() A former Trump administration official has a conventional theory for UFO sightings along the Southern border: Criminal cartels are using advanced drone technology, he said.

“They’ve got unlimited funding,” Ron Vitiello, a senior adviser for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told “ Prime” on Sunday.  “Maybe they’ve got technology that we’re not used to seeing in the drone space.”

Nominated by President Donald Trump in 2018, Vitiello served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is a former chief of the U.S. Border Patrol in Laredo, Texas. Another ex-employee of the latter agency compiled videos of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” or UAPs, that agents have seen across Arizona in recent years.

The visual material supplied by whistleblower Bob Thompson was examined in the recent special report “Hunting UFOs: The Desert Sky Mystery.”

While some observers say the unexplained objects could be of non-human origin, Vitiello leans toward a less dramatic source. He says drug cartels are known for using innovative aerial technology to surveil government agents and to try to move drugs.

“I suspect that this is the cartel on the cutting edge of technology, using different techniques, maybe different kinds of machines,” he said. “That’s part of their business model, to always be able to iterate and innovate, so that they can continue to sell their poison into the United States.”