uh this rash of drone sightings uh that's been reported over the past several weeks it's uh you know it's it's front page news it's headlines on uh the internet your news feeds and uh Nightly News TV I'm sure you've heard a lot about it um and I have to but there's a
• 00:30 - 01:00 lot of uh confusion and conflict and mystery and uh that seems to be uh the actual story seems to have disappeared into a cloud of uh confusion if you want to put it that way uh and what I'd like to do is is try to cut through some of that uh and give uh give our readers um the best information available in terms of what's actually going on now before I jump into that I want to be clear there's some things we know and some things we absolutely don't know uh and
• 01:00 - 01:30 there's some things that will infer and I just want to explain inference or inferential method is a very important part of intelligence uh Gathering and intelligence analysis I spent uh a very long period of time at working with the CIA and Director of National Intelligence and uh you have um certain you know it's like a carpenter with a with a hammer and saw or doctor with a stethoscope intelligence analist have their own toolkit that they use and
• 01:30 - 02:00 sometimes I always say if you have all the information you need a bright high school kid can solve the problem uh but the challenge for intelligence analysis is can you solve the problem without all the information um and there are different ways of doing that uh we use we use these models in our um in our newsletters in our recommendations so uh it may be familiar territory to uh to a lot of you but we're going to use some inferential method what but that means taking things that we know and drawing logical conclusions you may not actually
• 02:00 - 02:30 have the you know the Smoking Gun if you will or the hard evidence with a conclusion but it flows naturally and logically from the things that you do know uh and then you can update it as new information comes in you can raise or lower the probabilities that that's all part of how intelligence analysis Works we're going to use that but I'll make it very clear when we do that when we're um sort of segueing from hard facta to inference um it doesn't mean we don't have a good analysis uh it does mean we don't have as much certainty but
• 02:30 - 03:00 I I'll I'll uh make make that very clear so there won't be any question about what we're uh what we're saying so let's with that as kind of a preface or background Let's uh let's jump into the story so the story goes back over a month at this point um some say longer some reports are older uh of drone sightings uh these drones are uh sightings have uh heavily centered on New Jersey I I grew up in New Jersey went to high school there and uh lived in the area Philadelphia New York uh most of my career so uh most of my life
• 03:00 - 03:30 actually so uh so I'm very familiar with the area but a lot of them are centered around New Jersey um then some stings up in uh New York uh north of Westchester County um but we that's kind of a subset of the bigger story so we'll focus on what we know about New Jersey now what um the government has said the government hasn't said very much uh they did an intelligence briefing yesterday uh a couple days ago um with the house
• 03:30 - 04:00 intelligence committee there are these standing committees in the House and Senate uh that that specialize in intelligence that was a classified briefing so it's not like anyone could walk out and tell us exactly what was said but a few members have made a few comments about it um and what they were told or what they say they were told uh and what you're hearing in the media and to the extent that the government is saying anything about it kind of goes along the following lines um that most of these settings are are not drones um
• 04:00 - 04:30 some of them are amateur drones you know once the uh these kind of large uh SUV siiz drones were spotted um everybody you know maybe people had drones in their garage or called Amazon and got one the next day these little uh you know kind of little there some of them are serious they cost like a thousand bucks or whatever but they're not the industrial siiz drones that people have been reporting but everybody got drones and sorted sending them up looking for the other drones um some of those things were flying around there are aircraft flying over the area um there are stars
• 04:30 - 05:00 and planets uh if you look up in the sky for Bright Light if you're not used to doing it you might be surprised how bright venuses uh this time of year but the point being um so the government's been saying no there's really not much Drone activity going on not any drone activity going on these are false reports or people are getting confused they're seeing airplanes small small aircraft helicopters amateur drones Etc um and and here's the bottom line the is
• 05:00 - 05:30 some of that going on some people are making mistakes some people are looking at airplanes calling them drones uh and there are lots of amateur drones flying around these days one of them crashed in somebody's yard and they thought it was one of the big government drones but it was just I say it was a wasn't I'm not saying it was a toy but it was a kind of an amateur drone but that does not detract from the fact that these larger drone sightings are valid there were too many of them people were quite sure of what they saw I tend to believe that people you know kind too busy to go
• 05:30 - 06:00 around and make things up some people do once the once the the headlines start but um these were actual sightings they were actual drones they were large scale I've seen uh you know in my intelligence work and on military bases I've seen how big some of these drones are and some of them are the size of of airplanes they're drones they can fly on their own the global Hulk and so forth but some of them are as big as commercial aircraft some of them are a lot of them are smaller um so they they they come in all sizes but these the ones are spotted were quite large so what the
