Speaker 1: Previously on OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones.
Speaker 2: Colorado has what they call a multi mission aircraft. They
Speaker 2: call it an MMA.
Speaker 1: They can pinpoint of a.
Speaker 3: Straight cap in the middle of a wildfire somewhere.
Speaker 1: The man mentioned in the article who's apparently taking responsibility
Speaker 1: for the sightings is this guy named Matthew Spencer.
Speaker 4: Everybody's knowing completely around that site, but it doesn't show
Speaker 4: right there at that site.
Speaker 5: Very weird.
Speaker 1: Why do you think the drone showed up when the
Speaker 1: trash can was let with fire.
Speaker 3: I think it picked up the heat. It was probably
Speaker 3: at least eight feet across. It was intimidating. Didn't know
Speaker 3: anything like that, was it even existed that could hover
Speaker 3: like that and then take off at that kind of speed.
Speaker 6: Hong Kong health authorities have activated their most serious response
Speaker 6: level after an outbreak of a new type of viral
Speaker 6: pneumonia in China.
Speaker 1: As the World Health Organization has declared the coronavirus outbreak
Speaker 1: a public health emergency of International Concern.
Speaker 3: New York now confirming its first case.
Speaker 1: We're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread
Speaker 1: and severity. The WHO has formally declared the coronavirus a
Speaker 1: global pandemic. When the coronavirus pandemic ramped up in the
Speaker 1: spring of twenty twenty, I stayed focused, but experienced many setbacks.
Speaker 1: Along with trying to find more about Matthew Spencer and
Speaker 1: if he was tied to the sidings, I didn't cover
Speaker 1: other things, things that didn't make sense and made me
Speaker 1: fear what technology may be hovering above the prairies. Chapter
Speaker 1: eleven Outskirts of Yuma left here, old fashioned sign, rustic
Speaker 1: kind of text in the window. To help get a
Speaker 1: clearer picture of Matthew's relationship with the Yuma Pioneer, I
Speaker 1: set a time to visit with the newspapers editor, Tony Rail.
Speaker 1: Walking into the newsroom felt like going back in time.
Speaker 1: The walls were a bit worn, and there was a
Speaker 1: scent in the air that smelled like an old five
Speaker 1: and dime store. Tony, nice to meet you. How many
Speaker 1: papers do you appront of? Weekend?
Speaker 2: Here?
Speaker 5: Oh, are circuations about two thousand.
Speaker 1: Tony's the kind of guy you'd imagine running a small
Speaker 1: town newspaper. He had gray hair glasses, and you could
Speaker 1: tell he loved the news by the way that he talked.
Speaker 1: He walked me to an empty room, then told me
Speaker 1: when he first became aware of the unknown aircraft for sure, it.
Speaker 5: Was in December when it started started getting reports about
Speaker 5: him things in New Year's Even my kids said they
Speaker 5: thought they saw one too, and drove out in the
Speaker 5: country a little ways to kind of follow it. There's
Speaker 5: somewhere around.
Speaker 1: That night, when we talked for a couple minutes, I
Speaker 1: moved the conversation to Matthew.
Speaker 7: Oh.
Speaker 5: He was saying, there were the ones you know that
Speaker 5: were doing this stuff. Some of found out more for him,
Speaker 5: and they just kind of disappeared and never heard fro
Speaker 5: him again.
Speaker 1: After a while, Tony didn't reveal much. After I left
Speaker 1: the office, I thought I'd chat with a few local
Speaker 1: residents to see if Matthew was a regular in Yuma.
Speaker 1: No one had seen him. Another name kept getting brought up,
Speaker 1: Tim Colin. It was said that Tim may actually know
Speaker 1: what was behind a few of the sightings. Tim lived
Speaker 1: in a white, historic looking home on the main drag
Speaker 1: right through town. He was waiting for me on the
Speaker 1: front porch.
Speaker 7: I got an old saying, and I take it from Einstein,
Speaker 7: the universe is not only stranger than you imagine it's
Speaker 7: stranger than you can't imagine. I take that straight to heart.
Speaker 7: I'm pushing seventy here, and I've learned a lot. There
Speaker 7: no other way to look at it.
Speaker 1: Tim has gray hair and a distinctive voice. It didn't
Speaker 1: take long to realize why folks pointed me in his direction.
