Speaker 1: Previously on OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones.
Speaker 2: I think the funnest one is the fact that they
Speaker 2: were missing a nuclear warhead.
Speaker 3: I like that one.
Speaker 4: Well, they're quiet, but they had definite two spotlights coming
Speaker 4: out of the bottom of them. It was just going
Speaker 4: over the lake. The geese were just going crazy. To me,
Speaker 4: it seemed like they were looking for something.
Speaker 1: She was a lot more concerned. You'll, for in case
Speaker 1: they're trying to find people and find kids to nab,
Speaker 1: like sex traffickers are gone extremely high tech. I'm canning
Speaker 1: at least one two, three, four five.
Speaker 5: That actually rotated, looking as if it was appearing in
Speaker 5: each window of our home.
Speaker 3: Hello, where are you? I'm out by the canty line
Speaker 3: and walking around looking at a few of these abandoned barns.
Speaker 6: You need to be really careful out there.
Speaker 7: You know what I told you when I talked to
Speaker 7: my students in Benckelmann.
Speaker 2: Especially the boys. They said those places can be inhabited by.
Speaker 6: People that are making mess all sorts of stuff, so
Speaker 6: you really need to be aware of your surroundings.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm going to go down by the river and.
Speaker 6: So can you text me?
Speaker 7: Though, even if you can't call me please, I.
Speaker 3: Need to know where you are.
Speaker 1: Stories are like puzzles. Nothing makes sense until most of
Speaker 1: the pieces are in place, when you really start to
Speaker 1: see the big picture. With the unknown aircraft, I was
Speaker 1: hoping to quickly find which pieces were missing while trying
Speaker 1: to verify that the FBI had given the order to
Speaker 1: shoot these objects down. I dialed in on what I knew.
Speaker 1: I'd learned this forms of these mysterious aircraft varied in size,
Speaker 1: and we're being seen nightly over many counties. Most sightings
Speaker 1: started at dusk and ended around ten pm.
Speaker 8: It just makes me really uneasy because I feel like
Speaker 8: somebody is watching us all the time. That's just super unnerving.
Speaker 1: I'd been able to chat with a few residents and
Speaker 1: at this point people were wanting more information from local authorities.
Speaker 1: The following excerpt is from you MC County Sheriff Todd
Speaker 1: Combe's Facebook post and was read by a voice actor.
Speaker 9: I will tell you right up front, I do not
Speaker 9: have a lot of answers for you at this time.
Speaker 9: I wish I did, but I don't. I think we're
Speaker 9: all feeling a little bit vulnerable due to the intrusion
Speaker 9: of our privacy that we enjoy in our real community.
Speaker 9: But I don't have a solution or no of one
Speaker 9: right now. All I can say is, don't live your
Speaker 9: life in the fear of the unknown. I will keep
Speaker 9: you informed as soon as I hear anything.
Speaker 1: Chapter three. Above the prairie, the big white one is
Speaker 1: hovering low to the ground. If I had to guess,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Two to three hundred feet in the air.
Speaker 1: There are these red and green flashes moving around it
Speaker 1: to the switch was flipped. On my vacation, that calm
Speaker 1: feeling you get from being at home turned into pir adrenaline.
Speaker 1: With each hour, I found myself getting sucked into this
Speaker 1: odd series of events that seemed more like a sci
Speaker 1: fi movie than real life. I wasn't sure what my
Speaker 1: next steps should be, or if I should even be
Speaker 1: the one looking for next steps, as I'd soon be
Speaker 1: traveling back to Los Angeles. I started googling, searching through
Speaker 1: a ton of information about airplanes in UFO sidings. I
Speaker 1: wanted to know if anything similar to these craft had
Speaker 1: been seen in the area before.
Speaker 3: What were your grandparents' names, and what were they like.
Speaker 10: The man's name was Milt Clayton Moreland. Clara Moreland was
Speaker 10: his wife. I do have a picture of him sitting
Speaker 10: on the eve of a house with a team of
Speaker 10: horses moving a house across the prairie. So he was
Speaker 10: a can do it man.
Speaker 1: I discovered an old article about unexplained flying objects published
Speaker 1: in a local newspaper from nineteen fifty. Apparently the report
Speaker 1: was given by Milton Clara Morland of Imperial, Nebraska. They
Speaker 1: passed away, but I was able to talk with their grandson,
Speaker 1: Terry McNair about their story. What do you remember them
Speaker 1: telling you about what they experienced that day in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 10: Well, I remember mostly my grandmother talking about it, and
Speaker 10: she would get quite excited, and she would say that
Speaker 10: these things just came buzzing along and they weren't large,
Speaker 10: they were small, you know, like saucer basketball shaped, and
Speaker 10: you know, they were just kind of flittering along all together,
Speaker 10: a whole bunch of them, and they came in from
Speaker 10: one way and swooped out a different way.