• 06:00 - 06:30 government's doing they're using the fact that there are false sightings there are amateur drones there are aircraft and mistakes and maybe someone looks at a planet and thinks it's a drone that is going on but that should not detract or distract us maybe better put from the actual drone sightings so it's a little bit of a cover it's true but it's a little bit of a cover story for what's actually going on that the government doesn't want to talk about so that's number one number two um these are US Government drones uh how do we
• 06:30 - 07:00 know that well the answer is if they weren't they would have been shot down somebody would have done something now Congressman Jeff Andrew who represents uh South Jersey where where I grew up as say I went to K High School uh Jeff represents that District uh New Jersey it's K May County parts of Atlanta County and so forth he said a few weeks ago uh there was there was an Iranian Mothership offshore and it was launching these drones um that's clearly not the case uh I I know Congressman van Drew
• 07:00 - 07:30 great guy um very level-headed he's done a lot of good work uh who can blame him for you know kind of uh you know reading too much into it or or drawing conclusions that were not correct so I don't really he he was wrong about that but I really fault him this was very early in the process and he was doing the best he could based on the information he had to uh to make sense of it all but um but that's not correct he's a good good man but that's not correct there's no Iranian Mothership these are not IR Ian drones they're not
• 07:30 - 08:00 Chinese drones they're us drones and we know that because if they weren't they would have been shot down or one of them would have been you know captured somehow or you can interfere with the GPS signals there are things you can do to defend yourself against a drone attack we have that capability we haven't done any of that which means that there are drones number one number two to the extent that we had Reliable Reports in the beginning of this process these drones were flying a regular pattern basically a grid uh now if you noce anything about air sea rescue I've
• 08:00 - 08:30 uh I'm not a pilot but I spent a lot of time at at Sea a pilot of boats and you learn uh sea rescue techniques but you do the same thing from the air or someone's lost at sea and um helicopters or you know Coast Guard helicopters or aircraft or others go out to conduct a rescue they do what's called a grid pattern they start in the place where the the victim or someone you know person fell overboard or someone Str whatever the case may be they start in
• 08:30 - 09:00 the place where that individual that victim or group of victims are most likely to be and then they obviously look there but then if they don't see what they're looking for they they form a grid and as the process goes on the grid gets larger and larger kind of like the pattern I'm tracing so you keep you keep working in a expanding circle around the point of most likely contact so the grid sort of expands like this obviously looking for for the person and
• 09:00 - 09:30 with the passage of time particularly at Sea um I know we're talking about land phenomena but I'll get back to that but particularly at Sea you you can drift the currents are strong wind uh can take you where it wants um people might be paddling or or whatever and so so you can drift from the most likely spot so if they don't find you in the most likely spot they have this expanding grid uh that a maybe they got the first thing wrong that maybe the most likely spot was was a bad guess or bad estimate and B even if they were right to begin
• 09:30 - 10:00 with if they didn't find you you might have drifted so they expanded in the area so these drones uh based on reports appear to be flying uh a grid type of pattern what does that mean it means they're looking for something so um and it must be something fairly important or you wouldn't have the trones are expensive I'm not saying the government can't afford to keep them up there I am saying that the government would not be doing it unless the object of the search Were Somehow critical or very important so we know a couple things uh the the
• 10:00 - 10:30 drones are reliable there's been too many Reliable Reports not withstanding all the mistakes and fake reports number two these are US Government drones we know that because they would have been shot down otherwise and number three they appear to be searching for something and that's a reasonable inference from the fact that they are following this grid pattern okay so we're that far along what are they looking for well we don't know just be candid I'm not going to make something up uh you know I I don't know what
• 10:30 - 11:00 they're looking for but I do know as I say it must be a high value Target it must be something of um critical importance from either a national security point of view or a law enforcement point of view because the government would not be devoting these resources to something that was far less important if there's a bank robbery somewhere and there's a getaway car fine chase them with a state police helicopter but you're not going to send up a fleet of drones to find a getaway car in a bank robbery uh so um so uh what you're even you know an amber alert
• 11:00 - 11:30 or kidnapping you wouldn't this wouldn't be the way you would go about it number one number two if it were something um less critical or less vital to National Security and getting to the point that it is but if we're less vital than that they would engage the public you know you know when you're driving down the highway if there's a a a kidnapping um they'll put up an amber alert so-called um uh and engage the public here's the license number you know don't don't
