February 11, 2025 • 25 mins
Determined to uncover the truth, Gabe Lenners delves into the strange history of unexplained aircraft in the region. He turns to a local aviation expert and former Air Force pilot, whose insight blurs the line between the possible and unthinkable. Weird occurrences happen near these so-called drones. A woman shares a critical detail that’s impossible to ignore and too terrifying to explain.
This episode covers:
Chapter Three - Above the Prairie
Chapter Four - Surrounded
Episode Webpage: http://www.obscurumseries.com/podcast/invasion-of-the-drones/strange-happenings
Music by Epidemic Sound
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Previously on OBSCURUM
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I think the funnest one is the fact that they
were missing a nuclear warhead.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
I like that one.
Speaker 4 (00:15):
Well, they're quiet, but they had definite two spotlights coming
out of the bottom of them. It was just going
over the lake. The geese were just going crazy. To me,
it seemed like they were looking for something.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
She was a lot more concerned. You'll, for in case
they're trying to find people and find kids to nab,
like sex traffickers are gone extremely high tech. I'm canning
at least one two, three, four five.
Speaker 5 (00:41):
That actually rotated, looking as if it was appearing in
each window of our home.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Hello, where are you? I'm out by the canty line
and walking around looking at a few of these abandoned barns.
Speaker 6 (01:10):
You need to be really careful out there.
Speaker 7 (01:12):
You know what I told you when I talked to
my students in Benckelmann.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Especially the boys. They said those places can be inhabited by.
Speaker 6 (01:20):
People that are making mess all sorts of stuff, so
you really need to be aware of your surroundings.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Well, I'm going to go down by the river and.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
So can you text me?
Speaker 7 (01:30):
Though, even if you can't call me please, I.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Need to know where you are.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Stories are like puzzles. Nothing makes sense until most of
the pieces are in place, when you really start to
see the big picture. With the unknown aircraft, I was
hoping to quickly find which pieces were missing while trying
to verify that the FBI had given the order to
shoot these objects down. I dialed in on what I knew.
(01:59):
I'd learned this forms of these mysterious aircraft varied in size,
and we're being seen nightly over many counties. Most sightings
started at dusk and ended around ten pm.
Speaker 8 (02:11):
It just makes me really uneasy because I feel like
somebody is watching us all the time. That's just super unnerving.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I'd been able to chat with a few residents and
at this point people were wanting more information from local authorities.
The following excerpt is from you MC County Sheriff Todd
Combe's Facebook post and was read by a voice actor.
Speaker 9 (02:35):
I will tell you right up front, I do not
have a lot of answers for you at this time.
I wish I did, but I don't. I think we're
all feeling a little bit vulnerable due to the intrusion
of our privacy that we enjoy in our real community.
But I don't have a solution or no of one
right now. All I can say is, don't live your
life in the fear of the unknown. I will keep
(02:56):
you informed as soon as I hear anything.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Chapter three. Above the prairie, the big white one is
hovering low to the ground. If I had to guess,
I don't know. Two to three hundred feet in the air.
There are these red and green flashes moving around it
to the switch was flipped. On my vacation, that calm
(03:32):
feeling you get from being at home turned into pir adrenaline.
With each hour, I found myself getting sucked into this
odd series of events that seemed more like a sci
fi movie than real life. I wasn't sure what my
next steps should be, or if I should even be
the one looking for next steps, as I'd soon be
traveling back to Los Angeles. I started googling, searching through
(03:57):
a ton of information about airplanes in UFO sidings. I
wanted to know if anything similar to these craft had
been seen in the area before.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
What were your grandparents' names, and what were they like.
Speaker 10 (04:12):
The man's name was Milt Clayton Moreland. Clara Moreland was
his wife. I do have a picture of him sitting
on the eve of a house with a team of
horses moving a house across the prairie. So he was
a can do it man.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
I discovered an old article about unexplained flying objects published
in a local newspaper from nineteen fifty. Apparently the report
was given by Milton Clara Morland of Imperial, Nebraska. They
passed away, but I was able to talk with their grandson,
Terry McNair about their story. What do you remember them
(04:56):
telling you about what they experienced that day in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 10 (05:01):
Well, I remember mostly my grandmother talking about it, and
she would get quite excited, and she would say that
these things just came buzzing along and they weren't large,
they were small, you know, like saucer basketball shaped, and
you know, they were just kind of flittering along all together,
(05:23):
a whole bunch of them, and they came in from
one way and swooped out a different way.
Speaker 11 (05:31):
So she's just, you know, sitting at home one day,
it's it's daylight, and these saucer type basketball looking objects
just kind of appear.