Speaker 7: The night I was abducted to my wife and I
Speaker 7: were coming back from Denner because I had to go
Speaker 7: up to see a doctor, coming back from a doctor's
Speaker 7: appointment and coming up Highway fifty nine south of Yuma,
Speaker 7: about twelve miles south of Yuma at large ufo across
Speaker 7: the road in front of it was probably a hundred
Speaker 7: foot long, twenty foot wide and ten foot high, and
Speaker 7: it crossed over the fence but under the phone lines
Speaker 7: across the road. Now it was kind alongside the car
Speaker 7: and backed up plenty of yards and put the car
Speaker 7: and parking and we're looking at it. One light came
Speaker 7: on right above. Now there was two bright lights. Now
Speaker 7: A lot of people asked me what kind of alien
Speaker 7: did abducted me? And I don't really know, got no clue.
Speaker 1: Tim believed an alien had snatched him on the outskirts
Speaker 1: of Yuma and put some type of chip the size
Speaker 1: of a candalope seed in his arm.
Speaker 7: I'd injured my hand working, so I went to the
Speaker 7: doctor and got next to Ray and he come back
Speaker 7: and he says, do you know you have a piece
Speaker 7: of metal in your wrist? And no, And he said,
Speaker 7: got any idea where it come from? He had a
Speaker 7: student nurse doctor with him, And I said, well, doctor,
Speaker 7: finish making your rounds and come back and I give
Speaker 7: you some info on where that piece of metal might
Speaker 7: have come from, because it was rapidly dawning on me
Speaker 7: that it was shouldn't have been there, and it had
Speaker 7: been interesting. The implant was put in my body and
Speaker 7: it didn't have no port lantry. There was no port
Speaker 7: lanty in my body for this thing to be put
Speaker 7: in there. I mean there was a built for brise.
Speaker 1: Tim was a character. This was a fascinating story and
Speaker 1: a lot for me to take in. He provided nothing
Speaker 1: new about the drone like craft seen in the region.
Speaker 1: So did you ever find the guy that was mentioned
Speaker 1: in the article that you were looking for?
Speaker 8: No. I drove all the way to Yuma and I
Speaker 8: talked to the editor of the paper and he said
Speaker 8: he talked to that guy about the story, and then
Speaker 8: he just disappeared. Everyone kept saying, if you're looking for
Speaker 8: information about the drones, you got to talk to this
Speaker 8: guy named Tim, and I went over to Tim's house
Speaker 8: and he started telling me this story that he was
Speaker 8: abducted by an alien.
Speaker 9: Creepy, creepy, creepy.
Speaker 8: Okay, I got to get on this other call, but anyway,
Speaker 8: I'll talk to late mom.
Speaker 1: I look deeper into another theory while trying to find
Speaker 1: more about Matthew Spencer's background, and that was if these
Speaker 1: flying objects could be related to the oil and gas industry.
Speaker 1: Tell me just a little bit about what your company
Speaker 1: does and what the priorities are of your company.
Speaker 9: We're a small on min aircraft company that we focus
Speaker 9: primarily on the use of onman aircraft systems for scientific applications,
Speaker 9: so that can range everything from atmosphere can sense you're
Speaker 9: sampling to a remote sensing.
Speaker 1: That's Jack Elston of Blackswift Technologies out of Boulder, Colorado.
Speaker 1: His company not only flies drones for different clients, but
Speaker 1: builds them too.
Speaker 9: So we started out focusing on fixed wing on men
Speaker 9: aircraft and the reason why we did that is because
Speaker 9: of the endurance. They're far more efficient than quad roaders,
Speaker 9: and so we can fly for a lot longer with
Speaker 9: the same amount of battery, carrying more payload, And the payload, honestly,
Speaker 9: is the real reason why these things exist in the
Speaker 9: first place. Without a sensor to gather data, you're just
Speaker 9: having fun flying something around in the air. So the
Speaker 9: payload refers to, you know, anything that we're putting on
Speaker 9: board to gather the data that doesn't have to do
Speaker 9: with the flight control of the aircraft or actually keeping
Speaker 9: the aircraft aloft.
Speaker 1: Is thermal imaging pretty common in your line of work, Yeah.
Speaker 9: I'd say it's second only to just regular visual imagery.