• 11:30 - 12:00 confront the perpetrator but if you see this license plate number this color car you know call the police so that's smart I mean you're basically deputizing a large population of tens of thousands maybe more of motorists to help in the search well that's the way you do a search when you're looking for something like that that's not what they're doing here they're not informing the public they're not engaging the public that means that not only is this a high value Target that they're looking for a critical Target but it is of um such
• 12:00 - 12:30 significance that they don't want to get the public involved they don't want the public to know why would that be well the answer is uh look there's a lot of mystery about these drones right now as I see they're downplaying it they're saying oh people don't know what they're talking about they're AES again some of that but we can discount that there are actual drones up there but um but why not engage the public if you're looking for something uh because there's a lot of if not quite hysteria there's some genuine fear uh there's a lot of mystery there's a lot of angst uh people are
• 12:30 - 13:00 like why won't they tell us uh must be pretty bad well that's actually a reasonable inference it might be pretty bad uh but the point is the government must feel that the Panic that would result if they told you the truth is greater than the Panic or fear that is resulting from the from the drones themselves know there whatever whatever mystery whatever angst whatever uh tension is being caused by the drones one way to alleviate that is just to level with the public say hey here here's what we're doing here's why you
• 13:00 - 13:30 know Etc um they're not doing that which means that the actual cause must be something that would cause a worse Panic okay so now again we're using inferential method but they are government drones they're searching for something because they're flying a pattern they're not telling the public they're kind of blowing smoke in terms of false sightings yeah there's some of those but um but uh that that's more of a distraction than anything else and whatever it is is worse than letting the
• 13:30 - 14:00 mystery continue which means it must be pretty bad it must be pretty serious it's also not something you can find are there on foot or by car why do you need drones in the first place unless perhaps this is a moving Target or you need special equipment now what can a drone do that U maybe it's more difficult if you're you know in a truck or a car state police force or whatever well they they have um uh radiation detectors uh when I say radiation you it's not
• 14:00 - 14:30 exactly the same as a Geer counter it's more the case that um everything throws off um some some degree of radiation some microwaves or some other uh heat waves or has some sort of output that can be detected and it varies depending on what it is and so you can actually uh some of you may have had uh you know Consultants come in and check out your house uh for uh for leaks or drafts and you know you get these uh photographs back I've seen them where uh you know most of it's on it yellow but there's a
• 14:30 - 15:00 dark purple spot well that's that's a leak you know you need to put some insulation on I mean this stuff is fairly uh it's fairly sophisticated but it's also quite common but the drones can have high powerered versions of that um of course they can have cameras U that's that's the easy part but these heat or radiation detectors I'm talking about can be put into these drones so um so that's as much as we either know or can reasonably infer I'll take that one
• 15:00 - 15:30 step further and again I want to be clear I don't know this for a fact I don't want to engage in loose speculation but using the inferential method I described I'll take it one step further but again to be clear this is a guess they may be looking for some kind of radiological device some kind of what's called a dirty bomb or uh some stolen or hijacked radioactive material now let me explain what a what a dirty bomb is um it's a radio it's a radiological device uh weapon really a
• 15:30 - 16:00 weapon of mass destruction wmd it's not an atomic bomb this is not something that could even like Hiroshima scale Nagasaki scale let alone much larger than that that's not what I'm talking about that were're missing I they would have shut down the whole state of New Jersey by now but you what you what you can do you can take radioactive material and you can get it from a dentist office you can steal it from uh some industrial commercial user you can get it from a nuclear wayt site there are plenty of ways to get this um
• 16:00 - 16:30 and then take conventional explosives so you put the conventional explosive in a bomb you wrap it and this radiological material you detonate it and then this radio radioactive material goes off it's not a nuclear explosion just to be clear but it will cause radiation to spread uh that area may be a no-go Zone obviously um extremely harmful to help it's worse than that it would it would make that area not not talking quite as bad as Chernobyl but it would make that area
• 16:30 - 17:00 off limits basically radioactive um plus the terror effect is huge obviously we can uh we can understand that so um so this could be a terrorist plot to detonate a radiological device or one step short of that perhaps some radioactive material is missing that could be used in such a device and they're trying to find that and what they're doing is they're using these drones uh with detectors to just try to locate it and obviously they could Verge on that and confiscated it or stop the
• 17:00 - 17:30 terrorist attack um again everything I've been saying for the last couple minutes is is is an inference from what we know but I want to be clear that we don't know this for a fact we have to wait and find out now you can take that just to put it in context a little bit and say oh by the way we've had an open border for the last uh almost four years um some number millions of people cross the border estimates vary five six seven8 million um you know a lot of them
