Kyle Breese, 36, works remotely in insurance and lives in Ocean Township, New Jersey, a sleepy suburb with tree-cloaked streets, not far from beaches. Last Saturday night, with his wife and two kids inside their home, he let out his ageing dog Bruce into the backyard and then looked up.

There, in the sky, was an unmistakable floating object. Not high enough to be a planet or a star, but about the elevation of an aircraft.

“It’s not an airplane that’s just hovering there,” he described. “What it looked like, it was so high it’s tough to see, but just like a red light and a white light.”

Breese and his wife said they saw others the day before while driving to dinner. His mother Luann, 68, confirmed seeing the same thing, white and red lights floating firmly in the night sky.

“To me they’re looking for something,” said Luann about the drones. “My concern is we have ammunition bases here in New Jersey.”

The Breese family isn’t alone in noticing the unsettling activities of drones or some sort of airborne vehicles appearing across the state. Thousands of people have been calling into local police forces, the FBI and even alerting the Pentagon about relentless flocks of drones suddenly appearing in New Jersey airspace in the last month.

“The FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated, and the federal government is supporting state and local officials in investigating these reports,” said a joint statement release by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Federal Aviation Administration.

“We have sent advanced detection technology to the region. And we have sent trained visual observers.”

So far, authorities have been mum: anything they can see looks like a combination of hobby drones, helicopters, planes or stars. But on Neighbors, made by the company behind Ring surveillance cameras, New Jersey residents are spamming the app – used for crime and safety updates – with videos of floating orbs and suspicious nightlights.

Some say they’re aliens, invading Iranian drones, emanating from a mothership off of the coast in the Atlantic. Maybe top-secret weapons testing.

One man near Ocean Township who said he was an off-duty firefighter and did not want to be identified, told the Guardian: “I heard it was al-Qaeda.”

Whatever they are, citizens of the Garden State, known for their legendary rock stars Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, are abuzz with rumors of drones.

The consensus is, at first they were odd, yet nothing to worry about. Now, most people want answers.

In coastal towns like Asbury Park, a popular vacation destination in the summer months, sightings have become commonplace. Rumors abound among locals: the drones don’t come out when it rains and they originate from the ocean.

“We started seeing them two weeks ago,” said Garrett Openshaw, 24, who works on the maintenance staff at the Asbury Hotel near the waterfront. “Before the news media.”

On a cold night in early December, he walked out on to a rooftop at the hotel where folded-up beach chairs are usually spread out for sunbathers in the warmer months. Staring out into the open ocean he saw the unmistakable red, green, and white lights of what he remembers was at least 12 sedan-sized drones flying in unison.

“There’s always something going on in this town,” said Collin Lynch, 26, the food and beverage supervisor at the same hotel, who was with Openshaw when they saw the swarm of drones. “It’s hard to tell if they’re just shooting a movie or something else.”

Between debates about UFOs and government secrets, Asbury Park residents are also gossiping about celebrity sightings in town: a Springsteen biopic, starring Jeremy Allen White, has been shooting on location.

“See this,” said Openshaw, flipping between his homemade videos of drones before landing on a photo of him and Allen White from onset.

At Frank’s Deli, a popular diner and recent shooting location for the film, staff has been excitedly discussing the theories behind the sightings.

“They’ve been having, like, drone watch-parties out on Long Beach Island,” said Danielle Coyle, a server at the diner who was wearing a green and red Christmas hat. She said some of her co-workers and friends, “men in their 40s” had gone to the shoreline island to hunt for drone sightings.

Others in town have more sinister questions.

Over at Kim Marie’s, a local Irish bar with low wooden ceilings a block from the boardwalk, people had opinions about the drones. Cassie Miller, 26, told of seeing two drones in nearby Monroe, where she lives, showing a video she captured of the encounter.

“We see two: one is closer and one’s further away, and then the second one turns the exact same corner, like following it, 30 or 40 seconds apart,” she said, narrating her video.

Miller continued: “Then I saw two more and they all turned the same corner. I think it was five or six total … You heard a hum and they were pretty low, too, not even that high up. Maybe 200 or 300 ft.”

Miller said her TikTok and Instagram feeds are replete with similar cellphone videos, and rightfully pointed out that she can’t tell if some of them are generated by artificial intelligence.

“It’s so hard to know now,” she said. “Videos of them shooting at stuff and I’m like, ‘Is that fake or is that really real?’ It’s so easy to spoof stuff now.”

But for Breese, the lurking lights in the sky, overlooking his town, are not only very real, but disconcerting.

“I have kids, so it’s weird,” he said. “Are they filming? Or is it some creep with a camera?”