Drones Over the Venue and the Butler Comparison (Claims)
:::caution Attributed claims only Permitted media and hobbyist drones are common at outdoor campus events, and compressed phone video routinely produces false drone sightings. The Butler linkage rests on a single anonymous conversation. Nothing below is a finding that any drone did anything. :::
Claim snapshot
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| The claim | Multiple drones were reportedly over the UVU venue, and an anonymous source reportedly tied them to the Butler attack on Trump |
| Raised by | Blake Bednarz (@BlakeBednarz); @JG_CSTT; an anonymous NCTC contact |
| First surfaced | September 2025; the NCTC conversation is dated Sept 18, 2025 |
| Rests on | Analysis of compressed phone video, plus secondhand hearsay |
| Evidence rating | SPECULATIVE |
What is alleged
Blake Bednarz says he spotted sixteen drones flying in footage from the UVU event. @JG_CSTT reports identifying UAVs in phone video and argues they moved fast enough — roughly 100–150 mph — to be nearly unnoticeable to the naked eye while still being captured by cameras; the reasoning offered is exposure time, with a 50-metre pass taking about 1.12 seconds at 100 mph and 0.75 seconds at 150 mph.
Investigators pair the sightings with the alleged N1098L low passes to argue a drop-and-recover cycle: drones released before the shooting, retrieved after. The investigation file also records that an anonymous NCTC contact allegedly told a researcher on September 18, 2025 that the Center believed the same drone-capable group was behind the Butler, Pennsylvania attempt on Trump, which likewise involved an unexplained drone, and that this group had demonstrated the ability to kill by drone while blaming a local patsy.
One further theory in the cluster speculates that a surveillance aircraft may have been used to cut mobile reception and livestreams, hijacking phone and internet connections and using AI to scrape, edit or delete videos without users noticing. The file treats this as speculative, and the person advancing it says so himself. Candace Owens' investigative wish-list poses the operative question in its narrowest form: did any of these objects have the ability to fire, and did they fire?
The ordinary explanation
Compressed phone video is one of the most reliable generators of false drone sightings in existence. Birds, insects passing near the lens, wind-borne dust, rolling-shutter artifacts, compression macroblocks and lens flare all produce fast-moving specks that survive a frame-by-frame review and look exactly like a distant aircraft. The count is itself the tell: sixteen of them in one clip is far more consistent with imaging artifacts than with sixteen aircraft, because sixteen actual drones over a crowded outdoor venue would have been seen, heard, and photographed by hundreds of attendees and by the professional camera crews present. They were not.
Utah Valley is also dense with hobbyist and commercial drone traffic, and a major campus event with press coverage would ordinarily attract permitted media drones — the innocent baseline is not zero. The Butler linkage is anonymous hearsay with no named source, no document and no corroboration; the same conversation is the sole basis for the "rogue CIA faction" theory addressed at the halted NCTC probe.
The livestream-jamming claim deserves to be named as the problem it is: the capability described — hijacking every phone and internet connection in an area and using AI to silently edit users' videos in place — does not exist in the form asserted. Including it undermines the credibility of the cluster it sits in, and this section says so rather than quietly leaving it out.
What would settle it
- Publication of the original, uncompressed source video files with their metadata, so the objects can be analyzed rather than described.
- FAA and UVU records of any drone flight authorizations over the campus on September 10, 2025.
- An independent imaging analyst's assessment of whether the tracked objects are consistent with aircraft or with compression artifacts.
- Whether any attendee heard drones — a question hundreds of witnesses can answer.
- Identification of the alleged NCTC contact, or retirement of the Butler linkage as uncorroborated.
Sources
- Blake Bednarz on X — "I spotted 16 drones flying"
- @JG_CSTT, UAV identification analysis — no direct URL is cited in the investigation file.
- An anonymous NCTC contact, relayed secondhand. No name, no document, no corroboration.