CLASSIC: Colorado's Mystery Drones

In December of 2019 the Denver Post began reporting a strange pattern over the night sky of northeast Colorado. Around 7pm each night, at least 17 drones -- large ones -- emerged from somewhere and flew over the region in what appeared to be a search pattern, disappearing between 9:30 and 10pm. No one, from federal agencies on down, seemed to know where these drones were coming from, who controlled them, or what they were doing up in the sky. If, that is, they existed at all.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. We returned to you with this week's
classic episode. Back in like the end of twenty nineteen,
something very strange started happening over the sky of northeast Colorado.
This captured our interest, this captured the national interest, and
it seems like it's even more important as we learn

(00:23):
more and more things about mysterious drones.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Well, yeah, we talked to Gabe Lennards not long ago
about this very subject, and this is back in twenty
twenty when we did the entire thing about the news
stories that were coming out at the time. So this
is really cool context, especially if you heard that episode
where we interviewed Gabe Lennars as a part of the obscurum.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Yeah, this definitely seems like a parallel example of some
of the stuff we talked about in that discussion. So
why don't we get right into it.

Speaker 4 (00:51):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now, learned
this stuff they don't want you to know. A production
of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is no Matt.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Thank you for that kindly.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Welcome, Oh yes, welcome to you. Welcome to Paul, Mission
Control decan who is with us. Welcome to Ben in spirit,
who is on an adventure. And he will tell us
about it when he gets back. He sure will, and
so today or he might not. No, well, who knows,
who knows, But if we do learn something, it will
be from his mouth and his mouth.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Alone, the ways of the Ben Boll in our mysterious ways.
That is correct, sort of like the way that character
and that U two song moves in mysterious ways. Mister,
I can't no, no, yeah, we can't afford Nope, nope, nope.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Okay, So today everyone, we are talking about something we've
mentioned on this show numerous times. We did a whole
series on it in video form and a couple episodes
of the podcast on this We're talking about drones.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
So what you're saying is we're going to talk about
the music of Brian Eno.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yes, this is an Eno centric podcast. Some of my
favorite music is drone music, particularly if I'm editing or
doing something where I need to focus on audio. Sure
that is not musical, but like especially if it's talking
heads or voices that I'm editing a little drone in there, just.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Keeps it flowing some kind of crazy trip in a
one of those isolation chambers.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
You know, yes, very much like that. Good for that,
but that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking
about the vehicles, the machines, drones, and you know, it's weird.
It is really weird because if you think about it, what,
maybe a decade ago, maybe not even that long ago,
a drone was something when you were talking about it
in the news or in social media, it was generally

(03:00):
something very different than what we're talking about today. You
were talking about an unmanned aerial vehicle that was used
by the military, and we're going to talk about the
differences between UAVs and drones here in.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Just a moment.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
But it is weird to think that nowadays you can
go to stores in a mall, you can go to Amazon,
you can go wherever you shop, and you can buy
a pretty sophisticated flying drone, one that has camera equipment
integrated into the machine itself, or one that you can
attach a larger camera to if you go to Dji.

(03:33):
It's one of the biggest companies out there. They back
in the day they introduced this drone called the Phantom.
Remember the Phantom you could buy them meant to Barnes
and Noble, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Well in it changed, it
really did change the game in a lot of ways.
That particular drone, and there are several others in the
same classic.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Can you call those a quad copter?

Speaker 2 (03:53):
No? Sure? Yeah, yeah, yeah absolutely. But now like this
year twenty twenty, they've they've got the Mavick series that's
been updated and it's incredible if you're a professional actually
working in the film industry.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
Dude, that's all it takes. You can get these stunning
beauty shots with those things. It's mind boggling. The kind
of a smooth the way they're stabilized and all that stuff.
I mean, it's just amazing.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Oh technology, I'm thinking in particular. I know we're talking
about one brand here, and this is not an advertisement
for Dji or Digiti, but if you.

Speaker 3 (04:23):
Do want to send us a free, free dope camera drone,
we're here for it.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Movies, now, films, television, music videos, even even what do
they called the people who are really famous just for
being on social media influencers. Yeah, those folks, they will
use drones. It's just it's crazy.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
It's shots. You used to have to have a legit
helicopter to get, yes, like back in the day, you know,
like that's how you would get those overhead shots. Now
from maybe ten grand for like I mean that probably
more depending on the quality of the camera and stuff,
but you could get it probably really insanely high powered
camera drone for about ten thousand dollars and then the
prosumer they go down from there. I mean I could

(05:09):
go buy one for like a grand or even less.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, for two grand, you can get a top of
the line consumer drone that will get you amazing shots.
It might not blow up to four K really well,
but it will look incredible. And the reason why we're
talking about this is just because there are so many
more flying objects now right roaming around, and there are
FAA regulations that we're gonna talk about here about when

(05:33):
you can fly drones.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Aha, you can fly drones exactly.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
And it's very good that those regulations are there, but
they are just regulations. They don't stop anyone from flying
a drone at a different time that's not within those specifications,
or you know, flying at a height that's not within
those specifications. And that's that thing that we talk about
about how technology almost always outpaces legislation, and then legislation

(05:59):
is just let so and here's a deal. Like if
you're talking about the FAA, you're talking about on a
national level trying to regulate these things. Then if you
just go to a state level, or you know, even
a county level, the rules aren't necessarily going to change,
but it's it's difficult to enforce on that minute level

(06:19):
at the county level, let's say with a sheriff's department
or something. So basically, with all this stuff in the air,
with all these people with drones, some weird stuff is
going to happen. Oh yeah, some sightings are going to occur,
no doubt that are now going to be able to
you know, what was once a UFO may very well
be a drone now or a group of drones.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
I mean, speaking of groups of drones, I don't remember.
I think it was at the Olympics where there is
this crazy synchronized like platoon of a battalion of drones
that would like spell stuff out in the sky. I
think that was through intel. I can't remember, but it
was just insane the way they're mapped, and they you know,
they can all move and tandem and a grid almost

(07:02):
and create all these effects really quickly. We're going to
kind of get into a little bit of the history
of drones as a term and some differentiations between types
of drones. But this is such a kind of maybe
obvious for many of your listeners, but it didn't occur
to me until I looked it up. Drones are male honeybees, yes,
and that is where the term kind of came into use,

(07:23):
because male honeybee can you know, move up and down,
left and right. That's what a drone can do. It's
really important for getting those kind of shots or to
be able to just hover in place to you know,
get a vantage point and also be able to get
it while moving. But that's not necessarily the same. I mean,
the term drone is interchangeably kind of used when referring

(07:44):
to something called UAVs that are more like aircrafts, I believe,
small aircrafts that can deploy you know, payloads and precision
attacks on targets for the United States military. Yes, and the.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Big different here. Every UAV is a drone, but not
all drones are UAVs right, pretty similar exactly. So again,
the media and the military are likely to use the
word drone. The FAA uses the term UAV in general.
But here's the other weird thing. A drone can can

(08:23):
be a water vehicle, which is kind of cool you
can have And we talked about this as well. When
there's there's military testing, they create these drone submersibles that
are like a certain percentage size of an actual submarine,
got it, and they will test them out in that way.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Now, I want to see one that's like James Bond
style both air and sea at the same time. Is
that a thing?