Speaker 10 (05:43):
They just kind of appear. They hurted noise, and they
went out to investigate it. That's what they found.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
If Terry hadn't used the word saucer, his description sounded
eerily similar to the drone behavior I'd heard about.
Speaker 11 (06:00):
He is of you know what, you think they saw.
Speaker 10 (06:04):
Flying saucers. I thought that my whole life.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Had you heard any other stories of flying saucers in
that area before?
Speaker 5 (06:18):
Not?
Speaker 10 (06:19):
Really. I would remember my mother talking about lights in
the prairie when she was a kid, that they would
see lights in different areas where they're knew there was
no population. They were just lights.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
What do you mean by by lights?
Speaker 10 (06:34):
They were more along the land rather than high in
the sky. They were they were close to the earth,
but off in the distance. She just said that they
were unexplained.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
So she just saw weird, weird lights in the prairie.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
As I looked further into the history of the area,
I came across more interesting facts. In the nineteen sixties,
a number of locals saw weird objects in the sky.
One of those people was Barb Stanley.
Speaker 6 (07:10):
I was ten years old and I looked out on
the horizon. There was a hilp and as I was
sitting there, I saw some type of craft that I
think had landed. Then it slowly rose and I thought
(07:35):
it was going to just keep going higher, but it
just disappeared. Just one minute was there and one minute
it wasn't. It was bigger than a car, but didn't
look like a car. You know. Back in my ten
year old mind, I was just like, wow, you know,
(07:56):
I've never never seen anything like that before, not what
the Jetsons were like. Yeah, it seemed to be the
real deal.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Barb experienced this siding on the family farm, which oddly enough,
was close to where these so called drones were first spotted.
Speaker 6 (08:16):
A week later, there was a newspaper article that said
there was a lady in Imperial that had basically seen
the same thing. I took it out to my husbands
to read this, so that was kind of an affirmation
that I wasn't just making up the story.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
You said you were sitting on the porch looking out.
You know what's going through your mind when you see this?
Speaker 6 (08:47):
I'd say astonishment, because I had the feeling that I
was alone, you know, like my parents were gone, and
so who would help me. I thought, oh, wow, this
is thereous and they mean harm. I'm basically by myself.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
That had to be such a surreal feeling, especially at
a young age without anyone around. When I continued looking
into these sightings, I came across an article about one
of the first UFO crashes in modern history. It was
said to have taken place in southwest Nebraska near Binkleman
in the late eighteen hundreds. As the story goes, in
(09:32):
early June of eighteen eighty four, a rare phenomenon occurred.
Speaker 12 (09:37):
A few cowboys were out at a round up when
they were startled by a loud noise and saw what
looked like a blazing body fall into the earth. The
next day, a brand inspector found machinery scattered throughout the
pasture after the object was cooled, including a wheel fragment
with a mill rimp. The object was reported to be
fifty to sixty feet long, cylindrical, and about ten or
(09:59):
twelve feet in diameter.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Because that story was from so long ago, I took
it with a grain of salt. I obviously had no
way to check the facts with the locals who'd experienced it.
Whether people were seeing drones, flying saucers, or something else.
I began to notice a common theme. Most of these
(10:24):
sightings occurred near isolated farmhouses outside the city limits. I
wasn't sure how this info could plain into what was happening,
but it proved one thing unexplained. Aircraft weren't out of
the ordinary for this part of the country. Chapter four
(10:48):
surrounded it's more residents saw drone like objects flying. I
began contacting police stations in neighboring counties. Despite my persistence,
(11:08):
it was tough to get anyone to speak with me.
There was one person I knew I could lean on
outside of law enforcement. His name is Bill Bowerley, and
he's a family friend. Bill also just happens to be
an aviation expert. He was an Air Force pilot, Delta
Airlines pilot, and former member of the local airport authority.
Speaker 10 (11:35):
How are you good?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I'm actually working on another aviation product.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Bill's an outdoorsman. When I walked into his house, there
were fish and animal heads up on the walls. So
have you been good?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
This has been my busiest year flying.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
After we caught up, Bill dove into his background.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
I started got my license in seventy six on a
program that was the pre military. It was part of
my scholarship. I had to go to the military. Takes
a year to get through Air Force pilot training. Seventy
eight I graduated. They plowed me back as an instructor
because I did too well in the course, and then
in Germany for three years, and then from that I
went to a test squadron and flew in the test squadron.