Speaker 11: So she's just, you know, sitting at home one day,
Speaker 11: it's it's daylight, and these saucer type basketball looking objects
Speaker 11: just kind of appear.
Speaker 10: They just kind of appear. They hurted noise, and they
Speaker 10: went out to investigate it. That's what they found.
Speaker 1: If Terry hadn't used the word saucer, his description sounded
Speaker 1: eerily similar to the drone behavior I'd heard about.
Speaker 11: He is of you know what, you think they saw.
Speaker 10: Flying saucers. I thought that my whole life.
Speaker 3: Had you heard any other stories of flying saucers in
Speaker 3: that area before?
Speaker 5: Not?
Speaker 10: Really. I would remember my mother talking about lights in
Speaker 10: the prairie when she was a kid, that they would
Speaker 10: see lights in different areas where they're knew there was
Speaker 10: no population. They were just lights.
Speaker 3: What do you mean by by lights?
Speaker 10: They were more along the land rather than high in
Speaker 10: the sky. They were they were close to the earth,
Speaker 10: but off in the distance. She just said that they
Speaker 10: were unexplained.
Speaker 3: So she just saw weird, weird lights in the prairie.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: As I looked further into the history of the area,
Speaker 1: I came across more interesting facts. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: a number of locals saw weird objects in the sky.
Speaker 1: One of those people was Barb Stanley.
Speaker 6: I was ten years old and I looked out on
Speaker 6: the horizon. There was a hilp and as I was
Speaker 6: sitting there, I saw some type of craft that I
Speaker 6: think had landed. Then it slowly rose and I thought
Speaker 6: it was going to just keep going higher, but it
Speaker 6: just disappeared. Just one minute was there and one minute
Speaker 6: it wasn't. It was bigger than a car, but didn't
Speaker 6: look like a car. You know. Back in my ten
Speaker 6: year old mind, I was just like, wow, you know,
Speaker 6: I've never never seen anything like that before, not what
Speaker 6: the Jetsons were like. Yeah, it seemed to be the
Speaker 6: real deal.
Speaker 1: Barb experienced this siding on the family farm, which oddly enough,
Speaker 1: was close to where these so called drones were first spotted.
Speaker 6: A week later, there was a newspaper article that said
Speaker 6: there was a lady in Imperial that had basically seen
Speaker 6: the same thing. I took it out to my husbands
Speaker 6: to read this, so that was kind of an affirmation
Speaker 6: that I wasn't just making up the story.
Speaker 3: You said you were sitting on the porch looking out.
Speaker 3: You know what's going through your mind when you see this?
Speaker 6: I'd say astonishment, because I had the feeling that I
Speaker 6: was alone, you know, like my parents were gone, and
Speaker 6: so who would help me. I thought, oh, wow, this
Speaker 6: is thereous and they mean harm. I'm basically by myself.
Speaker 1: That had to be such a surreal feeling, especially at
Speaker 1: a young age without anyone around. When I continued looking
Speaker 1: into these sightings, I came across an article about one
Speaker 1: of the first UFO crashes in modern history. It was
Speaker 1: said to have taken place in southwest Nebraska near Binkleman
Speaker 1: in the late eighteen hundreds. As the story goes, in
Speaker 1: early June of eighteen eighty four, a rare phenomenon occurred.
Speaker 12: A few cowboys were out at a round up when
Speaker 12: they were startled by a loud noise and saw what
Speaker 12: looked like a blazing body fall into the earth. The
Speaker 12: next day, a brand inspector found machinery scattered throughout the
Speaker 12: pasture after the object was cooled, including a wheel fragment
Speaker 12: with a mill rimp. The object was reported to be
Speaker 12: fifty to sixty feet long, cylindrical, and about ten or
Speaker 12: twelve feet in diameter.
Speaker 1: Because that story was from so long ago, I took
Speaker 1: it with a grain of salt. I obviously had no
Speaker 1: way to check the facts with the locals who'd experienced it.
Speaker 1: Whether people were seeing drones, flying saucers, or something else.
Speaker 1: I began to notice a common theme. Most of these
Speaker 1: sightings occurred near isolated farmhouses outside the city limits. I
Speaker 1: wasn't sure how this info could plain into what was happening,
Speaker 1: but it proved one thing unexplained. Aircraft weren't out of
Speaker 1: the ordinary for this part of the country. Chapter four
Speaker 1: surrounded it's more residents saw drone like objects flying. I
Speaker 1: began contacting police stations in neighboring counties. Despite my persistence,
Speaker 1: it was tough to get anyone to speak with me.
