Hundreds of mysterious drones have been sighted near military bases and critical infrastructure along America’s eastern seaboard, baffling federal and state authorities. “These are apparently very, as I understand it, very sophisticated. The minute you get eyes on them, they go dark,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (D), the state with the most drone sightings. Despite our lack of knowledge about the high-tech craft, Murphy reassured the public, “We don’t see any concern for public safety.”

“We have questions,” responded Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) on “Washington Watch,” who on Monday night went looking for the drones with a sheriff from his district. “It’s absurd. How is that? That’s what I said. How do you know that? You should say, ‘We hope we don’t have concerns, but we better investigate this.’”

“These are not just like [something] you buy off Amazon. … These are the size of cars. Some of them [are] the size of SUVs,” added Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “To be clear, the news reports — I mean, this has been growing in frequency.”

On Sunday night alone, “one of the Ocean County sheriff officers observed 50 — five-zero — of these things coming from the ocean, across the sand, and into the mainland, suggesting that they’re being deployed via a ship,” Smith described. A U.S. Coast Guard officer told Smith that, on the same night, he had more than a dozen drones following his 47-foot rescue boat.

The few publicly available facts about these drones give the lie to the government’s official posture: nothing to fear here. These drones are large and numerous. They appear with increasing frequency. They seem to come from somewhere offshore. They seem to bear sophisticated technology. They operate around military installations and critical infrastructure.

Squadrons of drones flying over America’s shores are not merely data anomalies for future generations of scientists to investigate. Clearly, someone is operating them. Another causal actor is assumed in the very definition of “drone.” The unanswered question is, who? And, relatedly, why? Unless and until the government can answer these questions, they lack the information to determine whether these drones pose a threat.

The theory that comes most readily to mind is that these drones are operated by some hostile state actor like China or Iran — in which case there is quite a lot to worry about. One could posit other theories — elaborate pranksters, wannabe Bond villains, or even aliens — but they all seem quite implausible. And, if the drones are most likely the product of some hostile foreign power, the government should be scrambling to find them and remove the vulnerabilities.

“Like the Chinese balloon that went all the way across [America] … this seems to be a very serious threat,” suggested Perkins. “It could be yet another probe by the Chinese, or some other or worse force, to see what our response is, just like our failed response with the balloon.” “I still can’t believe the balloon situation,” Smith responded. “This may be much worse because there are so many of them.”

When the government has advanced warning of a looming threat and fails to act upon it, the results can be devastating, Smith warned. He offered Pearl Harbor as an example, which the Japanese bombed 82 years ago last Saturday, before they were officially at war with the U.S. “About an hour before the zeros bombed the Missouri and all the other ships [on] battleship Row and all the rest, we saw it on the radar screen and translated it or sent that into headquarters,” he said. But “they didn’t do anything about it.”

These drones might not be a prelude to World War III, but how can the government guard against the next surprise attack if they can’t be bothered to seriously investigate?

Smith offered a closer comparison, this one from his own lengthy career in public service. “Back in 1998, I wrote the Embassy Security Act when we were hit by al-Qaeda in Dar es Salaam, [Somalia] and in Nairobi, [Kenya],” he began. At an Oversight hearing Smith held, Admiral William Crowe, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “said nobody thought they would ever hit there. It was like a soft target,” Smith recalled. “I said, ‘You got to have some imagination to say these are very evil people, and they’ll find a soft target and they’ll take it out.’”

In this situation, a little imagination would notice that the drones are “going to infrastructure, critical infrastructure, hovering over there — doing what?” suggested Smith. “I talked to our joint base commander at the Joint Base [Andrews],” outside D.C., said Smith. “If a drone goes within their defense perimeter, they will bring it down, or they’ll identify it. And he says, ‘We got the capability.’”

The problem is that “they haven’t used it” to counter these drones appearing along the coast. At a hearing Tuesday, Smith asked the FBI, which technically has opened an investigation into the drones, why they aren’t sharing technology with the DOD. “I even asked [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas … ‘Why can’t we follow them and figure out what their origination is? Don’t we have that capability?’” he said.

Smith wanted the U.S. government to be more “proactive” in responding to the mysterious drones. “Find out who they are, ascertain it, and then take deliberate action. If it means shooting a few of them down, they can bring them down. They have the capability.”

Perhaps such action will take a more proactive administration. In about six weeks, the incoming Trump administration will have an opportunity to take a different course of action to respond to threats from foreign actors.