Speaker 1: Last time on OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones. It was
Speaker 1: a routine medical call out east when a mission to
Speaker 1: save a life almost ended in disaster and a drone just.
Speaker 2: Went road underneath us.
Speaker 3: He tried to count the number of objects with the
Speaker 3: same white pattern. Were these things drones? Said, well, I
Speaker 3: couldn't tell for sure, and that location is probably about
Speaker 3: ten miles east of Denver International Airport. Do you feel it.
Speaker 4: Could be some type of government agency or foreign power
Speaker 4: controlling these drones?
Speaker 3: I can't answer that.
Speaker 1: Two weeks had passed since the task force meeting in Brush,
Speaker 1: Conversations about the mysterious aircraft continued to play out on
Speaker 1: the local news. Reporters captured grainy videos of the strange lights,
Speaker 1: but it was impossible to make any conclusions. I was
Speaker 1: determined to figure out if any of the aircraft were
Speaker 1: taking off and landing nearby. One night, I chased a
Speaker 1: larger drone like object in my dad's pickup for twenty miles. Now,
Speaker 1: big white one looks like it's coming closer.
Speaker 5: They are all over.
Speaker 1: There's another one right directly above me, to my left.
Speaker 1: It was shaped like an egg and had a spherical
Speaker 1: white light even as i'd take back roads to gain ground,
Speaker 1: it was always ahead of me. I plotted my next
Speaker 1: move and began texting with Chris, who i'd met after
Speaker 1: his wife Sarah, spotted a large aircraft hovering outside the
Speaker 1: family's farmhouse. There was an unsettling development he wanted to
Speaker 1: share with me, and I could tell it was important
Speaker 1: that we get together in person. Chapter nine, Dark Shadows.
Speaker 1: One of the first people to ever spot these aircrafts
Speaker 1: is driving about forty feet in front of me. The
Speaker 1: dust kicked up off the tires of Chris's pickup hauling
Speaker 1: down a dirt road in Phillips County, Colorado. I was
Speaker 1: closely behind him. Chris has a tall, athletic build in
Speaker 1: chiseled jawline. He had a ball cap on him. You
Speaker 1: could tell he probably played sports back in the day.
Speaker 1: We walked over to a clearing near the edge of
Speaker 1: a field, where he began telling me about another encounter.
Speaker 6: I've burned my trash and after we'd opened to our
Speaker 6: Christmas present, so I just have a bunch of wrapping
Speaker 6: paper and boxes, and there's some snow on the ground.
Speaker 6: So I just took out to trash burrel and lit
Speaker 6: it and had quite the fire going. It was pretty
Speaker 6: late at night again, and I went up to our office,
Speaker 6: which is like in the second story. I was just
Speaker 6: getting ready to head down for the night. I turned
Speaker 6: the lights off, and I realized that there were lights
Speaker 6: on outside. It looked almost like one of our yard
Speaker 6: lights that I could see it glowing off the tin
Speaker 6: of our shop. So I went outside the garage and
Speaker 6: as soon as I opened the garage door, there was
Speaker 6: a white like infrared camera light. I mean you could
Speaker 6: to see the perfect circle of bolts around a camera
Speaker 6: mounted on the bottom of a drone, and that was
Speaker 6: the light I was seeing from the house. And as
Speaker 6: soon as I opened the door and stepped outside, it
Speaker 6: just it took off.
Speaker 4: It was unroum.
Speaker 1: Why do you think the drone showed up when the
Speaker 1: trash can was lit with fire.
Speaker 6: I think it. I think it picked up the heat
Speaker 6: and it was cold again, so I'm sure it showed
Speaker 6: up from a long ways away. But that happened. That
Speaker 6: happened two different times. Once in the daylight too, where
Speaker 6: I had a pretty good fire, and within fifteen minutes
Speaker 6: there was a drone flying by. Didn't hover like the
Speaker 6: first one did that night, but it flew right by
Speaker 6: to get a look at what was going on. It
Speaker 6: was probably at least eight feet across. It was I mean,
Speaker 6: it was intimidating. It gave you goosebumps. And he looked
Speaker 6: at It's like, wow, didn't didn't know anything like that
Speaker 6: was even it even existed that could hover like that
Speaker 6: and then take off at that kind of speed. And
Speaker 6: when it was hovering, it was totally silent until I
Speaker 6: stepped out and it took off, and then it was
Speaker 6: just like, I'm just sound like a motor runner.
