OK Representative Jay Steagall Talks DRONES
Wednesday morning during our regular podcast, Rep. Jay Steagall was with me to talk about drones.
Right before Christmas, you’ll remember, there was a flurry of reported drone activity over the East Coast. Reel after reel of video taken from various places of items identified as drones was posted to social media and the news media was having near hysterics that they could be foreign in nature. I guess when you have an enormous ‘weather’ balloon known to be Chinese flying over air force bases, anything could happen, right?.
Like most good US citizens today, Rep. Steagall wasn’t buying any nonsense. He not only flies planes, he flies drones, so he knows a little bit about the issue.
During the podcast, he told us that he is part of a group that investigates similar incidences and that their investigations indicated that all the drones flying were registered with the FAA. The only reason it looked like there were so many of them was that because many people were filming the same thing from different angles and uploading it to social media. He explained that if there had been as many drones flying as the media made out, they would have been flying into each other and falling out of the sky!
Interestingly, yesterday – just before today’s show – President Trump’s new Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt held her first press conference and the first thing she addressed was the drone ‘freak out’. She said that the drones were all authorized by the FAA – some were being flown by hobbyists, but others were performing research. Now, she didn’t delve deeply into what the ‘research’ was, but the point of the matter was that it wasn’t another ‘Chinese weather balloon’ saga.
In the clip below, Rep. Steagall gives us some background on drones before we started talking about Governor Stitt’s Executive Order to have the Department of Public Safety buy ‘drone protection equipment’ – which they did, at a cost of $30k.
We talked for quite a bit about why Oklahoma would want to have ‘drone protection equipment’ and about how the equipment that was purchased by the Department of Public Safety purchase wasn’t going to do much other than to identify where the controller to the drone was. You’ll want to watch the full live video either here on YouTube or on our Rumble channels.
Because we’d had a run-in with a drone on our property back in 2020, I asked Rep. Steagall about what to do if that ever happened again. Seriously, as tech gets better, we have to understand what great surveillance capabilities these things have – and with cameras, pictures and video can be taken and uploaded to the internet – not good things for privacy! Below is our discussion about what to do if you find a drone flying on your property without permission because, since 2022, that is a misdemeanor. It’s a short video, so watch and then put that info in your back pocket in the event you ever need it…