Night Watchers

Last time on OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones. It was a routine medical call out east when a mission to save a life almost ended in disaster and a drone just.

Went road underneath us.

He tried to count the number of objects with the same white pattern. Were these things drones? Said, well, I couldn't tell for sure, and that location is probably about ten miles east of Denver International Airport. Do you feel it.

Could be some type of government agency or foreign power controlling these drones?

I can't answer that.

Two weeks had passed since the task force meeting in Brush, Conversations about the mysterious aircraft continued to play out on the local news. Reporters captured grainy videos of the strange lights, but it was impossible to make any conclusions. I was determined to figure out if any of the aircraft were taking off and landing nearby. One night, I chased a larger drone like object in my dad's pickup for twenty miles. Now, big white one looks like it's coming closer.

They are all over.

There's another one right directly above me, to my left. It was shaped like an egg and had a spherical white light even as i'd take back roads to gain ground, it was always ahead of me. I plotted my next move and began texting with Chris, who i'd met after his wife Sarah, spotted a large aircraft hovering outside the family's farmhouse. There was an unsettling development he wanted to share with me, and I could tell it was important that we get together in person. Chapter nine, Dark Shadows. One of the first people to ever spot these aircrafts is driving about forty feet in front of me. The dust kicked up off the tires of Chris's pickup hauling down a dirt road in Phillips County, Colorado. I was closely behind him. Chris has a tall, athletic build in chiseled jawline. He had a ball cap on him. You could tell he probably played sports back in the day. We walked over to a clearing near the edge of a field, where he began telling me about another encounter.

I've burned my trash and after we'd opened to our Christmas present, so I just have a bunch of wrapping paper and boxes, and there's some snow on the ground. So I just took out to trash burrel and lit it and had quite the fire going. It was pretty late at night again, and I went up to our office, which is like in the second story. I was just getting ready to head down for the night. I turned the lights off, and I realized that there were lights on outside. It looked almost like one of our yard lights that I could see it glowing off the tin of our shop. So I went outside the garage and as soon as I opened the garage door, there was a white like infrared camera light. I mean you could to see the perfect circle of bolts around a camera mounted on the bottom of a drone, and that was the light I was seeing from the house. And as soon as I opened the door and stepped outside, it just it took off.

It was unroum.

Why do you think the drone showed up when the trash can was lit with fire.

I think it. I think it picked up the heat and it was cold again, so I'm sure it showed up from a long ways away. But that happened. That happened two different times. Once in the daylight too, where I had a pretty good fire, and within fifteen minutes there was a drone flying by. Didn't hover like the first one did that night, but it flew right by to get a look at what was going on. It was probably at least eight feet across. It was I mean, it was intimidating. It gave you goosebumps. And he looked at It's like, wow, didn't didn't know anything like that was even it even existed that could hover like that and then take off at that kind of speed. And when it was hovering, it was totally silent until I stepped out and it took off, and then it was just like, I'm just sound like a motor runner.

I couldn't wrap my mind around why a drone would hover above a small fire.

I wanted to knock it down. All the Sheriff's apartment kept saying was do not shoot, do not try to follow him, just leave it, just leave. But I wanted to shoot it down because I don't like anybody being that close to my house without me, no one, let alone something that quiet with a camera within fifty feet of our house. I really wanted to knock it down just to see who would come pick it up.

Would anybody pick it up in risk being seen? If Chris had experienced this, there could be others. Maybe his neighbors had reported something similar to law enforcement. I called Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliott to see if we could visit. He promptly cut me off mid sentence and informed me that I needed to fill out a public records request before he'd talk. It seemed like I'd have to find details in a police report. Confused on where to turn, I spent many hours going down the rabbit hole of comments on the social media group Rod Miller usually posted to, hoping to find a tip that may lead to a breakthrough. One day, I woke up to a flurry of notifications. Rod told me that he locked in on one specific region where a high number of unexplained aircraft were still being seen. What puzzled him even more was that these sightings resembled orbs, or glowing balls of light, distinctly different from the drone like objects initially reported.

I set up off about a mile or two off that site, and almost ninety nine percent of all my really good videos of the orbs they come up off the ground, and they come off up off that site. That's where my setup is, and that's where I've had the best look. You know, every time I go out.

There, based on obscure land formations he located with satellites. He was convinced there was a sacred ancient site near the area of high activity.

To me, it's like they showed up in big numbers, but they've been here in the past.

I didn't know where this was going, but I was highly skeptical, then intrigued. Wanted to explore the canyons and pasture during the daylight to see if any remnants were there.

The landowner was a definite no. Through other family members of his, I ended up finding the homestead papers of his land one of my friends, she helped me get there. Anyway, long story short, we found the homestead papers and then traded him, gave him the homestead papers for his land, and then we got permission to go on to the land to look at the site. When I got to the site, the strange thing about this there was the variance of a temperature there. The farmer, like I said, he was hid and want nothing to do with the site. He told me that if one of his cows was having a caftin was having in trouble, that it would be on its own.

It was.

He just didn't have a bad feeling about the site and didn't want no part of it. When we got there, and he showed me the temperature gate on his pickup, and when we got pulled up to the site that at that side it was forty degrees hotter than where we had stopped. You know, there's like a forty degree difference. I've looked through binocular since then. When it's snowing, it'll be snowing completely around that site, but it doesn't snow right there at that site.

Very whare.