Speaker 1: I couldn't wrap my mind around why a drone would
Speaker 1: hover above a small fire.
Speaker 6: I wanted to knock it down. All the Sheriff's apartment
Speaker 6: kept saying was do not shoot, do not try to
Speaker 6: follow him, just leave it, just leave. But I wanted
Speaker 6: to shoot it down because I don't like anybody being
Speaker 6: that close to my house without me, no one, let
Speaker 6: alone something that quiet with a camera within fifty feet
Speaker 6: of our house. I really wanted to knock it down
Speaker 6: just to see who would come pick it up.
Speaker 1: Would anybody pick it up in risk being seen? If
Speaker 1: Chris had experienced this, there could be others. Maybe his
Speaker 1: neighbors had reported something similar to law enforcement. I called
Speaker 1: Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliott to see if we could visit.
Speaker 1: He promptly cut me off mid sentence and informed me
Speaker 1: that I needed to fill out a public records request
Speaker 1: before he'd talk. It seemed like I'd have to find
Speaker 1: details in a police report. Confused on where to turn,
Speaker 1: I spent many hours going down the rabbit hole of
Speaker 1: comments on the social media group Rod Miller usually posted to,
Speaker 1: hoping to find a tip that may lead to a breakthrough.
Speaker 1: One day, I woke up to a flurry of notifications.
Speaker 1: Rod told me that he locked in on one specific
Speaker 1: region where a high number of unexplained aircraft were still
Speaker 1: being seen. What puzzled him even more was that these
Speaker 1: sightings resembled orbs, or glowing balls of light, distinctly different
Speaker 1: from the drone like objects initially reported.
Speaker 5: I set up off about a mile or two off
Speaker 5: that site, and almost ninety nine percent of all my
Speaker 5: really good videos of the orbs they come up off
Speaker 5: the ground, and they come off up off that site.
Speaker 5: That's where my setup is, and that's where I've had
Speaker 5: the best look. You know, every time I go out.
Speaker 1: There, based on obscure land formations he located with satellites.
Speaker 1: He was convinced there was a sacred ancient site near
Speaker 1: the area of high activity.
Speaker 5: To me, it's like they showed up in big numbers,
Speaker 5: but they've been here in the past.
Speaker 1: I didn't know where this was going, but I was
Speaker 1: highly skeptical, then intrigued. Wanted to explore the canyons and
Speaker 1: pasture during the daylight to see if any remnants were there.
Speaker 5: The landowner was a definite no. Through other family members
Speaker 5: of his, I ended up finding the homestead papers of
Speaker 5: his land one of my friends, she helped me get there. Anyway,
Speaker 5: long story short, we found the homestead papers and then
Speaker 5: traded him, gave him the homestead papers for his land,
Speaker 5: and then we got permission to go on to the
Speaker 5: land to look at the site. When I got to
Speaker 5: the site, the strange thing about this there was the
Speaker 5: variance of a temperature there. The farmer, like I said,
Speaker 5: he was hid and want nothing to do with the site.
Speaker 5: He told me that if one of his cows was
Speaker 5: having a caftin was having in trouble, that it would
Speaker 5: be on its own.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 5: He just didn't have a bad feeling about the site
Speaker 5: and didn't want no part of it. When we got there,
Speaker 5: and he showed me the temperature gate on his pickup,
Speaker 5: and when we got pulled up to the site that
Speaker 5: at that side it was forty degrees hotter than where
Speaker 5: we had stopped. You know, there's like a forty degree difference.
Speaker 5: I've looked through binocular since then. When it's snowing, it'll
Speaker 5: be snowing completely around that site, but it doesn't snow
Speaker 5: right there at that site.
Speaker 2: Very whare.