Speaker 2 (08:49):
You know?

Speaker 3 (08:49):
It is? Is it?

Speaker 2 (08:50):
But nobody's you know, nobody's talking to talk about that.
Come on, you can't give away that kind of secret.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
That's true. They're sitting on that ip for a little
bit longer before we can buy one of those.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Well, yeah, then it's got the anti grav drive in
there and all this stuff from Groom Lake matth. You
know it is, it's there, it's real. So we're today,
We're just going to keep going down this drone train.
It's not a drone train. That would be cool too. Hole, yeah,
drone hole and we're going to talk about some mysterious
sightings of drones that have been occurring over the end

(09:21):
of twenty nineteen that are still occurring now in twenty twenty.
And we're just going to talk about the possibilities that
are within. But we do have to continue down this
track of given some more background information on drones, their usage,
and things like that.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
So, as we alluded to, drones have become a bit
of a nuisance, if not an outright hazard. Right, Like
any technology, drones have inherent pros and cons in some
of which we are not even fully aware of because
it's relatively new technology, at least in terms of the
sophistication of these devices that are now kind of everywhere. Right,

(09:59):
you see people lying in parks, you see people taking
them up to like canyon overlooks and like Los Angeles
or whatever. I mean, there's a lot of them around,
which can lead to some sticky situations. Drones can potentially
potentially make make things safer. This is a pro list,
not just for pilots but for people on the ground
as well. They can give you advance warning if there's

(10:22):
you know, trouble afoot up ahead. In both military and
civilian applications. They are, like we said, affordable, and they're
only going to keep going down in price and up
and sophistication. That's just how it works. When you have
an economy of scale like this, the tech expertise required
can kind of help, you know, launch new careers. It's

(10:42):
it's it's a good skill to have.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
It's certainly an industry that is that is growing here. Well,
here's the other deal. We've been using as humans drones
for a lot of different applications. As we kind of
mentioned there. Right now, in Wuhan and other places in China,
drones are being used not only to observe areas just
to see where where people are and to see where

(11:06):
congestion is occurring, and they're also being used weirdly enough
to enforce the rules that are in place right now
because of the coronavirus and.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
The i don't know what you call it, the.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
The harsh control that's being put on the people of
Wuhan and surrounding areas, trying to control when people are
out and curfews and everything. They're using drones to go
around and essentially verbally accost people who are not following
the strict rules. So there's a video you can watch
online right now of an elderly woman walking around at
a certain time, I guess after a curfew, and it's

(11:43):
just saying hey, hey, get go back, go back indoors,
but just someone speaking through the drone.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
I mean, it's certainly almost become a cliche and like
you know, black mirror type scenarios where you know, things
like drones or AI you know, autonomous kind of robots.
I guess for lack of I guess that's what they are.
There's that kind of tipping point where that technology that
once seems so cool and kind of like quirky and

(12:13):
just like oh it's neat, it's neat, fun, it's new toy.
It sort of takes on a more of a sinister
role as the technology gets more and more accessible and
more and more sophisticated, and and like we said, they
have a lot of untapped potential. There is there are
there is an upside to this technology. It's not all dystopian.

(12:33):
But you know, like you said, what about people that
are lost in difficult to reach areas. You know, you
could scout them out in advance with these drones in
the same way you might send a probe to Mars
or something, you know, and exploration, installing telecom for example,
weather monitoring and all that. But but we get to

(12:54):
the cons and you know, that's really where the rubber
meets the road.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
And I can't remember if we mentioned this in this
episode yet, but drones of varying types can either be
autonomous to an extent or very likely, as most drones are,
they are controlled by someone with essentially a laptop and
a controller, and someone is viewing the camera that's attached

(13:22):
aboard and they're manipulating the drone with their controller and
they're just getting a readout of what the drone is
doing where it is. Generally that's how they function and
when you think about that, when an end user is
looking at what the drone is looking at, you kind
of get to start seeing the picture of why and
how this tech could be easily abused.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
I mean, there's also there's a really interesting and I
think very valid sort of a satire of this and
one of my favorite British British comedies Toast of London,
where Stephen Toasts, the main character played by Matt Barry,
is the woman he's having affair with he's making a
little extra money on the side piloting drones for the

(14:05):
US military. And he comes in. He's like, oh, what
are you doing? And she's just on a laptop and
it's like she's playing a video game, and he's like,
can I Can I do it for a minute? She goes, yes,
make sure you blow up the houses on the left
side of the street. And then she leaves and he's
just like going to town blowing up houses. And she
gets back it goes she goes, oh, did I say
the left side of the street?

Speaker 2 (14:25):
I meant the right side.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
Oh lord, But that's you know, to your point, Right,
there's this disconnect where when you're not actually you know,
it's just a push of a button. You know, not
only can mistakes be made, there is that lack of
humanity when you're at such a remove from what you're
actually doing with this stuff, right exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
And because anyone can have access to one of these things,
depending on the legal education of that individual, you also
get into problems. We have a quote here that we're
going to read from Vitana. This is the legal problem
with drones. Because drones are such a new technology, there's

(15:05):
a patchwork of laws which govern their use. Some people
may be able to use drones anywhere as long as
they do not interfere with other aircraft. Others may not
be allowed to launch their drone unless it's on their
personal property. That creates great areas of legality where someone
may find themselves in violation of a law that they
knew nothing about. And that's a problem. If you don't

(15:26):
know the laws that are governing the activity that you're
partaking in, you're likely going to break one. And again,
you're talking about airspace above public and private areas almost
always when you're talking about a drone. There are so
many There are so many drone operators out there, both

(15:46):
amateur and professional, that know exactly what they need to do,
what rules they need to follow, what laws exist under
the FAA, and they fly their drones responsibly and carefully.
That I would say that is the vast majority of
drone operators in the world right now, outside of militaries.
And I'm not saying they don't do that. I'm just
saying the consumer level, the prosumer level people. But that