Of course, the landowner he wouldn't get out of his pickup because he just that side spooked him. But his wife was very curious about it. She went with me and there was some pictographs different carvings on a bluff there, and we were looking over those. There were a total of seven owls and them our owls that I had never seen the seen before. They were kind of a brown mot with white matted color to him, but I I mean they looked like real living owls. Well, they let her, the landowner's wife, get up pretty close and she took pictures, trying to take pictures of him, and she come running over to me. She goes, Roddy, they don't show up on a camera. As we was looking at some pictographs, a dark shadow swooped down over us, which her husband was in the pickup, but scared him for us, and she of course screamed, and it was kind of this cold draft. It's hard to explain. They just came right over. He swooped over as cattle took off running, and he's told us to get to pick up, and he he wouldn't love to look anymore. So then, and of course I'll never get back on there again. Probably whatever that black shadow was was in a negative way.

You wasn't good.

Rod was eccentric. I had no reason to believe that he wouldn't be truthful. Could there possibly be a connection between the Land and Sky I members and Rod's drone hunting group were now taking their investigative conversations to a secret messenger chain. They had to be aware of his personal research Chapter ten Silent Silhouettes. The realist in me thought that if Froud Miller was seeing large numbers of aircraft again and again over a small concentrated area, maybe this localized event could be related to agriculture.

All right, good deal, I don't want you to do different.

A neighbor who lived close by introduced me to a man named Jeff Wessel's. He was one of the few people in the region certified to fly drones professionally. When I walked up to Jeff, he was talking with a waitress in another couple of few tables over. He was wearing a Nebraska Cornhusker's T shirt, blue jeans, and glasses and reminded me of one of those guys who's never a stranger to anyone. What is your specific background. I know you are licensed to fly drones.

We do it for work.

We fly dji fnom fours and look around, take videos, take pictures, and then we can show them to the customer and say here's what we're seeing out in the field. You know, even though we're not selling the information to the customer, we're still being FAA certified UAV pilots so that we don't get in.

Trouble for anything.

With Jeff's experience as a crop advisor, he'd know the geography of the area and how someone may go about running fleets of drones.

There'd have to be a lot of automation, or there would It would take a tremendous amount of individuals. Somebody has watched them. Obviously, I can guarantee you because in a commercial aspect like the ones we fly, they won't go over two miles away from the receiver, or they will turn around and come back. I know they would show up on radar as big as they are, they would look like a flock of birds, for example, on radar. And the FAA takes violation of airspace really seriously, so I promise you they know. What I don't think anybody will ever know.

Is what they're doing.

It was a year ago a big old snow storm, you know, snow was piled up everywhere, and I thought, all this would be really fun. I was at the Grontomy office and I thought, well, I'm gonna launch it out of the air and take pictures of all the snow around there, not thinking about where I was, got it all set up, got ready to go, and it wouldn't launch it. Oh dudge aff. The airport is only a mile away your way, inside the radius of the airports. There's no way it will fly. So someone has got permission from the FAA to do this, or they have very sophisticated ways to override the fa rules that are in here.

Jeff mentioned drones were used for surveys, but there had to be a company that did more. I soon connected with Michael Ott from ran Tizo.

We use drones to spray for agriculture and sanitization. We can spray pesticides, insecticides, herbicides wherever they're needed in crop fields.

Growing up in the area, I was used to hearing spray planes at the crack of dawn, but I never heard of drones being used for spraying crops.

With the drones you use, what are the typical sizes.

The drone itself is maybe the size of a card table. That's a good frame of reference for most people. And then we put on a boom that extends out fourteen feet and gives us a twenty foot swath as its spring. There'd be very unusual reasons to be higher than twenty feet about the crop. If you're doing an application.

Can you charge them wirelessly while they're in the air.

We have batteries and so when you're doing a job, you'll bring multiple batteries, a charge are and a generator with you.

How close can you get to an airport typically before like you get a notification or a land If.

You get that authorization, you can fly much closer. Otherwise a lot of them are no fly zones.

If the unexplained aircraft could be related to farming, I wondered about climate. January in Nebraska is cold and the ground is frozen.

Is there ever a time of year where you wouldn't be flying and putting these on some type of agricultural related field.

I'd say it's a typical. I mean, if you don't want to spray something on snowcover. But I think that'd be a foolish thing to do. I cannot imagine that the people that were doing there had a legitimate agricultural purpose.

Hearing that from an expert helped me come to the same conclusion. With no luck calling additional agencies and companies who fly drones in hopes of getting fresh leads to look into. I monitored cell phone tower video feeds and scoured the web. During that third week of January, I came across a link to a cryptic article. I visited the website in FROs There was a piece by the Sterling Colorado Journal Advocate with a headline that read drone mystery solved, WHICHITA group may be responsible? The story centered on a man who wasn't from the area. A few days later, a second article was published, this time in the January twenty third issue of the Yuma Pioneer. An editor's note stated that a man whom I began referring to as Matthew Spencer was taking responsibility for the nighttime drone sightings. Was confusing and didn't seem to be written by a seasoned reporter. If Matthew had knowledge related to the mystery, why was he choosing to speak after weeks of sightings? I had to find him coming up on obscure invasion of the drones.

I got an old saying, and I take it from Einstein. The universe is not only stranger than you imagine, it's stranger than you can't imagine. I take that straight dark.

There's cameras kind of all over the place.

So there could be physical manifestations that people could get sick.

You want to sit me down and say I had lives going. You want the clearers to understanding, I think put me on the polygraph.

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 Entertainment 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.