(12:17):
Left the military on a Friday, started on Monday with Delta,
and I've been flying for Delta every month since.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
It was Bill's military history that I thought might shine
some light on what was going on. So they've been
doing drones in the military for a really long time.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Really, that first Golf War was where they really brought
him in, so you didn't have to risk a man's
life and you could provide reconnaissance. And that's where it
got started. In the intel gathering and the censors they
can put on it. The miniaturization of all of that
just kept improving improvement, so they'd make him smaller and smaller. Well,
they kept making him a little bit bigger and giving
(12:53):
them more range. So that's where they came up with
these twenty four or thirty six hour drones and could
just loiter.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I'd heard the term drone tossed around a lot. I
pulled up an official definition. A drone is technically any
unmanned aircraft that can fly remotely or autonomously. In my opinion,
that description left a lot of room for interpretation. Was
the word drone just the new and more casual term
for UFO. I'd now seen these drones as people were
(13:24):
calling them. Three nights in a row, there were larger
or black objects illuminating the fields and smaller ones surrounding them.
Each night. They were flying in groups.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
We were testing the ability to be able to tie
remotely piloted vehicles to a mothership, and that was in
the late eighties, so we know that you can have
a mothership fly and tether wirelessly other ones off of it.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Bill then gave me more than I bargained for a
first person report on what he thought maybe flying in
the sky.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
These are most likely the ones that they'll put a
gas engine on them with a small field cell, and
that engine then powers electric that powers all the props.
We've got military drones that can stay up thirty six
hours if you just use the premise that they are
a six hour drone, and they can travel at sixty
(14:24):
miles an hour. It would be very conceivable, but that
you could launch the use from one hundred miles away,
go do your work, and then fly that hundred miles home.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Imagine a six foot vehicle with wings, which job takes
thirty six hours and covers hundreds of miles.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Somebody's making money doing this. Otherwise it wouldn't exist.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
That's what I keep saying.
Speaker 13 (14:44):
I follow the money trail.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Follow the money trail. That's the first step. It comes
down to what confidence.
Speaker 7 (14:51):
Do you have.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
In believing what your government tells you want.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
By the time I left Bill's, I'd received a few messages.
Apparently when people hear you're back home from la and
asking questions about a weird phenomenon they've seen too, you
get a lot of tips for who to visit with the.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Girl you were talking about. That's your daughter in law,
or that's your daughter, or that's my daughter. It is
your daughter, Okay. When she was an inner car and
those three drones kind of appeared, you know, surrounding her car,
how close would she estimate that those were to her
actual vehicle as it was going down the road.
Speaker 7 (15:37):
She said, they were just like a little above like
the telephone polls, So, I mean, she could see them clearly,
and there was like three of them and they were
just just kind of following her.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
A lady named Trisha Michael told me that she'd received
a strange phone call late one evening when a few
of the unknown aircraft flew above her daughter's vehicle.
Speaker 6 (16:00):
She called.
Speaker 7 (16:01):
It was her phone number, but it said Palestinian territories
as far as our area.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
But she I didn't answer it. So when I called her.
Speaker 8 (16:09):
Back, she did not answer.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
So I called the Palestinian number back just to kind
of see what it was and see if I would
get anybody or not. And I had just got a
male voice recording saying that the number was no longer available.
Once she got home and there was nothing above her,
and it rang in just fine, it rang in normal.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
So when she called you, it said Palestinian territories on
your caller ID, where you'd normally see her name.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
Correct, Yeah, normally it would say like local, like if
it's a local call, it would say Sterling, Colorado, where
it would say where it's from.
Speaker 6 (16:47):
It had listed Palestinian territories.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
What did your daughter describe, you know, feeling like when
those drones were following her.
Speaker 8 (16:56):
I don't think that that one bothered her nearly as much.
Later in that evening, she had gotten home and she
was the only one here, and there were three that
were parked on our road, and they parked there for
about thirty minutes or so at least.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
When you say parked, you mean that they were hovering
in the air, yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
Covering, Yeah, Yeah, they just don't move. So that made
her a lot more uncomfortable than just driving underneath it.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Could these aircraft be interfering with cell towers? It sure
seemed like that was a possibility. I kept searching for
new leads. Let's just say things got even more peculiar.
Speaker 6 (17:40):
I just don't get, like, why they're so interested suddenly
in this area.
Speaker 7 (17:44):
He said that we have the military drums out here
that are using scramblers that are trying to break up
the signals.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
There is a river bottom down through here, and they
seem to work the waterway.
Speaker 7 (17:54):
The drums that are here have been described as black.