Speaker 5: Of course, the landowner he wouldn't get out of his
Speaker 5: pickup because he just that side spooked him. But his
Speaker 5: wife was very curious about it. She went with me
Speaker 5: and there was some pictographs different carvings on a bluff there,
Speaker 5: and we were looking over those. There were a total
Speaker 5: of seven owls and them our owls that I had
Speaker 5: never seen the seen before. They were kind of a
Speaker 5: brown mot with white matted color to him, but I
Speaker 5: I mean they looked like real living owls. Well, they
Speaker 5: let her, the landowner's wife, get up pretty close and
Speaker 5: she took pictures, trying to take pictures of him, and
Speaker 5: she come running over to me. She goes, Roddy, they
Speaker 5: don't show up on a camera. As we was looking
Speaker 5: at some pictographs, a dark shadow swooped down over us,
Speaker 5: which her husband was in the pickup, but scared him
Speaker 5: for us, and she of course screamed, and it was
Speaker 5: kind of this cold draft. It's hard to explain. They
Speaker 5: just came right over. He swooped over as cattle took
Speaker 5: off running, and he's told us to get to pick up,
Speaker 5: and he he wouldn't love to look anymore. So then,
Speaker 5: and of course I'll never get back on there again.
Speaker 5: Probably whatever that black shadow was was in a negative way.
Speaker 2: You wasn't good.
Speaker 1: Rod was eccentric. I had no reason to believe that
Speaker 1: he wouldn't be truthful. Could there possibly be a connection
Speaker 1: between the Land and Sky I members and Rod's drone
Speaker 1: hunting group were now taking their investigative conversations to a
Speaker 1: secret messenger chain. They had to be aware of his
Speaker 1: personal research Chapter ten Silent Silhouettes. The realist in me
Speaker 1: thought that if Froud Miller was seeing large numbers of
Speaker 1: aircraft again and again over a small concentrated area, maybe
Speaker 1: this localized event could be related to agriculture.
Speaker 7: All right, good deal, I don't want you to do different.
Speaker 1: A neighbor who lived close by introduced me to a
Speaker 1: man named Jeff Wessel's. He was one of the few
Speaker 1: people in the region certified to fly drones professionally. When
Speaker 1: I walked up to Jeff, he was talking with a
Speaker 1: waitress in another couple of few tables over. He was
Speaker 1: wearing a Nebraska Cornhusker's T shirt, blue jeans, and glasses
Speaker 1: and reminded me of one of those guys who's never
Speaker 1: a stranger to anyone. What is your specific background. I
Speaker 1: know you are licensed to fly drones.
Speaker 2: We do it for work.
Speaker 7: We fly dji fnom fours and look around, take videos,
Speaker 7: take pictures, and then we can show them to the
Speaker 7: customer and say here's what we're seeing out in the field.
Speaker 7: You know, even though we're not selling the information to
Speaker 7: the customer, we're still being FAA certified UAV pilots so
Speaker 7: that we don't get in.
Speaker 2: Trouble for anything.
Speaker 1: With Jeff's experience as a crop advisor, he'd know the
Speaker 1: geography of the area and how someone may go about
Speaker 1: running fleets of drones.
Speaker 7: There'd have to be a lot of automation, or there
Speaker 7: would It would take a tremendous amount of individuals. Somebody
Speaker 7: has watched them. Obviously, I can guarantee you because in
Speaker 7: a commercial aspect like the ones we fly, they won't
Speaker 7: go over two miles away from the receiver, or they
Speaker 7: will turn around and come back. I know they would
Speaker 7: show up on radar as big as they are, they
Speaker 7: would look like a flock of birds, for example, on radar.
Speaker 7: And the FAA takes violation of airspace really seriously, so
Speaker 7: I promise you they know. What I don't think anybody
Speaker 7: will ever know.
Speaker 1: Is what they're doing.
Speaker 7: It was a year ago a big old snow storm,
Speaker 7: you know, snow was piled up everywhere, and I thought,
Speaker 7: all this would be really fun. I was at the
Speaker 7: Grontomy office and I thought, well, I'm gonna launch it
Speaker 7: out of the air and take pictures of all the
Speaker 7: snow around there, not thinking about where I was, got
Speaker 7: it all set up, got ready to go, and it
Speaker 7: wouldn't launch it. Oh dudge aff. The airport is only
Speaker 7: a mile away your way, inside the radius of the airports.
Speaker 7: There's no way it will fly. So someone has got
Speaker 7: permission from the FAA to do this, or they have
Speaker 7: very sophisticated ways to override the fa rules that are
Speaker 7: in here.
Speaker 1: Jeff mentioned drones were used for surveys, but there had
Speaker 1: to be a company that did more. I soon connected
Speaker 1: with Michael Ott from ran Tizo.