(16:11):
doesn't affect the reputation that both drone operators and the
drones themselves have have gotten over the course of the
last several years.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Yeah, I mean, like I said, they're regarded as kind
of a public nuisance, and I would tend to agree.
You know, it's sort of like an extreme version of
like kite flying or something. You know, I see like
if there's two you know, but it's like it's dangerous.
You know, they can like if someone really screws up,

(16:40):
it could like this, it could hit somebody. You know,
there's different ways that it could interfere with people's lives
and and and and make you feel unsafe.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
You know.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Again, they're not like massive, They're not going to kill
you or anything, but it's I don't want a plastic
thing falling on my head from the sky.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
My potential damage can occur absolutely, let's say that.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
Yeahlet in a lot of different ways. So, yeah, they've
got this terrible public reputation. For decades, science fiction's kind
of taught the public the potential terrifying consequences of unregulated
drone tech. Militaries have also already used drones to execute
human targets. As we know, UAV kills continue to be
controversial in the US. I mean, we've got one that

(17:21):
just took place with Sulimani, you know, and whether or
not that was even legal to carry that out. You know, again,
with that push of a button, you can execute these
precision strikes on very specific targets without having to put
a single human being on the ground.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, but how specific is it? What's the collateral damage
of an explosive launch? You know, there are so many things,
And how how did you how exactly did you identify
that target? And are you absolutely certain that that target
is the one that you aimed at?

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Oh? No, absolutely, But I don't think I don't think
we're calling into question that it's probably more precision than
maybe dropping a massive bomb or like mortar rounds on
a village or something like that.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Well, yeah, sure, but if it's let's say, your target
is in a facility where there are not only the
quote unquote bad guys hanging out in there and your
bad guy target hanging out in there, but there's also staff, like,
oh for sure, civilian staff and civilian families.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Perhaps, I know, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
It's a tough thing to it's a tough thing to
think about and then try and make some kind of
legislation or rules or to create morals around it.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, it's sort of like the Venn diagram of like,
you know, at what point is this an acceptable number
of civilian catch? Somebody's got that calculation, you know what
I mean, somebody has made it, or I guess it's
maybe exclusively at the judgment of the president himself or
the person who's executing the strike.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
Well, we talked about it before, or one of the
solutions was to categorize any mail of fighting age that
is defined as a possible enemy combatant that is operating
or hanging out within an area where a target is operating.
It's really wonderfully messed up.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
Did you know that? It's actually I don't know if
illegal is the right term, but we don't use the
word assassination. We don't assassinate.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, why would you assassinate anyone?

Speaker 3 (19:28):
That's what I'm saying. Like it was like legislated like that.
That's we don't use that word anymore. That's like a
bad word. And I forget the exact I think I
think you say precision strike or something along those lines.
When Trump made the speech, you know, his kind of
victory lap speech or whatever, he was talking about doubling
down on how killing Subamani was the exact right thing
to do, and he referred to it as a flawlessly

(19:48):
executed precision strike. And there was a piece on NPR
about how we don't talk, we don't say we assassinated somebody.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Yeah, I mean we talked about this before, but President
and Obama really really into town with the drones, decision
strikes and no question about and honestly that that's a
big part of what people remember about him as his
presidency is that he was he.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Was real lucy goosey with those with those drones.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
It has less to do with the standing president and
more to do with the technology agreed and the calculations. Okay,
so just really quickly, we talked about how drones are
prone to accidents. We talked about, you know, human error
always comes in or not always comes into it. Because
some of them are autonomous. Sometimes it's technical error. But

(20:36):
you know, if you actually have a controller and you're
flying one, you could crash. One of these things. Drones
do sometimes interfere with nature. Some of these drones that
are submersible are having effects on marine life. If you
imagine just the frequencies that are generated when you've got
those propellers going for let's say, a quad copter or something.

(20:57):
If you're out in nature, we're you know, we're right
now studying scientists are studying what kinds of effects that
has on animal life as well as you know, if
you think about wind energy farms that have the giant turbans,
that it is also generating frequencies and it seems to
be having an effect on wildlife. We've talked about that before,
So there's a lot to think about here. So look,

(21:21):
before we really get in to the rest of this,
we're gonna we need to take a quick word from
our sponsor. While we're doing that, look around, like, are
you walking outside? Are you like, what are you doing?
Are you driving? Just take a quick peek, see do
you see any drones flying around? You see any flashing lights?
Is it nighttime? You see anything? Let us know. But

(21:42):
for now, we're gonna take a quick word from our sponsor.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
And we're back. So here's the other thing, the quite
spooky thing. No one really knows what they're doing. More
and more people are going to spot drones up in there,
up there on the sky. Did you did you spot any?
You probably did? I would I would. I would hazard
a guess.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
I certainly have on many occasions.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
There's a little tiny one floating around in here right
now above our heads. It's it's a silent drone. Oh lord,
silent but deadly drone. But yeah, I don't know what
it's doing. It's just making me, you know, feel things.
But no one knows. Many people do not know what
drones are up to the ones you can see, the
ones you can't see. You know, there's a lot of

(22:33):
nefarious things that even you know, consumer grade drones can do.
You could use them to spy on people, for example,
to invade people's privacy. There is a lot of kind
of unknown quantities in this whole drone equation, and there's
no accountability, right, that's the issue.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Well, yeah, it's difficult to find accountability somehow when you
have an individual operator somewhere in a county somewhere with
the contiguous United States, especially.

Speaker 3 (23:02):
Remember in a Parks and rec when it gets into
the future and they've got Grizzle or whatever the kind
of it's like a Facebook type company and they have
drones that deliver gifts to people based on their Grizzle profiles.
And Ron Swanson just loses his mind because it delivers
a present for his his very young son, who has

(23:24):
no social media profile. Right, so what does he do.
He starts shooting him out of the sky. That's gonna
I'm telling you, man, that's gonna become a thing. You're
gonna have these like get off my lawn, you know
types that are out there literally shooting drones out of
the sky. Well sure, and you know.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
If it's on your property and you have a gun,
and you're in a you're in a state that allows
for guns, have that, what do you legally, what are
you gonna do?