We have been told that the military drones are actually light.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Their grid pattern was definitely around Frenchman Creek.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
God.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
I love sweet and Cream. I used to go here
growing up, and I'd always get the same order two hamburgers,
ketch boneley, French fry, and uh doctor pepper. It was
early evening and I just ordered dinner and to drive
through an Imperial when I received information about another encounter.
(18:32):
This one seemed different. The lady mentioned in the message
didn't live too far east of town. I quickly finished
up my meal and headed in her direction. I think
this is the turn and to go see this girl
right now named Marcy Kelly. There was a pen close
(19:02):
by with a few of Marcy's animals. Her goat named Nanny,
kept wanting to get in on the interview. Nanny, don't
eat my clothes. You are a good goat, though I
could tell that Marcy was a small town gall at heart.
Before we began our conversation, she walked me through her house,
(19:22):
past some family photos, and onto the back patio.
Speaker 14 (19:27):
I don't remember where a question was.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
No, I was just going to say, you know, is
it typical for farmers to use drums?
Speaker 14 (19:33):
Yes, even through my husband's work, they have a drone
that they check the pivots with, and I think that
a lot of other people do too. I think that
Southwest Power uses them, probably check the power lines. From
what I've understood and now and they're not nearly this.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Bigh What do you make of this whole thing?
Speaker 5 (19:52):
Do you?
Speaker 3 (19:52):
How do you feel?
Speaker 14 (19:53):
I feel uneasy about it, just because there's so many
and they've been here for so long, and we don't
have an answer of who's doing it. We both, my
husband and I both think that they shut off their
lights and they can fly lower than and they're undetected,
like later at night when they're trying to go back
(20:15):
to their check in point or whatever they're trying to do,
because then you can hear them, and there's no planes
in the area, and it's just a different kind of
a noise.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
What would lead you to believe that they that they
shot off their lights.
Speaker 14 (20:29):
Because when they're high up, you can't hear them, and
so it's just a different kind of a noise that
we hear. So I just it's just kind of a
noise that you're like, oh, they're lower and you can
hear them, you know, kind of like after a jet
goes by and then you hear it later on or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Marcy had seen most of the aircraft near her property,
and she noticed something else. Wild animals weren't acting as
they normally would during the winter Sunday.
Speaker 14 (20:56):
And it was like the day after the blizzard, like
we lost power and stuff Saturday from the snow. My
dog's caught a snake, and then a few days before that,
my friend's daughter had gotten a turtle, and I'd seen
a frog hopping and I'm like, what, So that was
weird to me that all of those things are coming
out of the ground.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Kind of worried that way. From your perspective, what do
the formations look like? And are there different sizes of
the drones from what you've seen, I think that.
Speaker 14 (21:25):
There's different sizes. I think that there's like a docking station,
one that's a little bit bigger that either they get
energy from it or charge or reboot or exchange information too.
And that one seems pretty just like it hovers. It
doesn't really move a lot, kind of just stay stable.
And then the other ones. I've seen them go fast,
(21:48):
I've seen them go slow. I've seen them shut off
the lights and then turn them back on later. And
I think that they range in sizes. I don't think
that they'd be over ten foot at the biggest. I
mean probably mostly five to eight foot.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Could you make out that it was, in fact a drone?
Speaker 14 (22:06):
Sounds better than a UFO identified flying object.
Speaker 6 (22:09):
Basically, yeah, Just.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
When I thought I'd heard every theory, Marcy dropped this one.
Speaker 14 (22:18):
I have heard and I haven't seen. I seen a
picture of like a green substance that's been dropped, you know.
I'm like, oh, what if it's something like dangerous?
Speaker 1 (22:31):
When I got back inside the pickup, I played that
audio over and over, and.
Speaker 14 (22:37):
I seen a picture of like a green substance that's
been dropped, A green substance that's been dropped.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Marcy didn't reveal who showed her the picture or where
they lived. The skeptic and me kept thinking aircraft dropping
things from the sky at night? Why do these accounts
keep getting even more bizarre? Just when I begin to
wrap my mind around certain parts of this story, I
was told another credible, if unbelievable detail coming up on
(23:18):
obscure invasion of the drones.
Speaker 7 (23:23):
Really, we have to absolutely verify what is happening in Colorado.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Someone has very sophisticated ways to override the FA rules
that are in here.
Speaker 13 (23:36):
I can see it going off ten of our shop
as soon as I opened the garage door, there was
a white like infrared camera light.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
We want to hear from you. If you have any
information surrounding the events detailed in this podcast or other
obscure stories in rural America we should look into. Please
visit our website at obscurumseries.com and send us an email.