Speaker 1: There was one person I knew I could lean on
Speaker 1: outside of law enforcement. His name is Bill Bowerley, and
Speaker 1: he's a family friend. Bill also just happens to be
Speaker 1: an aviation expert. He was an Air Force pilot, Delta
Speaker 1: Airlines pilot, and former member of the local airport authority.
Speaker 10: How are you good?
Speaker 2: I'm actually working on another aviation product.
Speaker 1: Bill's an outdoorsman. When I walked into his house, there
Speaker 1: were fish and animal heads up on the walls. So
Speaker 1: have you been good?
Speaker 2: This has been my busiest year flying.
Speaker 1: After we caught up, Bill dove into his background.
Speaker 2: I started got my license in seventy six on a
Speaker 2: program that was the pre military. It was part of
Speaker 2: my scholarship. I had to go to the military. Takes
Speaker 2: a year to get through Air Force pilot training. Seventy
Speaker 2: eight I graduated. They plowed me back as an instructor
Speaker 2: because I did too well in the course, and then
Speaker 2: in Germany for three years, and then from that I
Speaker 2: went to a test squadron and flew in the test squadron.
Speaker 2: Left the military on a Friday, started on Monday with Delta,
Speaker 2: and I've been flying for Delta every month since.
Speaker 1: It was Bill's military history that I thought might shine
Speaker 1: some light on what was going on. So they've been
Speaker 1: doing drones in the military for a really long time.
Speaker 2: Really, that first Golf War was where they really brought
Speaker 2: him in, so you didn't have to risk a man's
Speaker 2: life and you could provide reconnaissance. And that's where it
Speaker 2: got started. In the intel gathering and the censors they
Speaker 2: can put on it. The miniaturization of all of that
Speaker 2: just kept improving improvement, so they'd make him smaller and smaller. Well,
Speaker 2: they kept making him a little bit bigger and giving
Speaker 2: them more range. So that's where they came up with
Speaker 2: these twenty four or thirty six hour drones and could
Speaker 2: just loiter.
Speaker 1: I'd heard the term drone tossed around a lot. I
Speaker 1: pulled up an official definition. A drone is technically any
Speaker 1: unmanned aircraft that can fly remotely or autonomously. In my opinion,
Speaker 1: that description left a lot of room for interpretation. Was
Speaker 1: the word drone just the new and more casual term
Speaker 1: for UFO. I'd now seen these drones as people were
Speaker 1: calling them. Three nights in a row, there were larger
Speaker 1: or black objects illuminating the fields and smaller ones surrounding them.
Speaker 1: Each night. They were flying in groups.
Speaker 2: We were testing the ability to be able to tie
Speaker 2: remotely piloted vehicles to a mothership, and that was in
Speaker 2: the late eighties, so we know that you can have
Speaker 2: a mothership fly and tether wirelessly other ones off of it.
Speaker 1: Bill then gave me more than I bargained for a
Speaker 1: first person report on what he thought maybe flying in
Speaker 1: the sky.
Speaker 2: These are most likely the ones that they'll put a
Speaker 2: gas engine on them with a small field cell, and
Speaker 2: that engine then powers electric that powers all the props.
Speaker 2: We've got military drones that can stay up thirty six
Speaker 2: hours if you just use the premise that they are
Speaker 2: a six hour drone, and they can travel at sixty
Speaker 2: miles an hour. It would be very conceivable, but that
Speaker 2: you could launch the use from one hundred miles away,
Speaker 2: go do your work, and then fly that hundred miles home.
Speaker 1: Imagine a six foot vehicle with wings, which job takes
Speaker 1: thirty six hours and covers hundreds of miles.
Speaker 2: Somebody's making money doing this. Otherwise it wouldn't exist.
Speaker 3: That's what I keep saying.
Speaker 13: I follow the money trail.
Speaker 2: Follow the money trail. That's the first step. It comes
Speaker 2: down to what confidence.
Speaker 7: Do you have.
Speaker 2: In believing what your government tells you want.
Speaker 1: By the time I left Bill's, I'd received a few messages.
Speaker 1: Apparently when people hear you're back home from la and
Speaker 1: asking questions about a weird phenomenon they've seen too, you
Speaker 1: get a lot of tips for who to visit with the.
Speaker 3: Girl you were talking about. That's your daughter in law,
Speaker 3: or that's your daughter, or that's my daughter. It is
Speaker 3: your daughter, Okay. When she was an inner car and
Speaker 3: those three drones kind of appeared, you know, surrounding her car,
Speaker 3: how close would she estimate that those were to her
Speaker 3: actual vehicle as it was going down the road.