Speaker 3 (23:47):
At the very least, it's it's good, it's good target practice.
But that's right, there's just no accountability. Mystery drones. Yeah,
this is a thing around the world and right here
in the United States.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Oh yeah, And today we're talking about a couple of
specific let's call them groups of sightings, certain areas in
the United States where there are a lot of drone
sightings occurring that appear strange and not only to the
initial reporters and the you know, people actually having these sightings,

(24:22):
but to authorities. So we're gonna jump to December twenty nineteen,
last year, the Denver Post and ABC News and NBC News,
the local affiliates there. They all began reporting about these
strange patterns of drones that are being seen and spotted
around northeast Colorado. And we'll see a little later. It

(24:45):
wasn't just in northeast Colorado. So let's just talk about
what exactly the sidings were. Around seven o'clock at night
in northeastern Colorado round, you know, fifteen seventeen drone allegedly
very large ones came from somewhere, flew over this area,

(25:07):
and they appeared to be searching for something. That's kind
of applying meaning to the flight patterns, right, but they
appeared to be in some kind of search pattern, and
they would They ended up disappearing around nine point thirty
ten o'clock that night, so let's say roughly two and
a half hours, three hours of flight time. Reports were

(25:28):
coming from multiple sources. It wasn't just you know, somebody
playing a prank saying, Hey, I'm seeing lights in the sky.
What the heck was that? It was, Hey, there are drones,
and there are a bunch of them, and they're flying
in this weird pattern.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
Here.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Here's the thing. So the Denver Post then quoted Thomas Elliott.
He's the sheriff of a local county, Phillips County there,
and he describes the drone activity in pretty pretty good detail.
The FAA was contacted by Thomas Elliott, the the shaf
there in Phillips County, who said they don't know what
it is. They least they can't confirm anything at this point.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
In The Air Force chime in too, and they didn't know.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, they said, this is not our fleet of drones
that's operating right now. And then even even Force com
f O R s co O M, the Force co
Force Colm, the United States Army Forces Command, they said, hey,
this is also not us guys. So the big question

(26:29):
is what was occurring in Colorado, northeastern Colorado in December
of twenty nineteen. What were those drones? That's really our
big question for today. But it's not just this sighting in.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
This area where it gets crazy is here. Okay, I'd
like it.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
I like the spin on it.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
I just I can't. You can't. You can't do it
any better than mister bullets. You got to give it
its own, its own flavor. I love it, all right.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
So so that that is occurring right now, I'm gonna
jump to this other You're just gonna have to bear
with me.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
Noel, I'm with you.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
They jump to this other story. Here about one of
the first sightings it was on. This one was on
December seventeenth of twenty nineteen. In this one, there's a
sheriff named Tom Nestor. He's in Lincoln County. He said
there have been two confirmed reports of drone sidings in
his county over open areas such as ranches, and they

(27:27):
were first noticed on December seventeenth. This is called Mystery
Drones flying over Northeastern Colorado from ABC News. You can
find it if you'd like to. And here's the thing.
Residents in these areas they have no idea what's going on.
They don't understand why the drones are being operated at night.
And the sheriff there is worried about the local airport,

(27:50):
you know, a small airport that's they have emergency helicopter
flights that are going on sometimes at night, depending on
if there's an emergency or a police operation or something
like that. And again the FAA said that you know,
this area is pretty isolated in rural and it's not
really a controlled traffic space, air traffic space, so they're

(28:10):
not that worried about other aircraft running into these drones
or any kind of major things like this. Just to
say like it wasn't a single county that we were
talking about with a Denver Post. It is multiple counties
in northeastern Colorado that are looking into this, and it's
not just those two counties either.

Speaker 3 (28:25):
So let's get into some of these reports. Sergeant Vince
Lovanella Lovanella of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department, he recalled
the moment he began getting multiple drone reports on the
evening of December thirtieth, and he referred to multiple residents
calling in saying that they were seeing all these drones.

(28:49):
They didn't know where they were coming from. They were
hovering above their houses, hovering above their farms. You'd be
hearing reports ranging from four drones to ten drones in
single area at any given time. And then he was
getting reports that some of them were low flying and
were at least six feet long. Now that's like a UAV, right,

(29:12):
I mean that's quite large.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
It's close.

Speaker 3 (29:15):
Yeah, it's closer to a UAV.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
A six foot drone is pretty dang big.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
Seriously, so Lovanella, he you know, made a note that
the drones were so high they couldn't actually be heard,
but they had white and red flashing lights that were
seen when they would fly over areas at a high speed.
Then they were seen slowing down to that sustained kind

(29:41):
of hovering thing that they do, and they would do
that for quite a while, which is eerie.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
And the sergeant they're at the Morgan County Sheriff's Department again,
this is the third sheriff's department for the third county
that we're discussing here. He said, several deputies were attempting
to follow the flight path of these drones, like where
are they going? Where are they coming from? And they're
just in their patrol cars, you know, trying to watch
where they're headed, and the sergeant said they were unable

(30:08):
to determine exactly where they were going. The sergeant there, Lovinella,
estimated there could have been up to thirty drones moving
in concert at a single time. That's a ton and
it's certainly odd, especially flying at night because guess what, guys,
drones are not supposed to be flying at night. According

(30:30):
to the FAA regulations. It's thirty minutes before dawn when
you can fly a drone, and thirty minutes after dusk,
like after the sun goes down.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
What do you think, what's the rationale behind that?

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Do you think just flying drones at night it just
causes a safety hazard. I think for any other aircraft
that makes sense. And I'm assuming there's may be some
privacy stuff going on there, but I don't know. I
just know that makes sense officially. To protect others, you
don't fly them at night. And these are death definitely
flying at night. And that danger was illustrated when a

(31:04):
medical helicopter had an extremely close call with an unidentified
drone in that northeastern Colorado area on January eighth of
this year, twenty twenty.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
So on that day you have seventy local, federal, state,
and military officials jumping into action, getting down there to
the rural town of Brush, Colorado to assemble a joint
task force of between ten and fifteen different government agencies
to come together to solve this mystery. I mean, that's

(31:37):
a pretty serious hustle there. The sheriff of Morgan County,
a guy named David Morgan. Interesting probably a coincidence. He
told ABC that he and his colleagues were really concerned
that people might try to shoot the drones down just
what we were talking exactly, an injure themselves or others
in the process. By the way, UAVs are considered aircraft

(32:00):
by the FAA, and shooting down an aircraft is a
federal crime, carrying a possible twenty year sentence. So don't
shoot down drums.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
But again, then you get in the that's the sticky proper, dude.
It be a crazy court case. It reminds me of
the cannabis legislation of you know, states versus federal.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
It's also I mean, at what point is a drone
considered an aircraft? Is it about size? Is there any
distinction between like the little twenty dollars one I buy
from best Buy and like a six foot long one
like we're talking about here. I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
I don't know the federal the exact federal law, like
the letter of the law.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
I'd be intrigued. It'd be kind of I mean, I'm
sure you probably not a good idea to shoot anything
out of the sky, but you know still, I mean
I'm interested. So By the time the task force was assembled.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
They're like, all right, we got everybody here, everybody's ready
to go. We're gonna figure out.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
All this mystery. We got the gang together, we got Scooby,
we Velma, we got really, who's the other one? Shaggy?