To connect with us on social media, you can follow
(24:22):
@obscurum_series and @gabelenners on all social platforms. OBSCURUM is produced
by Imagine and Lenners Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is written, hosted,
and produced by Me Gabe Lenners. It's executive produced by
(24:44):
Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl Welker, Nathan Kloke, Nicki etour
in Me. Additional production by Jacob Plough. Music and sound
effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Brand management and digital design
(25:04):
by Labyrinth Brand Co. Video editing by Alex Semikopenko. This
project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough. Special thanks
to Dan Bodanski, Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Birchfield,
(25:25):
David Wasserman, Katrina Norvel and my family. OBSCURUM
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite podcasts. Follow now
Previously on OBSCURUM
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I think the funnest one is the fact that they
were missing a nuclear warhead.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
I like that one.
Speaker 4 (00:15):
Well, they're quiet, but they had definite two spotlights coming
out of the bottom of them. It was just going
over the lake. The geese were just going crazy. To me,
it seemed like they were looking for something.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
She was a lot more concerned. You'll, for in case
they're trying to find people and find kids to nab,
like sex traffickers are gone extremely high tech. I'm canning
at least one two, three, four five.
Speaker 5 (00:41):
That actually rotated, looking as if it was appearing in
each window of our home.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Hello, where are you? I'm out by the canty line
and walking around looking at a few of these abandoned barns.
Speaker 6 (01:10):
You need to be really careful out there.
Speaker 7 (01:12):
You know what I told you when I talked to
my students in Benckelmann.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Especially the boys. They said those places can be inhabited by.
Speaker 6 (01:20):
People that are making mess all sorts of stuff, so
you really need to be aware of your surroundings.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Well, I'm going to go down by the river and.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
So can you text me?
Speaker 7 (01:30):
Though, even if you can't call me please, I.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Need to know where you are.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Stories are like puzzles. Nothing makes sense until most of
the pieces are in place, when you really start to
see the big picture. With the unknown aircraft, I was
hoping to quickly find which pieces were missing while trying
to verify that the FBI had given the order to
shoot these objects down. I dialed in on what I knew.
(01:59):
I'd learned this forms of these mysterious aircraft varied in size,
and we're being seen nightly over many counties. Most sightings
started at dusk and ended around ten pm.
Speaker 8 (02:11):
It just makes me really uneasy because I feel like
somebody is watching us all the time. That's just super unnerving.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I'd been able to chat with a few residents and
at this point people were wanting more information from local authorities.
The following excerpt is from you MC County Sheriff Todd
Combe's Facebook post and was read by a voice actor.
Speaker 9 (02:35):
I will tell you right up front, I do not
have a lot of answers for you at this time.
I wish I did, but I don't. I think we're
all feeling a little bit vulnerable due to the intrusion
of our privacy that we enjoy in our real community.
But I don't have a solution or no of one
right now. All I can say is, don't live your
life in the fear of the unknown. I will keep
(02:56):
you informed as soon as I hear anything.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Chapter three. Above the prairie, the big white one is
hovering low to the ground. If I had to guess,
I don't know. Two to three hundred feet in the air.
There are these red and green flashes moving around it
to the switch was flipped. On my vacation, that calm
(03:32):
feeling you get from being at home turned into pir adrenaline.
With each hour, I found myself getting sucked into this
odd series of events that seemed more like a sci
fi movie than real life. I wasn't sure what my
next steps should be, or if I should even be
the one looking for next steps, as I'd soon be
traveling back to Los Angeles. I started googling, searching through
(03:57):
a ton of information about airplanes in UFO sidings. I
wanted to know if anything similar to these craft had
been seen in the area before.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
What were your grandparents' names, and what were they like.
Speaker 10 (04:12):
The man's name was Milt Clayton Moreland. Clara Moreland was
his wife. I do have a picture of him sitting
on the eve of a house with a team of
horses moving a house across the prairie. So he was
a can do it man.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
I discovered an old article about unexplained flying objects published
in a local newspaper from nineteen fifty. Apparently the report
was given by Milton Clara Morland of Imperial, Nebraska. They
passed away, but I was able to talk with their grandson,
Terry McNair about their story. What do you remember them
(04:56):
telling you about what they experienced that day in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 10 (05:01):
Well, I remember mostly my grandmother talking about it, and
she would get quite excited, and she would say that
these things just came buzzing along and they weren't large,
they were small, you know, like saucer basketball shaped, and
you know, they were just kind of flittering along all together,
(05:23):
a whole bunch of them, and they came in from
one way and swooped out a different way.