Speaker 2: We use drones to spray for agriculture and sanitization. We
Speaker 2: can spray pesticides, insecticides, herbicides wherever they're needed in crop fields.
Speaker 1: Growing up in the area, I was used to hearing
Speaker 1: spray planes at the crack of dawn, but I never
Speaker 1: heard of drones being used for spraying crops.
Speaker 3: With the drones you use, what are the typical sizes.
Speaker 2: The drone itself is maybe the size of a card table.
Speaker 2: That's a good frame of reference for most people. And
Speaker 2: then we put on a boom that extends out fourteen
Speaker 2: feet and gives us a twenty foot swath as its spring.
Speaker 2: There'd be very unusual reasons to be higher than twenty
Speaker 2: feet about the crop. If you're doing an application.
Speaker 4: Can you charge them wirelessly while they're in the air.
Speaker 2: We have batteries and so when you're doing a job,
Speaker 2: you'll bring multiple batteries, a charge are and a generator
Speaker 2: with you.
Speaker 4: How close can you get to an airport typically before
Speaker 4: like you get a notification or a land If.
Speaker 2: You get that authorization, you can fly much closer. Otherwise
Speaker 2: a lot of them are no fly zones.
Speaker 1: If the unexplained aircraft could be related to farming, I
Speaker 1: wondered about climate. January in Nebraska is cold and the
Speaker 1: ground is frozen.
Speaker 4: Is there ever a time of year where you wouldn't
Speaker 4: be flying and putting these on some type of agricultural
Speaker 4: related field.
Speaker 2: I'd say it's a typical. I mean, if you don't
Speaker 2: want to spray something on snowcover. But I think that'd
Speaker 2: be a foolish thing to do. I cannot imagine that
Speaker 2: the people that were doing there had a legitimate agricultural purpose.
Speaker 1: Hearing that from an expert helped me come to the
Speaker 1: same conclusion. With no luck calling additional agencies and companies
Speaker 1: who fly drones in hopes of getting fresh leads to
Speaker 1: look into. I monitored cell phone tower video feeds and
Speaker 1: scoured the web. During that third week of January, I
Speaker 1: came across a link to a cryptic article. I visited
Speaker 1: the website in FROs There was a piece by the
Speaker 1: Sterling Colorado Journal Advocate with a headline that read drone
Speaker 1: mystery solved, WHICHITA group may be responsible? The story centered
Speaker 1: on a man who wasn't from the area. A few
Speaker 1: days later, a second article was published, this time in
Speaker 1: the January twenty third issue of the Yuma Pioneer. An
Speaker 1: editor's note stated that a man whom I began referring
Speaker 1: to as Matthew Spencer was taking responsibility for the nighttime
Speaker 1: drone sightings. Was confusing and didn't seem to be written
Speaker 1: by a seasoned reporter. If Matthew had knowledge related to
Speaker 1: the mystery, why was he choosing to speak after weeks
Speaker 1: of sightings? I had to find him coming up on
Speaker 1: obscure invasion of the drones.
Speaker 8: I got an old saying, and I take it from Einstein.
Speaker 8: The universe is not only stranger than you imagine, it's
Speaker 8: stranger than you can't imagine. I take that straight dark.
Speaker 1: There's cameras kind of all over the place.
Speaker 7: So there could be physical manifestations that people could get sick.
Speaker 8: You want to sit me down and say I had
Speaker 8: lives going. You want the clearers to understanding, I think
Speaker 8: put me on the polygraph.
Speaker 1: If you have any information surrounding the events detailed in this podcast, or have your own similar account, please visit our website at obscurumseries.com and share your story. You'll also find exclusive behind the scenes content on the side. To connect with us on social media, you can follow @obscurum_series and @gabelenners on all social platforms. OBSCURUM is produced by Imagine and Lenners Entertainment for iHeartMedia. This series is written, hosted, and produced by Me Gabe Lenners. It's executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl Welker, Nathan Kloke, Nicki Etour and Me. Additional production by Jacob Plough. Music and sound effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Brand management and digital design by Labyrinth Brand Co. Video editing by Alex Semikopenko. This project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough. Special thanks to Dan Bodansky, Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Birchfield, David Wasserman, Katrina Norvel and my family. OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Follow now.