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Shaggy is the best though, you like Shaggy, who's.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
The other one with the ascot who was kind of
a turd. He never was very helpful. He was kind
of the good looking one. Fred Yeah, that was it.
Fred Yeah, Freddie.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
Oh boy, Scoob Sorry, that's all I got.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
That's good. That was good. And then and then his
girlfriend was was a Veronica. Doesn't matter. We're not talking
about Scooby Doo. We're talking about an elite government task
force as symbol for the purposes of getting down. It
was about the mystery, That's what it was about. It's
getting in the heart of this mystery. But lo and behold,
as soon as this uh creme de la creme, you know,
a converge on this town, everything kind of dries up,

(33:43):
the trail goes cold. No more reports.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Well they started tapering off the official reports, right, but
mystery drones started appearing all over other places. Like Nebraska
and the local NBC affiliate out there, Channel six News.
Let's see, they're in near Omaha, Nebraska. They started talking
about and reporting a bunch of these mystery drone sidings

(34:09):
at night over farmland. And that was happening in January
seme kind of the same time January seventh, it continued
to happen, just these weird drone clusters flying in a
formation over farmland. Nobody knows what they're doing or where
they're going. It's just odd. It's just stinking odd. And

(34:32):
this task force got together, but they just really couldn't
make anything happen because they had moved on, I guess,
or at least they weren't being reported as much by
the citizens there in northeastern Colorado.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
So it's no surprise that, like you know, people are
prone to do, people started to talk, you know, Yeah,
the rumor mill started going, social media going ham well, seriously,
social media began fueling this thing just worked up into
a froth. So let's walk through some of the possibilities

(35:06):
some of the things that folks were conjecturing might have
been at play. Here, what's most likely and of course
what's the least likely, But First, let's take a quick
break and we're back. So first and foremost, foremost, but first, definitely, first,

(35:29):
let's just address the elephant in the room, the big
green or gray elephant in the room, like UFOs, you
mean that's those are the ones.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
These unidentified flying objects that most people have said, Oh wait, no,
they're drones.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, yeah, that one. So what if extraterrestrials are a
real be here right now amongst us and see using
what appeared to be UAVs to surveil are our planet.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Matt uh Okay, So, the NBC affiliate as well as
the ABC affiliate in uh well, the the NBC affiliate
in Nebraska and the ABC affiliate in Colorado, both teams
sent out reporters at night to try and get footage
of these drones. And both of those teams were able

(36:21):
to go to areas where sightings had occurred in both
Nebraska and near Omha, Nebraska and in Colorado northeast of Colorado,
and they were able to see and get footage the
TV footage of these drones. Most of them were like
a single drone that was flying around at night, or
maybe two maximum flying around but and here's the deal.

(36:41):
They could hear the I believe the Omaha teams at
NBC could hear both propellers on one and then they
saw another one that sounded like an aircraft, like a
like a plane, small planes. So I'm sorry, really quick
clarification for me. Can the UAVs not hover? You say
they're like small aircraft? Does that mean they have to

(37:01):
constantly be moving or can they hover stationary in the
same way that a drune can. A lot of UAVs,
at least the ones that are known about that have
been operating in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, are more
plane like. They take off and they land and they
fly through the air, and when they fire a precision strike,
the weapon is the thing the like missile itself is

(37:24):
the thing that's being guided by I'm trying. I'm saying
this with a lot of authority, but my understanding is
that systems on the UAV itself and the missile are
working in concerts to make.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
The precision and it's an important distinction. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
Absolutely, But so we're talking about aliens here. The question
is let's let's say the question is would extraterrestrials if
they were to visit planet Earth. Would they just come
down as you know, their bodily form whatever that is,
in a suit or maybe even in an aircraft of

(37:59):
some sort, or would they send some kind of autonomous
drones or even remote control drones to surveil the Earth
before they come down. My answer would be, well, again
from my understanding and maybe just sci fi tropes, you
would definitely send autonomous things that you can replicate again

(38:19):
if one of those is to be destroyed, and you
wouldn't endanger any member of a species or any important
you know being.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yeah, on the surface, it seems like a very humanitarian
effort kind of well, it's got that component to it.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
Well, even if the even if the drone is armed
and has defensive capabilities. All I'm saying is you wouldn't
risk God, this is me putting a bunch of my
human like ideas onto this, but in my mind, you
wouldn't risk sending an actual being down. You would just

(38:56):
send an autonomous thing.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
Totally. It's gonna check it out. That's that's what I mean.
I mean, I think drones obviously have a bad rap
for many reasons, but they do they do accomplish some
humanitarian thing in that they save the lives of pilots
that might go down with their planes or that might
risk their lives for this mission. So it does cut
down on the human cost of this kind of stuff.

(39:20):
Obviously not for the quote unquote bad guys or whatever,
but on our end or on whoever is wielding the drones,
that as a positive, a net positive. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
So here is why I think a lot of people,
once this hit social media began associating aliens with it.
And I think this is just my opinion that it's
being connected to stories of cattle mutilations.

Speaker 3 (39:44):
Are aliens only hanging out in farm country.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Because a lot of that occurs over farms and ranches,
and so a lot of this activity also occurred over
large swaths of land that are used for farming and
sometimes ranching. So I think that's kind of being connected
as the well, maybe these drones or what we think
our drones are actually the alien spacecraft and they're also
doing this other stuff, this weird stuff out there on

(40:06):
the farmland. That's just my opinion again, because it seems
very implausible that the sightings that are occurring have anything
to do with extraterrestrials. But in my mind, you got
to leave it open for possibility until you can conclusively.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
Prove what it is. I mean, the Internet's gonna do it.
The Internet's going to do So we move on to
maybe in order of plausibility. I guess we've got secret
military practice. We certainly know and can attribute many quote
unquote UFO sidings to people catching a glimpse of classified
tests of secret military tech. Sure, right, that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Sure you know some of the sidings do put the
drones or estimate the drones to be about six feet
let's say in I don't know in diameter, possibly a
larger model that we're unaware of commercially, or there are
some models that are pretty dang large and could fit

(41:09):
the bill there. But size of the drones aside. It
feels unlikely that the military would be operating and conducting
tests over private farmland. Generally, when you're thinking about that
kind of thing, you think about Groom Lake and other
facilities like that. They have huge areas of open land
that they can fly things over. Why would you not

(41:30):
do testing?

