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December 20th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Earlier this year The War Zone exclusively reported about a series of 2019 incidents that involved unidentified drones stalking US Navy vessels over several nights in the waters off of Southern California. Our initial report also covered the Navy’s investigation into the incidents, which appeared to struggle to identify either the aircraft or their operators. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday later clarified that the aircraft were never identified, and that there have been similar incidents across the service branches and allied militaries.
Newly released documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that the full scope of these drone incursions was greater than it initially appeared, and they persisted well after the Navy’s investigation was launched. Deck logs indicate that drone sightings continued throughout the month of July 2019 and included events where drone countermeasure teams were called into action. One notable event involved at least three ships observing multiple drones. Uncharacteristically for unclassified deck logs, the details on this event are almost entirely redacted.
Among the new documents is the map seen below that details the interactions between a drone (denoted on what appears to be a briefing slide as an unmanned aerial system, or UAS) and a Navy Arleigh Burke class destroyer, the USS Paul Hamilton.
The map depicts Paul Hamilton making an abrupt right-hand turn while a drone closely follows the ship. The legends and annotations of the map have been redacted under FOIA exemptions that apply to technical data that have military applications. Though the title of the document reads July 17th, the map appears to refer to drone encounters that occurred in the incidents on July 14th and July 15th.
Intriguingly, one of the position points of the drone is marked with a star, while others show a dashed line around a given area. It is unclear exactly what these indicate without the map legends, though the star suggests at least one particularly notable event. Our previous coverage indicated that the incident involved multiple contacts that maneuvered around the ships in a highly dynamic way, and there may have been uncertainty about the exact location of the drones at times.
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