Photo shared by Pennsylvania state senator shows a ‘Star Wars’ fighter craft, not a downed drone

When you see images flying around social media claiming to show drones amid the mysterious sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere, beware before you share them. It could be a trap! 

Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin/Adams, on Dec. 16 shared on X an image of a purported drone being carried on a truck bed. "Breaking News," the image read, "Crashed drone in Orange Beach retrieved from water, and taken to undisclosed location for further investigation."

Mastriano in his X post said, "It is inconceivable that the federal government has no answers nor has taken any action to get to the bottom of the unidentified drones."

But it wasn’t a drone. It was a replica of an imperial TIE fighter that appeared in several of the "Star Wars" movies.

Mastriano’s X post was tagged with a community note pointing to a Star Wars website showing the spacecraft featured in the film franchise. We contacted Mastriano’s office for comment but received no immediate response. 

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A day after sharing the photo, Mastriano wrote on Facebook and in a separate X post that he had been asked about the photo by a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter. He said he had been sharing "an obvious Star Wars prop as a meme." He also criticized "modern-day ‘journalism.’" In a separate X post he said he tried to clarify he knew it was a joke, hours before Newsweek wrote about it.

(Screenshot from X)

We found a Dec. 15 post in The Gulf Coast Blog, a public Facebook group, that used the same language and photo seen in Mastriano’s X post. Orange Beach is a coastal city in Alabama. 

A reverse-image search shows the photo in Mastriano’s X post has been circulating online for more than a year. We found a March 1, 2023, Facebook post sharing the photo with "Star Wars" references abundant in the comments. In a reply to a comment, the post’s author said, it’s "some type of Star Wars prop probably coming from some event."

It’s unclear whether the person who posted the photo also took the photo. We messaged him on Facebook for comment but received no immediate response. A radio station posted an article with a headline that called it a "Giant Star Wars replica TIE fighter" and linked to the March 1 Facebook post. The article said the photo was taken on a highway south of Detroit.

Mastriano’s X post does not show a photo of a downed drone in Alabama or anywhere. It shows a photo of a replica of a spacecraft from the "Star Wars" franchise, and it has been circulating online for more than a year. We rate the claim it’s a drone False.