Speaker 3 (41:31):
It would be super risky.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
Yeah, there are air bases, there are huge areas of
land and sea that are controlled by the United States
military that you could do that kind of testing over.
And it doesn't make sense to me why they would
do it over private land. But again, I don't know,
it isn't This one is, let's just say, far more

(41:54):
likely though, than the extraterrestrial angle.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
Right, really, Matt, really quickly, What's what. I'm so shocked
that these consumer drones the battery life on them is garbage. Yeah,
like five minutes, six minutes on some of these. I'm
looking at one that's five hundred bucks and the battery
life flight time is six minutes.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, but you know, spend fifteen hundred more dollars and
it goes up pretty heavily.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
Man.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
You can get extra Can you get extra batteries on
some of them?

Speaker 3 (42:27):
I don't know. You could bring it back and flip
it out, but that's not the heat on there. I
was just surprised because I bought like a pretty cheap
drone and I thought the battery life was insanely low.
But now I'm looking at even some of the expensive
ones are quite low as well.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
Well.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yeah, and that is a thing to bring up here.
These drones were allegedly operating for two and a half
three hour long time.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
I mean, those are clearly high as hot high. I'm
looking online right now, I'm like, where can I get
a UAV for sale? You can't, you just can't.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
You know.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
The best one we could get would be, like, you know,
a couple grand, maybe ten grand or something like that
for a really crazy fancy cinema type one for UAV. Well, no,
a drum can't. You can't get a you can't. That's
not even a thing. There's nowhere a guy like you
or me could get our hands on one that we
have to find some sort of a black market, you know,
weapons dealer or something like that. So, yes, to your point,

(43:16):
the flight time really does add to the whole military
component for sure.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
But it all depends on the model and whether or
not it's something that is available to, like you said,
consumers are prosumers. Okay, So here's the other thing. Could
this be not just a military practice of some sort,
but an operation like let's say they're going out and
trying to observe something on the ground over these areas

(43:44):
of farmland that is not necessarily observable by the human eye,
and that's why they're operating at night. Maybe they're using
infrared sensors or something.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Maybe they are.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
Tracking with some other sensor that we're not thinking about,
maybe radiation.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
That sounds that's a little.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Implausible, but it's again something that would be unseeable that
you could track with a machine's such as this with
certain sensors.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
Absolutely, I mean, there's you know, there's no question that
something along those lines is going on.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Well here's and here's the other thing. What if it
is some kind of let's say, grow operation.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
Mmmm, that's a new one.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Now we're talking about Colorado.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
Like this is to monitor their crops and make sure
no one's like making sure the cops aren't trying to
snatch their crops.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
Or looking for crops.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Perhaps, I see, I see, that makes more sense.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Or but what if it is internal what if it
is a grow operation that is, you know, trying to
keep tabs on their stuff, trying to make sure they're good.
Maybe it's a secret where the stuff is actually being
grown for some reason. That is intriguing, especially when you're
talking about Nebraska, because you know, in Colorado, what's the
state of marijuana. Cannabis in Colorado legal? Okay, So what

(45:08):
about Nebraska.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
No, not something.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Okay, So the drones have been seen in Nebraska and Colorado,
and I'm wondering, and this is complete speculation on my
part that there may be some kind of weird thing
going on between something being grown in Nebraska and taken

(45:32):
over into Colorado to be sold. That's complete speculation. If
you are doing that and are part of this, I
don't care personally, don't reach out. But that's just my
that's my theory.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
Can reach out to me if you want. I just cad.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
But but could it be Uncle Sam doing something illegal
like that they want to keep away. Maybe they're maybe
they're hunting for something that's on the ground somewhere, maybe
some kind of foreign intelligence sensors that exist out in
the middle of farmland.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
Why would you.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Have foreign intelligence sensors in the middle of farmland somewhere?

Speaker 3 (46:10):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Maybe because it has something to do with strategically placed
missile silos that are across the United States. Okay, in farmlands.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Okay, is this are you? Is this? Are you speculating
about this? Are you speculating again?

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Inside speculating again?

Speaker 3 (46:26):
With these secret missile silos.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
I'm trying to give examples of why, like why in
the heck would some unknown military group be coming farmland
in Nebraska and Colorado.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
It's a good question. What if there's you know, let's
let's go step further unacknowledged research by some other government agencies,
like the United States Geological Survey, for example, using drones
to conduct routine So this is like the innocuous version
of this problem that you're describing, right, Yes, just you know,
to do geologic survey, we activities.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
We do have to point out there are agricultural uses
for drones in places like Nebraska and Colorado. And I'm
I'm I'm just gonna put this out there. There are
reasons where you would want to have drones flying over
farmland to check out crops, especially when you're in certain

(47:19):
times of the season.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yeah, So if you go to the University of Nebraska
Lincoln or Lincoln, Nebraska, they've got a thing called Crop
Watch at the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
That's a mouthful, Yeah, the.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources crop Watch. So they
use they use drones for a variety of reasons for
working nitrogen or you know, managing the nitrogen that goes
into a certain crop, let's say for corn, especially checking
out something called stand assessment when you're looking at a crop,

(47:57):
like checking out weeds or scouting for weeds. That way,
you don't have to actually drive out there and look out.
Let's say you've got a huge swath of land that's
just farmland that's got corn all over it or wheat
all over it, and you want to assess what's going
on with the weeds out there, you can send a
drone and check it out. It's really interesting. There's all

(48:19):
kinds of uses that are being developed for drone technology
within agriculture and farming, and it is a real thing.
So when you're talking about seeing a bunch of drones
on farmland, right, maybe it's just being used for that. Again,
it gets back to why fly at night though, And
if you're using infrared technology, maybe it's for hunting pests

(48:41):
or for identifying pests that are out like nocturnal that
are out at night, which is another possibility here, but
who really knows. And outside of just agriculture, there are
other reasons that you could be like checking out like
essentially for mapping, right sure.

Speaker 3 (48:58):
Oh yeah, so there's the geological survey STUF. There's think
about I mean, think, come on, think about the way
Google uses cars to go around and like take three
hundred and sixty degree photos of cities, you know, for
Google street View and stuff. How cool would it be
to be able to do that aerially, you know, with
with drones that can take the same kind of either
VR type camera that would be hanging from the bottom
of one of those that can record literally an entire

(49:20):
sphere at super high resolution. You could use that for
really in depth mapping. I mean, I can't imagine why
if it's not already being done. It's certainly not being
done by the military in secret, you know.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Well yeah, I mean the satellite imagery that consumers in
the public are not privy too, that exists out there.
That's pretty satellite imagery.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
You don't think you could go even further, get even better, Like.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
With I absolutely thinking if you're taking four K six
K photography over the land, the question is why farmland
that's just got wheat or true? Well in the other
the argument there is that it's far enough away from
roads where you can't just have a Google car drive
by and get you great images.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
But you know, but Google tends to be pretty transparent
about that kind of stuff. And again, you wouldn't do
it at night, because that's not gonna make a good image,
you know.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yes, if it was a big company like Google or
something like that, they would most certainly alert the FAA
and local regional authorities that was going down, if not
just the private landowners, right, I mean, well, I don't know.
Would Google alert the private landowners.

