They are - obviously - lying. This screams secrecy to me. All 3 know that these drones are not a threat. They aren't US military because they are a 3 letter agency program. They know there's nothing to worry about it, but they won't tell you any more details. Which has been the modus operandi for secret services for decades, so I'm surprised it's such an issue?
It seems to me what's happening is a "Streisand Effect" where the whole attitude of "go away, nothing to see here" is in fact maximizing attention and defeating the purpose of hiding this away.
If it were me I'd put a band-aid on a drone, fly it to a person, and say, "we are testing military capabilities to render first aid to our soldiers" or something similar. It's not a lie, it's good optics, adversaries can worry about it... then put whatever it is on ice for a while until the heat dies down
It would be like shooting someone for taking pictures of your house from the street.
I'm relatively certain law enforcement would have opinions about that.
If a drone is trying to gain access to your home, do you have the right to defend against it using deadly force? Meaning; Force that would be deadly to a human attacker.
That said, the FAA's jurisdiction ends with the National Airspace, which physically ends the moment it crosses into a structure.
There's plenty of states where you don't even have that.
The FAA may have someone who knows, but the interesting people wouldn't be the ones to show up when there's no need for them to do so.
Can you elucidate what you meant?
Which is why I asked
> Can you elucidate what you meant?
For various locally-defined values of "low".
I expect a police drone to be visually distinguished.
One wonders how they'd keep tracking it down a secret especially if the perpetrator was smart and gave them a decent run for their money.
How exactly do you follow a fixed-wing drone? Some of the high-end/industrial drones has pretty impressive ranges.
And even if you can't follow one all the way to its destination you can still take some real good pictures with flash and plaster them all over the news and wait for someone to say "I pump fuel and sweep floors at airport X and a bunch of dickbags with black suburbans and bad attitudes have a hanger full of those things".
Since you're replying to a question about tracking fixed wing it's worth mentioning that their range can be well over 1000 miles as some of the Iranian Shahed drones have a range of almost 1600 miles.
Personally I'd rather have evidence of this before dwelling on all the possible tragedies here.