Speaker 9: Thermal camera can be used again, you were talking about
Speaker 9: search and rescue. It makes it a lot easier to
Speaker 9: find individuals rather than just trying to look at visual data.
Speaker 9: We've also used thermal cameras as well to detect things
Speaker 9: like pipelines underneath the ground because you can actually see
Speaker 9: their thermal signatures coming to the surface.
Speaker 1: Do people use drones a lot like in oil? In
Speaker 1: oil and gas or pipelines like that.
Speaker 9: The oil industry, I know they're doing a lot of
Speaker 9: infrastructure inspection, So inspectrum pipes and things like that, stuff
Speaker 9: that you normally have to have people climb up on
Speaker 9: ladders and kind of deal with the risk of that.
Speaker 9: It's much easier to just have the aircraft fly the
Speaker 9: camera up there for you. They're also doing things like
Speaker 9: looking at methane detection so see if there's any leaks
Speaker 9: in the area.
Speaker 1: The mysterious aircraft didn't belong to Jack's company, but I
Speaker 1: thought he could have some ideas as to why they
Speaker 1: might be flying.
Speaker 9: Sounds like they were a fixed wing aircraft from based
Speaker 9: one of the explanations that I heard, I don't know
Speaker 9: exactly what people are doing. I mean, normally I have
Speaker 9: to get permission to go do that without permission. The
Speaker 9: most plausible thing I heard, though, was that it was
Speaker 9: somebody that was conducting experiments as far as figuring out
Speaker 9: whether these things could do perimeter surveillance or missile.
Speaker 1: Sites missile sites. When Jack said those words, I had
Speaker 1: a flashback to high school. On the way to a
Speaker 1: football game, I remember somebody pointing out an area on
Speaker 1: the side of the road where a bomb was buried
Speaker 1: in the ground. Weeks rolled by with few developments. Eventually,
Speaker 1: a new piece of information emerged Douglas Johnson, volunteer researcher
Speaker 1: affiliated with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a group
Speaker 1: that analyzes unidentified aerospace phenomena, obtained a trove of internal
Speaker 1: FAA emails. They were published online and provided a glimpse
Speaker 1: into how the FAA was approaching the unidentified drone mystery.
Speaker 1: Looking to verify the authenticity of the messages, I noticed
Speaker 1: a couple interesting notes in the endless pages of text.
Speaker 1: One of them was dated January second, twenty twenty, and
Speaker 1: written by Special Agent Michael Bumberger of the FAA's Law
Speaker 1: Enforcement Assistance Program. Michael Bumberger, who I refer to as
Speaker 1: Agent Bumberger, wrote that he was chasing a lead about
Speaker 1: someone who may be behind the sightings. In the email,
Speaker 1: he insinuated that he wanted the FBI to visit this person.
Speaker 1: Chapter twelve The hunt. Was the FAA is zeroing in
Speaker 1: on Matthew Spencer or was he even real? I contemplated
Speaker 1: that question many times. I was beginning to wonder if
Speaker 1: he was just a joke drummed up over a poker
Speaker 1: game by some drunk at the bar. Then everything changed.
Speaker 1: Through a series of recurring visits to a couple people
Speaker 1: who didn't want to be recorded. I was able to
Speaker 1: figure out that Matthew Spencer did in fact exist. I
Speaker 1: finally believed that I knew how to approach him. The
Speaker 1: conversation started with a DM to a random Twitter account.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a person's name linked to it and very
Speaker 1: few details In the bio. I wrote, I'm a journalist
Speaker 1: based in la I'm originally from the area. I'd like
Speaker 1: to chat with you about the mystery aircraft. Interested in
Speaker 1: learning more. I received a long and detailed reply. The
Speaker 1: words were jumbled and confusing at times. The writing style
Speaker 1: was similar to the article in the Yuma Pioneer. I
Speaker 1: was ninety percent sure I was messaging with Matthew. I've
Speaker 1: never seen this guy's face before. He told me he's
Speaker 1: wearing Gene Schortz, I believe, a T shirt and a
Speaker 1: ball cat. I persuaded Matthew to talk with me in person.