Speaker 3 (50:27):
They're supposed to not be evil, so I would hope
they would at least give them a little call.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
They don't. They don't let me know when the Google.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
Car drives by my house.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Oh, now looks terrible at Google.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
That's a good question. I've always wondered that this is
a whole nother discussion. But isn't it kind of invasion?
I mean, I guess whatever you can see from a
public place is in the public domain. You can take
a picture of the front of my house and it
be on zillo or whatever. I did not have to
give you permission to take that picture, It's true. Yeah,
m your lawn usually does it?

Speaker 2 (50:59):
Okay, Okay, if I take pictures of the front of
your house, like just.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
At night, I would have not I would expect nothing less. Okay, cool,
you creep.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
Glad to get that retroactive.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
Yeah you have, you have full cart blanche creep privileges
on my abode. No, but then you so there you go. Right,
So okay, so let's let's let's just cross some things
off the list. Right, Aliens pretty easily dismissed by far
the least likely possibility. Now, I'm not scoffing anyone the
believes in aliens. There's been in this scenario. You know,

(51:31):
it's again that rumor mill that kind of tends to
get the Internet going nuts with stuff like this. That's
always like kind of a low hanging fruit for a
certain type of enthusiast. Let's say, right, if there was
anything weird going on in the sky, something that could
not be explained, then the proliferation of surveillance technology would
make that pretty quickly apparent. I would say, if these

(51:55):
devices originated from outside of our hemisphere or something, right, yeah, yeah,
that would.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
Get flagged most certainly. And if the military was doing
some kind of operation out there on private land, they
would admit it, at least in a broad term. They say, hey,
we've got there is something occurring, right, now and we
are operating in this area, but there's nothing to see here.
Don't worry about it. We're going to move elsewhere for

(52:24):
further testing or something like that. I mean, they they
admit the X thirty seven B that we keep talking
about on the show over and over and over, which
is a drone. It's an unmanned space drone. It really
does creep me out. Again, this is something that we
very much enjoy talking about, and we monitor what X
thirty seven B and the rest of the amazing mini

(52:47):
space shuttles are doing out there that are just kind
of doing their own thing. Ben in particular is a
huge fan of the X thirty seven B.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Just so everybody's aware of that.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
But we do know that United States has conducted secret
operations where they test things on small populations within the
United States, specifically with chemicals and other things like that.
So maybe you could imagine that these drones are spraying
some kind of chemical. Speaking of that, by the way,
what if they are crop dusting?

Speaker 3 (53:20):
Okay, all right, so a kind of a high higher
tech version of the old planes that would that would
fly over like in north By Northwest.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Yeah, yeah, putting pesticides on a crop or you know,
treating with certain herbicides to kill the weeds. If they're
using some kind of you know, large GMO seed or
something like that, that is very much a possibility. The
weird thing is the landowners weren't aware in some cases. Okay,

(53:50):
so there's more to this. By the way, we didn't
even talk about just amateur operators of drone enthusiasts that
are just doing night flights, which is a possibility.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
I don't think. So that doesn't add up with the
with the length of time these things were hovering in
the air, the length of the actual.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
It seems, and it is a swarm of them or
you know, multiple drones at one time. Yeah, I guess
that doesn't really match up. But it is a possibility,
and it's more likely than extraterrestrials I would say, I
would tend to but you know, we just have to
keep that in there. So let's talk about as we're
kind of wrapping up here, let's talk about the social

(54:30):
media impact and really the fear that was generated and
concern after this started being reported in the media.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
So what if the folks in these Colorado counties started
reacting to the initial reports and these reports influenced the
way they interpreted stuff they saw, like the better Meinhoff
syndrome or complex or whatever, where you have something on
top of mind, you start to see it everywhere, a
song in your head, a word, whatever. This is like

(54:58):
an extreme example of that. Because again with all of
the you know, kind of alarmists alarmism surrounding the proliferation
of drones for all those reasons we listened to the
top of the show, there's a reason people would not
be trustful of them and tend to, you know, go
down those mental rabbit holes when they see it and
think that they're seeing them everywhere and they're after me,
you know, they're watching me. Right, it's like almost a

(55:21):
form of mass hysteria kind of right in a way, potentially.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
So.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
For example, Colorado officials had received ninety reports of drone
activity between November twenty third and January twenty third, and
of those, fourteen are be confirmed to be hobbyist drones.
Of twenty three drone reports since jan sixth thirteen were
determined to be quote planets, stars or small hobbyist drones.

(55:49):
Those are all very different things.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Yeah, because not all of these sightings are created equally
they you know, the site or the distance at which
the drones are sighted or the alleged drones are cited
is very, very different. And again, some can be heard,
some cannot, some are just flashing lights, and some are
much higher than others. And by the way of those,

(56:13):
let's see thirteen since January sixth six were ruled out
as atmospheric conditions or commercial aircraft.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
What do you mean conditions?

Speaker 2 (56:22):
Atmospheric conditions you know, swamp gas. No, just kidding, but
just some kind of other atmospheric conditions.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
A sort of visual disturbance, some sort of like honestly,
I'm not exactly sure what they are referring to there, but.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Just they were ruled out by the authorities.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
I got it, I got it. That's a weird one.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
But there were four that could not be identified by
the local law enforcement, which is something, right.

Speaker 3 (56:50):
So at that point don't they officially become UFOs they
can't identified?

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Well, well, here's the deal. Imagine you're reading the first
report that came out in December. Okay, let's say it's
the evening. Let's say you walk outside. You live kind
of near a farm or a bunch of other farms,
and you're just looking around in the sky and then
you see something that you don't normally see or you
don't normally notice because now you're looking for it, and

(57:17):
it's just an airplane, but to your mind, you're primed
to be seeing something that's you know, has to do
with this article, the information you've just processed, Absolutely that
could be exactly what's happening. And then you know more
and more people, all of these other reports get generated,
and because everybody's looking for it now, it's certainly a possibility. Essentially,

(57:39):
what I'm saying is false reports. But here's another thing.
What if there were no drones ever? What if the
drones never existed? And this is where.

Speaker 3 (57:51):
We go to Vice, right. Vice did some reporting that
argued that the drones never in fact existed. Instead, the
drones were, according to their arguments, simply misidentified, despite what
was reported as an organized grid search pattern, regular schedule
and all of that. So what does that mean? Is

(58:12):
this a cover up? Are there some possible like nefarious
ulterior motives at play here? What's going on? Possibly?