Speaker 11 (05:31):
So she's just, you know, sitting at home one day,
it's it's daylight, and these saucer type basketball looking objects
just kind of appear.
Speaker 10 (05:43):
They just kind of appear. They hurted noise, and they
went out to investigate it. That's what they found.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
If Terry hadn't used the word saucer, his description sounded
eerily similar to the drone behavior I'd heard about.
Speaker 11 (06:00):
He is of you know what, you think they saw.
Speaker 10 (06:04):
Flying saucers. I thought that my whole life.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Had you heard any other stories of flying saucers in
that area before?
Speaker 5 (06:18):
Not?
Speaker 10 (06:19):
Really. I would remember my mother talking about lights in
the prairie when she was a kid, that they would
see lights in different areas where they're knew there was
no population. They were just lights.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
What do you mean by by lights?
Speaker 10 (06:34):
They were more along the land rather than high in
the sky. They were they were close to the earth,
but off in the distance. She just said that they
were unexplained.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
So she just saw weird, weird lights in the prairie.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
As I looked further into the history of the area,
I came across more interesting facts. In the nineteen sixties,
a number of locals saw weird objects in the sky.
One of those people was Barb Stanley.
Speaker 6 (07:10):
I was ten years old and I looked out on
the horizon. There was a hilp and as I was
sitting there, I saw some type of craft that I
think had landed. Then it slowly rose and I thought
(07:35):
it was going to just keep going higher, but it
just disappeared. Just one minute was there and one minute
it wasn't. It was bigger than a car, but didn't
look like a car. You know. Back in my ten
year old mind, I was just like, wow, you know,
(07:56):
I've never never seen anything like that before, not what
the Jetsons were like. Yeah, it seemed to be the
real deal.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Barb experienced this siding on the family farm, which oddly enough,
was close to where these so called drones were first spotted.
Speaker 6 (08:16):
A week later, there was a newspaper article that said
there was a lady in Imperial that had basically seen
the same thing. I took it out to my husbands
to read this, so that was kind of an affirmation
that I wasn't just making up the story.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
You said you were sitting on the porch looking out.
You know what's going through your mind when you see this?
Speaker 6 (08:47):
I'd say astonishment, because I had the feeling that I
was alone, you know, like my parents were gone, and
so who would help me. I thought, oh, wow, this
is thereous and they mean harm. I'm basically by myself.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
That had to be such a surreal feeling, especially at
a young age without anyone around. When I continued looking
into these sightings, I came across an article about one
of the first UFO crashes in modern history. It was
said to have taken place in southwest Nebraska near Binkleman
in the late eighteen hundreds. As the story goes, in
(09:32):
early June of eighteen eighty four, a rare phenomenon occurred.
Speaker 12 (09:37):
A few cowboys were out at a round up when
they were startled by a loud noise and saw what
looked like a blazing body fall into the earth. The
next day, a brand inspector found machinery scattered throughout the
pasture after the object was cooled, including a wheel fragment
with a mill rimp. The object was reported to be
fifty to sixty feet long, cylindrical, and about ten or
(09:59):
twelve feet in diameter.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Because that story was from so long ago, I took
it with a grain of salt. I obviously had no
way to check the facts with the locals who'd experienced it.
Whether people were seeing drones, flying saucers, or something else.
I began to notice a common theme. Most of these
(10:24):
sightings occurred near isolated farmhouses outside the city limits. I
wasn't sure how this info could plain into what was happening,
but it proved one thing unexplained. Aircraft weren't out of
the ordinary for this part of the country. Chapter four
(10:48):
surrounded it's more residents saw drone like objects flying. I
began contacting police stations in neighboring counties. Despite my persistence,
(11:08):
it was tough to get anyone to speak with me.
There was one person I knew I could lean on
outside of law enforcement. His name is Bill Bowerley, and
he's a family friend. Bill also just happens to be
an aviation expert. He was an Air Force pilot, Delta
Airlines pilot, and former member of the local airport authority.
Speaker 10 (11:35):
How are you good?
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I'm actually working on another aviation product.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Bill's an outdoorsman. When I walked into his house, there
were fish and animal heads up on the walls. So
have you been good?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
This has been my busiest year flying.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
After we caught up, Bill dove into his background.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
I started got my license in seventy six on a
program that was the pre military. It was part of
my scholarship. I had to go to the military. Takes
a year to get through Air Force pilot training. Seventy
eight I graduated. They plowed me back as an instructor
because I did too well in the course, and then
in Germany for three years, and then from that I
went to a test squadron and flew in the test squadron.