• 17:30 - 18:00 they're all illegal but a lot of them are illegal immigrants maybe they're just looking for a you know better life or better job all kinds of political issues around that I don't want to get into that that's a separate debate but we know for a fact that substantial number of these people are criminals and some of them are terrorists they're on terrorist watch list they have not been vetted there's no control um the Biden Administration has almost said yeah we'll we'll we'll take a certain amount of terrorists we want we want so many people coming in is some terrorists are
• 18:00 - 18:30 in the crowd uh too bad I mean that's literally their attitude well they're here uh these people are not uh predominantly Mexicans or even Guatemalans or Hondurans they're they're Venezuelans uh which are you know closely in line with China China this would be a golden opportunity in fact it is the case that China would um have its Agents come across the border uh as with Iran as with um terrorist in Afghanistan Etc it's an open border so as I say it's not confined to the
• 18:30 - 19:00 Central American you know Farm Workers or uh or or uh people looking for entry level uh uh jobs um there are some hardcore terrorists who are coming in in the process we just described they're here now just to add one more fact again I want to we're we're using Aints but it has to be fact-based Donald Trump is going to be sworn in on January 20th what's Donald Trump going to do we already know he's going to shut the border number one but he's also going to deport these people uh Tom homman is the
• 19:00 - 19:30 borders are he's made his plan clear they're going to have the resources um everyone's in agreement on this Democrats may not be but they don't have any once Trump's in office they're not going to have any say uh and homman Tom hman the borders are has said we're going to start with the criminals and terrorists you know trying to 8 million people that that's not going to happen I can tell you that too many but a million yeah uh and and or some large number yes uh and
• 19:30 - 20:00 they're going to start with the terrorists so if you're a terrorist and you're in the country and you have reason to believe that the government knows who you are even though they may not care and you you're ready to to carry out a terrorist attack the clock is ticking what I mean by that is starting January 20th and then the months that follow you may be deported you probably will be deported they're going to come and get you and so if you want to carry out a terrorist act um now's your chance so it's sort of you know you're at the bar and it's late and
• 20:00 - 20:30 you're thinking you might want one drink and the bartender says last call you say Hey you bartender pour me a beer but um this is last call for terrorists because Trump's going to arrest them and kick them out so they may view this as their opportunity so there I'm going to I'll leave it at that uh again they are us drones they are flying a surveillance pattern they're looking for something whatever it is we don't know but whatever it is it's it would disclosing it would C cuse suff would cause more
• 20:30 - 21:00 Panic than the drones themselves that means it must be pretty serious um it's something you could um most easily or most likely find using the drones and they do have this radiological heat detective a microwave uh detection equipment I described much more effective than trying to do it from the ground um and uh as I said whatever it is it's it's not something they want to share with the American people or list the uh enlist the help of the American people because they're worried that uh telling people what's going on would
• 21:00 - 21:30 actually cause more Panic than just letting them speculate about the drones so that's where we are let's hope that uh I'm wrong number one let's hope that if I'm right they uh apprehend or catch or uh interdict this material before anything else happens um we can't be certain of that uh but as just as a everyday American as a citizen certainly people in that area uh I when I grew up we always heard the story of how Orson Wells and his Mercury Playhouse
• 21:30 - 22:00 did a radio reenactment of HG Wells War of the Worlds but they updated it for the 1930s which is when they did this uh in New Jersey and uh growing up in New Jersey you always heard about the the Panic people running out of their houses and getting in the cars they didn't know was a dramatization they thought it was a real invasion of martians in New Jersey uh well we're not quite at that stage but uh let's hope we don't get there um but uh I would be attentive to this um just as an investor uh you know
• 22:00 - 22:30 always keep a little dry powder keep some cash maybe a little gold on the side uh or slice of gold or just be prepared for the kind of volatility that might result is this something that would happen on inauguration day that's not a prediction that's not a forecast I do know from having done a lot of counterterrorism work that terrorists do think about significant dates um I don't want to go down the whole list but the uh um uh you know the the embassy bombings in um uh Tanzania and Kenya in
• 22:30 - 23:00 1998 were on the same dates that the first US troops arrived in Saudi Arabia going all the way back to the first Gulf War that anniversary was not a coincidence the terrorist picked it for that reason there are many examples like that would they pick inauguration day I don't know that and if uh you know the inaugurations over and everyone's at the inaugural ball and nothing blew up let's hope that's the case but um again I wouldn't necessarily assume it it has to
• 23:00 - 23:30 happen on before inauguration date I would I do assume that the terrorists if they're going to do anything now is their chance so um so I'll leave it at that uh hopefully this is helpful we're going to be watching it again hopefully this all comes to a uh an uneventful conclusion but I think it would be uh um we'd be remiss if we didn't at least point out some of these dangers so uh leave with that I'm Jim rickets and uh um by the way uh for all of our viewers and readers uh Merry Christmas uh Happy New Year hope everyone enjoys
• 23:30 - 24:00 the holidays thank you