Speaker 2 (58:20):
Let's get into this other thing here, which is one
of the most popular theories that you may have read
online or seen in somebody's feed somewhere. So among let's
call them drone enthusiasts, people who who like to operate drones,
is that the timing of this whole thing the end
of twenty nineteen early twenty twenty is pretty coincidental with

(58:42):
this recently proposed FAA rule that is going to or
will would could require drones to be identified remotely using
a unique identifier and GPS coordinates that get sent via
cell signal to a central database. And a lot of
enthusiasts worry that this is going to wreak havoc on

(59:03):
their ability to just go and operate their drone when
they feel like it where they feel like it, in
a place that they're already following the rules to be safe.
But then this is just going to add another layer
of bureaucracy, basically, And these hobbyists who are against this
FAA rule think that this whole mystery drone citing thing
over my property and all of that is a way

(59:24):
to drum up support for this new rule that would
at least allow the FAA to keep tabs on every drone.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
That's flying in the skies.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
I am interested in what you think about this new
proposed FAA rule about knowing where all the drones are
at any time when they're being operated right into us
call us. Let us know what you think about that,
especially if you're a drone operator. I really want to
know what you think about all of that. Now, as

(59:54):
we're getting to the very end here, I just want
to bring up that I actually personally only called the
WOWT news desk. This is the NBC affiliate in Omaha, Nebraska,
and they did a lot of reporting. This is the
Channel six NBC channel there. I talked to someone at
the news desk specifically asked him about the mystery drones

(01:00:17):
and the reporting that's going on what they have found out.
And this was just the other day. We're recording this
on February seventh. I talked to him two days ago,
and this is what he said. The aviation folks that
we spoke to said the majority of them were actual
airplanes that were being reported, both small aircraft and larger

(01:00:39):
aircraft that was higher in the sky. The sheriff's department,
after initially investigating looking into this stuff in the county
where they lived there in Nebraska, he said that the
department was no longer interested in looking into this stuff.
And he further said that the station and the news

(01:01:00):
team were unable to determine if the drones were actually
moving eastward because part of this part of the story
in Nebraska there that I can't remember if I even
talked about, was that the drones appeared to be moving
only eastward from where.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
They were in Omaha, Nebraska.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
Huh, it's just a little odd, but a lot of
the reports were saying that's what was happening, and he
was just saying that the news team couldn't determine if
that was the case. And in the end, he believes
just what we were talking about, that it became a
social media phenomena where everybody was seeing drones now and

(01:01:39):
everybody's reporting it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
It's a common phenomenon in some of these types of stories, though,
isn't it. You know, you start to kind of believe
the hype, or you start to believe or you maybe
even you there's part of your brain that wants to believe.
It's a combination of people that are like really freaked
out and a combination of people that are like fascinated
by it and think, oh there, uh, you know, given
given the scoop, you know. And they're they've got the

(01:02:03):
inside track on this stuff, right, They're part of something.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
You know, Dude, If if a story popped up in
the Ajac tomorrow about a Mothman siding somewhere in the
old fourth Ward, h uh, you better believe I'm gonna
be out with binoculars just scouring every dark no, but
just searching for a sighting, hoping that I'll get to

(01:02:28):
see it, even if that initial report was bogus. But
if I do see something, I mean, you better believe
I'll call it. Everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:02:36):
You you weren't with us that that road trip I
went on with Ben and Scott, Benjamin and Casey Pegrim
for a car stuff years ago. I was there in spirit.
We went there to the Mothman Museum. And there's this
statue of the Mothman. Where is that? What's what's what?
What's city?

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
Is that Point Pleasant? No?

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
No, that's right, that's right. Okay? Is that West Virginia?

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Yes, it is Point Pleasant.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
Maybe there's a statue as a sculpture of the Mothman
in their little downtowns where and he looks like one
of those he Man action figures from the eighties with
like he's got like a nine pack and a very
defined buttocks.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
M Ingrid cold Man A big fan. Well, who, I'm
a big fan of the whole thing, the whole model man.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Hm, hey, have you seen.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
The Mothman write to me and us? Yeah? You can
hit mat up on social media at Mothman Lover sixty
sixty six. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
Uh, somebody someone out there has that username, you think so, yeah,
I'm sure probably because I tried.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
To use it. I think it's actually at Matt Frederick
underscore h no, underscore, iHeart. Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
So, look, let's get to our conclusion because we do
have some information from the Colorado Department of Public Safety
because they concluded that quote.

Speaker 3 (01:03:49):
We at the Colorado Department of Public Safety have confirmed
no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigation substantiated reports
of suspicious or illegal drone activity. The Door Out of
Information Analysis Center CIAC or SAC will continue to receive
and analyze suspicious drone activity reports. Sounds like they're closing

(01:04:09):
the book on this one. They're leaving it open for
you know, and they're like saying, hey, quit bugging us
with this stuff, you know, yeah, stop letting your imaginations
run wild.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
If you want to read the official report, you can
head on over to Colorado dot gov and search for
update drone activity. You'd probably be able to find it
that way. Got it. It's it's pretty good. I mean
they're reading good light reading there. I mean they're updating
it as it goes. So that's one of the best
things you can do right now, besides reaching out to

(01:04:40):
somebody who's you know, reporting on it or sure has
cited something. So we really just want to know what
you think about all this stuff. Have you noticed suspicious
drones anywhere where you live, especially if it's in the
middle of nowhere or over large areas of farmland. Is
there something? Is there some pattern that maybe nobody else

(01:05:01):
is noticing. Write to us, talk to us. Conspiracy Stuff
show on Instagram, Conspiracy stuff on Instagram and Facebook. Check
out our hears where it gets crazy page or group
on Facebook.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
M hm hmm. Yeah. All you gotta do is name
myself Matt or Ben, or make some passing reference to
a thing that we recognize from the show lore, or
just make a little pun or just say something clever.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
Or just bring up mission control.

Speaker 3 (01:05:27):
Paul Dickett. We love that too, of course. Of course,
how could I possibly leave out mission control himself? I
feel like a real heel.

Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
No, no, we just will know for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
We'll know you're not a Russian bot or an autonomous
essentient drone trying to get at us.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
Absolutely, you can call us. We are one H three
three std WYTK. Leave a message, record your drone sighting
if you can, that would be amazing. Or fly a
drone while you're on the phone with us, that's not dangerous.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):
Make sound effects with your mouth like a drone.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
If you don't want to do any of that stuff,
send us a good old fashioned email.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
Stuff they Don't Want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.