Speaker 1: After many hours of driving through Kansas, I slowly pulled
Speaker 1: up to a location. He chose, the Old Cowtown Museum
Speaker 1: in Wichita. It's a western town that resembled the city
Speaker 1: in the late eighteen hundreds. He was waiting in the
Speaker 1: gift shop. He had a stocky build with a black hat,
Speaker 1: car go shorts and glasses on. We set a brief hello,
Speaker 1: then began walking through the town's dirt road streets. We
Speaker 1: turned past the blacksmith shop, then grabbed a couple of
Speaker 1: saasparillas from the saloon. We sat down at some picnic tables.
Speaker 1: You're an old town square.
Speaker 2: All right, So first go ahead and tell me your name.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's Matthew Spencer.
Speaker 2: And what is it exactly that your group does.
Speaker 6: Basically, when you start forming together and you're picking up people,
Speaker 6: and you're picking up you know, property, and you're doing
Speaker 6: different things. We decided to form a group. You know,
Speaker 6: in a group you're not gonna find on the Internet
Speaker 6: or a website per se. But what we want to
Speaker 6: do in the trick and we want to do is
Speaker 6: essentially the identifying mark of who we are.
Speaker 1: The tracking we want to do is an identifying mark
Speaker 1: of who we are. Surely I didn't drive all the
Speaker 1: way to Kansas for a vague recon sponsores like that.
Speaker 1: I asked Matthew to clarify, so we.
Speaker 6: Caught some attention. When you get into what you're referred
Speaker 6: to as the Colorado Drawn Mystery, naturally, but it's about
Speaker 6: a decade of work. And essentially what we're doing is
Speaker 6: we track high value aerospace targets, so to break down
Speaker 6: into the business world. But our many focus is to
Speaker 6: go after the UAPs that are within the news right now.
Speaker 1: I thought back to a few stories I'd seen about UAPs.
Speaker 3: Oh, queen of them.
Speaker 4: Look on the Afah going against the wain.
Speaker 8: They went one.
Speaker 1: Hundred, went out of the class. While the mission of
Speaker 1: Matthew's group was unusual, I wanted to get straight to
Speaker 1: the point. It seemed highly unlikely that one man or
Speaker 1: team could operate large numbers of drones in multiple locations
Speaker 1: hundreds of miles apart at the same time.
Speaker 2: How many drones were you using, like five, ten, fifteen, twenty.
Speaker 6: So the groups of drones, let's say ten to twenty five? No,
Speaker 6: not at the same time. Yeah, do we have a fleet?
Speaker 6: Of course? Was it you know, twenty five the night
Speaker 6: sky looking any windows?
Speaker 1: No? Well, I pressed Matthew on the characteristics of his
Speaker 1: drones and if he was actually flying them at night.
Speaker 1: I didn't get much information.
Speaker 2: So what type of process do you use and do
Speaker 2: with those drones?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 6: I wouldn't say there's an exact method, But the idea
Speaker 6: is that you have to get in the air one
Speaker 6: way or another with your devices and with your tools,
Speaker 6: and then essentially, based on that data, your picking at
Speaker 6: your next location.
Speaker 1: Matthew avoided the question, and I was losing my patients.
Speaker 1: Do you know who is responsible for the drones in Colorado?
Speaker 6: You have to get down to the basis. Were there
Speaker 6: other drones there besides mine? Yeah, without a doubt. Can
Speaker 6: I tell you who they were?
Speaker 1: No, Matthew was adamant that the small number of his drones,
Speaker 1: along with others, were flying in the night sky.
Speaker 6: You know what I do when I'm tracking, or when
Speaker 6: anybody's tracking, what do you do? You're flying a grid.
Speaker 6: That's just how it works. And so you hear all
Speaker 6: the reports coming out, Well, they're flying in a grid.
Speaker 6: Kind of makes me think that you know, you got
Speaker 6: you know, I don't want to stay fool because I
Speaker 6: wasn't trying to fool anybody, But you've seen something in
Speaker 6: your brain kind of figured out the rest. Was there
Speaker 6: drones in the area, Definitely, But anytime you have drones
Speaker 6: in the area, there's always a why. So who's gonna
Speaker 6: be right on the why? And it's always the facts
Speaker 6: and the burden of proofs on you, and I think
Speaker 6: there's more.
Speaker 5: Of a story there.