(12:17):
Left the military on a Friday, started on Monday with Delta,
and I've been flying for Delta every month since.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
It was Bill's military history that I thought might shine
some light on what was going on. So they've been
doing drones in the military for a really long time.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Really, that first Golf War was where they really brought
him in, so you didn't have to risk a man's
life and you could provide reconnaissance. And that's where it
got started. In the intel gathering and the censors they
can put on it. The miniaturization of all of that
just kept improving improvement, so they'd make him smaller and smaller. Well,
they kept making him a little bit bigger and giving
(12:53):
them more range. So that's where they came up with
these twenty four or thirty six hour drones and could
just loiter.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I'd heard the term drone tossed around a lot. I
pulled up an official definition. A drone is technically any
unmanned aircraft that can fly remotely or autonomously. In my opinion,
that description left a lot of room for interpretation. Was
the word drone just the new and more casual term
for UFO. I'd now seen these drones as people were
(13:24):
calling them. Three nights in a row, there were larger
or black objects illuminating the fields and smaller ones surrounding them.
Each night. They were flying in groups.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
We were testing the ability to be able to tie
remotely piloted vehicles to a mothership, and that was in
the late eighties, so we know that you can have
a mothership fly and tether wirelessly other ones off of it.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Bill then gave me more than I bargained for a
first person report on what he thought maybe flying in
the sky.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
These are most likely the ones that they'll put a
gas engine on them with a small field cell, and
that engine then powers electric that powers all the props.
We've got military drones that can stay up thirty six
hours if you just use the premise that they are
a six hour drone, and they can travel at sixty
(14:24):
miles an hour. It would be very conceivable, but that
you could launch the use from one hundred miles away,
go do your work, and then fly that hundred miles home.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Imagine a six foot vehicle with wings, which job takes
thirty six hours and covers hundreds of miles.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Somebody's making money doing this. Otherwise it wouldn't exist.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
That's what I keep saying.
Speaker 13 (14:44):
I follow the money trail.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Follow the money trail. That's the first step. It comes
down to what confidence.
Speaker 7 (14:51):
Do you have.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
In believing what your government tells you want.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
By the time I left Bill's, I'd received a few messages.
Apparently when people hear you're back home from la and
asking questions about a weird phenomenon they've seen too, you
get a lot of tips for who to visit with the.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Girl you were talking about. That's your daughter in law,
or that's your daughter, or that's my daughter. It is
your daughter, Okay. When she was an inner car and
those three drones kind of appeared, you know, surrounding her car,
how close would she estimate that those were to her
actual vehicle as it was going down the road.
Speaker 7 (15:37):
She said, they were just like a little above like
the telephone polls, So, I mean, she could see them clearly,
and there was like three of them and they were
just just kind of following her.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
A lady named Trisha Michael told me that she'd received
a strange phone call late one evening when a few
of the unknown aircraft flew above her daughter's vehicle.
Speaker 6 (16:00):
She called.
Speaker 7 (16:01):
It was her phone number, but it said Palestinian territories
as far as our area.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
But she I didn't answer it. So when I called her.
Speaker 8 (16:09):
Back, she did not answer.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
So I called the Palestinian number back just to kind
of see what it was and see if I would
get anybody or not. And I had just got a
male voice recording saying that the number was no longer available.
Once she got home and there was nothing above her,
and it rang in just fine, it rang in normal.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
So when she called you, it said Palestinian territories on
your caller ID, where you'd normally see her name.
Speaker 7 (16:40):
Correct, Yeah, normally it would say like local, like if
it's a local call, it would say Sterling, Colorado, where
it would say where it's from.
Speaker 6 (16:47):
It had listed Palestinian territories.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
What did your daughter describe, you know, feeling like when
those drones were following her.
Speaker 8 (16:56):
I don't think that that one bothered her nearly as much.
Later in that evening, she had gotten home and she
was the only one here, and there were three that
were parked on our road, and they parked there for
about thirty minutes or so at least.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
When you say parked, you mean that they were hovering
in the air, yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
Covering, Yeah, Yeah, they just don't move. So that made
her a lot more uncomfortable than just driving underneath it.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Could these aircraft be interfering with cell towers? It sure
seemed like that was a possibility. I kept searching for
new leads. Let's just say things got even more peculiar.
Speaker 6 (17:40):
I just don't get, like, why they're so interested suddenly
in this area.
Speaker 7 (17:44):
He said that we have the military drums out here
that are using scramblers that are trying to break up
the signals.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
There is a river bottom down through here, and they
seem to work the waterway.
Speaker 7 (17:54):
The drums that are here have been described as black.
