For at least the last two days, unmanned aerial vehicles have been spotted flying over high-profile sites in Paris, including the Eiffel Tower and the U.S. Embassy in France, French officials said.
Authorities say they don’t know who is flying the aircraft.
Though it’s unclear if the drones pose any danger, Secret Service is in contact with French officials regarding this week’s mysterious drone incidents in Paris, a law enforcement official tells CNN.
“We had folks from Paris calling us yesterday because of all the UAV’s over there,” the official said.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service will be busy over the coming days and weeks conducting readiness drills to better prepare officers for drone incidents around the White House.
The drone drills follow last month’s crash landing of a small quadcopter drone on the White House grounds, an incident that highlighted a new security challenge for the Secret Service — defending the President against potential threats from unmanned aircraft. Flying drones is against the law in the nation’s capital.
The Secret Service issued an advisory Tuesday alerting the public to the upcoming drone exercises.
“The United States Secret Service, in conjunction with other inter-agency partners, will conduct a series of exercises involving unmanned aircraft systems, in the coming days and weeks,” the agency said in a statement.
“Because these exercises will be conducted within the normally flight restricted areas in the Washington D.C. area, they have been carefully planned and will be tightly controlled,” the statement added.
“We didn’t want to cause an Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ panic,” a law enforcement official said about the drills, an indication that there may be small drones flying around the White House as part of the Secret Service training.
The agency will be working with drone experts both inside the federal government and in the private sector to get up to speed on unmanned aerial technology, the official added.
“We’re open to suggestions,” the official said.