Speaker 7: She said, they were just like a little above like
Speaker 7: the telephone polls, So, I mean, she could see them clearly,
Speaker 7: and there was like three of them and they were
Speaker 7: just just kind of following her.
Speaker 1: A lady named Trisha Michael told me that she'd received
Speaker 1: a strange phone call late one evening when a few
Speaker 1: of the unknown aircraft flew above her daughter's vehicle.
Speaker 6: She called.
Speaker 7: It was her phone number, but it said Palestinian territories
Speaker 7: as far as our area.
Speaker 5: But she I didn't answer it. So when I called her.
Speaker 8: Back, she did not answer.
Speaker 5: So I called the Palestinian number back just to kind
Speaker 5: of see what it was and see if I would
Speaker 5: get anybody or not. And I had just got a
Speaker 5: male voice recording saying that the number was no longer available.
Speaker 5: Once she got home and there was nothing above her,
Speaker 5: and it rang in just fine, it rang in normal.
Speaker 3: So when she called you, it said Palestinian territories on
Speaker 3: your caller ID, where you'd normally see her name.
Speaker 7: Correct, Yeah, normally it would say like local, like if
Speaker 7: it's a local call, it would say Sterling, Colorado, where
Speaker 7: it would say where it's from.
Speaker 6: It had listed Palestinian territories.
Speaker 3: What did your daughter describe, you know, feeling like when
Speaker 3: those drones were following her.
Speaker 8: I don't think that that one bothered her nearly as much.
Speaker 8: Later in that evening, she had gotten home and she
Speaker 8: was the only one here, and there were three that
Speaker 8: were parked on our road, and they parked there for
Speaker 8: about thirty minutes or so at least.
Speaker 3: When you say parked, you mean that they were hovering
Speaker 3: in the air, yeah.
Speaker 5: Covering, Yeah, Yeah, they just don't move. So that made
Speaker 5: her a lot more uncomfortable than just driving underneath it.
Speaker 1: Could these aircraft be interfering with cell towers? It sure
Speaker 1: seemed like that was a possibility. I kept searching for
Speaker 1: new leads. Let's just say things got even more peculiar.
Speaker 6: I just don't get, like, why they're so interested suddenly
Speaker 6: in this area.
Speaker 7: He said that we have the military drums out here
Speaker 7: that are using scramblers that are trying to break up
Speaker 7: the signals.
Speaker 4: There is a river bottom down through here, and they
Speaker 4: seem to work the waterway.
Speaker 7: The drums that are here have been described as black.
Speaker 7: We have been told that the military drones are actually light.
Speaker 4: Their grid pattern was definitely around Frenchman Creek.
Speaker 3: God.
Speaker 1: I love sweet and Cream. I used to go here
Speaker 1: growing up, and I'd always get the same order two hamburgers,
Speaker 1: ketch boneley, French fry, and uh doctor pepper. It was
Speaker 1: early evening and I just ordered dinner and to drive
Speaker 1: through an Imperial when I received information about another encounter.
Speaker 1: This one seemed different. The lady mentioned in the message
Speaker 1: didn't live too far east of town. I quickly finished
Speaker 1: up my meal and headed in her direction. I think
Speaker 1: this is the turn and to go see this girl
Speaker 1: right now named Marcy Kelly. There was a pen close
Speaker 1: by with a few of Marcy's animals. Her goat named Nanny,
Speaker 1: kept wanting to get in on the interview. Nanny, don't
Speaker 1: eat my clothes. You are a good goat, though I
Speaker 1: could tell that Marcy was a small town gall at heart.
Speaker 1: Before we began our conversation, she walked me through her house,
Speaker 1: past some family photos, and onto the back patio.
Speaker 14: I don't remember where a question was.
Speaker 1: No, I was just going to say, you know, is
Speaker 1: it typical for farmers to use drums?
Speaker 14: Yes, even through my husband's work, they have a drone
Speaker 14: that they check the pivots with, and I think that
Speaker 14: a lot of other people do too. I think that
Speaker 14: Southwest Power uses them, probably check the power lines. From
Speaker 14: what I've understood and now and they're not nearly this.
Speaker 1: Bigh What do you make of this whole thing?
Speaker 5: Do you?
Speaker 3: How do you feel?