Speaker 6: But I think it was evolving more than just you know,
Speaker 6: Drnes for no reason. We're flying in with people there
Speaker 6: who referred to as the middle of nowhere, and I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm from a place like that, so there's no disrespect there.
Speaker 6: But something was going on.
Speaker 1: I was able to confirm that. On January second, Agent
Speaker 1: Bumberger emailed Matthew directly saying that he'd been advised by
Speaker 1: the Yuma County Sheriff's office that the mysterious drones in
Speaker 1: question were his.
Speaker 6: You want to send me down and say I had
Speaker 6: lives going You want the clearest to understanding. I think
Speaker 6: when you get down to it, and that he said,
Speaker 6: She said, especially federal agencies put me on a polygraph.
Speaker 1: I couldn't verify the majority of what Matthew told me.
Speaker 1: It appeared that when the FAA wouldn't allow a polygraph,
Speaker 1: he reached out to different newspapers to claim responsibility for
Speaker 1: his drones. If Matthew was breaking any laws, he hadn't
Speaker 1: been arrested yet. Was he just screaming for attention behind
Speaker 1: the scenes? FAA investigators clearly had an interest in him.
Speaker 1: I could tell he wanted to share more. When we
Speaker 1: finished visiting, I fired off an email to Ian Gregor
Speaker 1: to see if he could arrange a short interview with
Speaker 1: Agent Bumberger. In a nutshell. Ian wrote back that he
Speaker 1: wouldn't make Bumberger available. I pushed through further correspondence he
Speaker 1: shut me down. Since the origin of the sightings was
Speaker 1: a mystery, I thought the FAA would want to provide
Speaker 1: as much transparency as possible. I was wrong. I had
Speaker 1: to find another way to Bumberger. I re examined the
Speaker 1: FAA emails i'd seen online. As I analyzed them again,
Speaker 1: I discovered a paragraph i'd previously skimmed over. This was
Speaker 1: part of a message sent on New Year's Eve of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, notating paragraph six. The drones are reported to
Speaker 1: have six foot wingspans, and there are several reports that
Speaker 1: indicate the drones are operating in coordination with a big
Speaker 1: drone that may be stationary in the area. There's also
Speaker 1: an unverified report of the larger drone potentially landing and
Speaker 1: taking back off from an airport and Imperial, Nebraska. I
Speaker 1: closed my eyes and thought back to those first couple nights,
Speaker 1: I saw the mysterious lights in the sky. It's what
Speaker 1: we like to call God's country out here. You look
Speaker 1: into the sky, you see a few stars, but then
Speaker 1: you see all of these blinking lights kind of just
Speaker 1: moving around in irregular patterns. I'm looking at one now
Speaker 1: and it has green and yellow light, and there's one
Speaker 1: with a solid white light on it. It looks bigger
Speaker 1: and lower to the ground, and it looks like it's
Speaker 1: stayed in the same area since I pulled up here,
Speaker 1: just kind of hovering, counting at least now one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,
Speaker 1: thirteen fourteen. I'd seen the unexplained aircraft. You're the exact
Speaker 1: spot the FAA official had written about. Had I missed
Speaker 1: a landing coming up on obscure invasion of the drums.
Speaker 4: Eat a living beat. I mean they show curiosity, They
Speaker 4: just show different emotions here. You can feel it.
Speaker 1: They did not look like anything that I had ever
Speaker 1: seen from this planet.
Speaker 8: They backed those things up and were started to.
Speaker 4: Come after me as I was coming down the road.
Speaker 1: When it comes to the active missile silos, I assume
Speaker 1: that there's some type of counter drum technology was that
Speaker 1: in place, I.
Speaker 7: Got things to do and it ain't play with drones.
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. This series is written, hosted,
Speaker 1: and produced by Me Gabe Lenners. It's executive produced by
Speaker 1: Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Welker, Nathan Kloke, Nicki Etour and Me.
Speaker 1: Additional production by Jacob Plough. Music and sound effects courtesy
Speaker 1: of Epidemic Sound. Brand management and digital design by Labyrinth
Speaker 1: Brand Co. Video editing by Alex Simikopenko. This project was
Speaker 1: mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough. Special thanks to Dan Bodansky,
Speaker 1: Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Birchfield, David Wasserman,
Speaker 1: Katrina Norvel, and My Family. OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones Invasion is available on
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