Speaker 14: I feel uneasy about it, just because there's so many
Speaker 14: and they've been here for so long, and we don't
Speaker 14: have an answer of who's doing it. We both, my
Speaker 14: husband and I both think that they shut off their
Speaker 14: lights and they can fly lower than and they're undetected,
Speaker 14: like later at night when they're trying to go back
Speaker 14: to their check in point or whatever they're trying to do,
Speaker 14: because then you can hear them, and there's no planes
Speaker 14: in the area, and it's just a different kind of
Speaker 14: a noise.
Speaker 1: What would lead you to believe that they that they
Speaker 1: shot off their lights.
Speaker 14: Because when they're high up, you can't hear them, and
Speaker 14: so it's just a different kind of a noise that
Speaker 14: we hear. So I just it's just kind of a
Speaker 14: noise that you're like, oh, they're lower and you can
Speaker 14: hear them, you know, kind of like after a jet
Speaker 14: goes by and then you hear it later on or
Speaker 14: something like that.
Speaker 1: Marcy had seen most of the aircraft near her property,
Speaker 1: and she noticed something else. Wild animals weren't acting as
Speaker 1: they normally would during the winter Sunday.
Speaker 14: And it was like the day after the blizzard, like
Speaker 14: we lost power and stuff Saturday from the snow. My
Speaker 14: dog's caught a snake, and then a few days before that,
Speaker 14: my friend's daughter had gotten a turtle, and I'd seen
Speaker 14: a frog hopping and I'm like, what, So that was
Speaker 14: weird to me that all of those things are coming
Speaker 14: out of the ground.
Speaker 1: Kind of worried that way. From your perspective, what do
Speaker 1: the formations look like? And are there different sizes of
Speaker 1: the drones from what you've seen, I think that.
Speaker 14: There's different sizes. I think that there's like a docking station,
Speaker 14: one that's a little bit bigger that either they get
Speaker 14: energy from it or charge or reboot or exchange information too.
Speaker 14: And that one seems pretty just like it hovers. It
Speaker 14: doesn't really move a lot, kind of just stay stable.
Speaker 14: And then the other ones. I've seen them go fast,
Speaker 14: I've seen them go slow. I've seen them shut off
Speaker 14: the lights and then turn them back on later. And
Speaker 14: I think that they range in sizes. I don't think
Speaker 14: that they'd be over ten foot at the biggest. I
Speaker 14: mean probably mostly five to eight foot.
Speaker 1: Could you make out that it was, in fact a drone?
Speaker 14: Sounds better than a UFO identified flying object.
Speaker 6: Basically, yeah, Just.
Speaker 1: When I thought I'd heard every theory, Marcy dropped this one.
Speaker 14: I have heard and I haven't seen. I seen a
Speaker 14: picture of like a green substance that's been dropped, you know.
Speaker 14: I'm like, oh, what if it's something like dangerous?
Speaker 1: When I got back inside the pickup, I played that
Speaker 1: audio over and over, and.
Speaker 14: I seen a picture of like a green substance that's
Speaker 14: been dropped, A green substance that's been dropped.
Speaker 1: Marcy didn't reveal who showed her the picture or where
Speaker 1: they lived. The skeptic and me kept thinking aircraft dropping
Speaker 1: things from the sky at night? Why do these accounts
Speaker 1: keep getting even more bizarre? Just when I begin to
Speaker 1: wrap my mind around certain parts of this story, I
Speaker 1: was told another credible, if unbelievable detail coming up on
Speaker 1: obscure invasion of the drones.
Speaker 7: Really, we have to absolutely verify what is happening in Colorado.
Speaker 2: Someone has very sophisticated ways to override the FA rules
Speaker 2: that are in here.
Speaker 13: I can see it going off ten of our shop
Speaker 13: as soon as I opened the garage door, there was
Speaker 13: a white like infrared camera light.
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you. If you have any
Speaker 1: information surrounding the events detailed in this podcast or other
Speaker 1: obscure stories in rural America we should look into. Please
Speaker 1: visit our website at obscurumseries.com and send us an email.
Speaker 1: To connect with us on social media, you can follow
Speaker 1: @obscurum_series and @gabelenners on all social platforms. OBSCURUM is produced
Speaker 1: by Imagine and Lenners Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is written, hosted,
Speaker 1: and produced by Me Gabe Lenners. It's executive produced by
Speaker 1: Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl Welker, Nathan Kloke, Nicki etour
Speaker 1: in Me. Additional production by Jacob Plough. Music and sound
Speaker 1: effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Brand management and digital design
Speaker 1: by Labyrinth Brand Co. Video editing by Alex Semikopenko. This
Speaker 1: project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Dan Bodanski, Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Birchfield,
Speaker 1: David Wasserman, Katrina Norvel and my family. OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones is available
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite podcasts. Follow now