We have been told that the military drones are actually light.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Their grid pattern was definitely around Frenchman Creek.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
God.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
I love sweet and Cream. I used to go here
growing up, and I'd always get the same order two hamburgers,
ketch boneley, French fry, and uh doctor pepper. It was
early evening and I just ordered dinner and to drive
through an Imperial when I received information about another encounter.
(18:32):
This one seemed different. The lady mentioned in the message
didn't live too far east of town. I quickly finished
up my meal and headed in her direction. I think
this is the turn and to go see this girl
right now named Marcy Kelly. There was a pen close
(19:02):
by with a few of Marcy's animals. Her goat named Nanny,
kept wanting to get in on the interview. Nanny, don't
eat my clothes. You are a good goat, though I
could tell that Marcy was a small town gall at heart.
Before we began our conversation, she walked me through her house,
(19:22):
past some family photos, and onto the back patio.
Speaker 14 (19:27):
I don't remember where a question was.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
No, I was just going to say, you know, is
it typical for farmers to use drums?
Speaker 14 (19:33):
Yes, even through my husband's work, they have a drone
that they check the pivots with, and I think that
a lot of other people do too. I think that
Southwest Power uses them, probably check the power lines. From
what I've understood and now and they're not nearly this.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Bigh What do you make of this whole thing?
Speaker 5 (19:52):
Do you?
Speaker 3 (19:52):
How do you feel?
Speaker 14 (19:53):
I feel uneasy about it, just because there's so many
and they've been here for so long, and we don't
have an answer of who's doing it. We both, my
husband and I both think that they shut off their
lights and they can fly lower than and they're undetected,
like later at night when they're trying to go back
(20:15):
to their check in point or whatever they're trying to do,
because then you can hear them, and there's no planes
in the area, and it's just a different kind of
a noise.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
What would lead you to believe that they that they
shot off their lights.
Speaker 14 (20:29):
Because when they're high up, you can't hear them, and
so it's just a different kind of a noise that
we hear. So I just it's just kind of a
noise that you're like, oh, they're lower and you can
hear them, you know, kind of like after a jet
goes by and then you hear it later on or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Marcy had seen most of the aircraft near her property,
and she noticed something else. Wild animals weren't acting as
they normally would during the winter Sunday.
Speaker 14 (20:56):
And it was like the day after the blizzard, like
we lost power and stuff Saturday from the snow. My
dog's caught a snake, and then a few days before that,
my friend's daughter had gotten a turtle, and I'd seen
a frog hopping and I'm like, what, So that was
weird to me that all of those things are coming
out of the ground.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Kind of worried that way. From your perspective, what do
the formations look like? And are there different sizes of
the drones from what you've seen, I think that.
Speaker 14 (21:25):
There's different sizes. I think that there's like a docking station,
one that's a little bit bigger that either they get
energy from it or charge or reboot or exchange information too.
And that one seems pretty just like it hovers. It
doesn't really move a lot, kind of just stay stable.
And then the other ones. I've seen them go fast,
(21:48):
I've seen them go slow. I've seen them shut off
the lights and then turn them back on later. And
I think that they range in sizes. I don't think
that they'd be over ten foot at the biggest. I
mean probably mostly five to eight foot.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Could you make out that it was, in fact a drone?
Speaker 14 (22:06):
Sounds better than a UFO identified flying object.
Speaker 6 (22:09):
Basically, yeah, Just.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
When I thought I'd heard every theory, Marcy dropped this one.
Speaker 14 (22:18):
I have heard and I haven't seen. I seen a
picture of like a green substance that's been dropped, you know.
I'm like, oh, what if it's something like dangerous?
Speaker 1 (22:31):
When I got back inside the pickup, I played that
audio over and over, and.
Speaker 14 (22:37):
I seen a picture of like a green substance that's
been dropped, A green substance that's been dropped.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Marcy didn't reveal who showed her the picture or where
they lived. The skeptic and me kept thinking aircraft dropping
things from the sky at night? Why do these accounts
keep getting even more bizarre? Just when I begin to
wrap my mind around certain parts of this story, I
was told another credible, if unbelievable detail coming up on
(23:18):
obscure invasion of the drones.
Speaker 7 (23:23):
Really, we have to absolutely verify what is happening in Colorado.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Someone has very sophisticated ways to override the FA rules
that are in here.
Speaker 13 (23:36):
I can see it going off ten of our shop
as soon as I opened the garage door, there was
a white like infrared camera light.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
We want to hear from you. If you have any
information surrounding the events detailed in this podcast or other
obscure stories in rural America we should look into. Please
visit our website at obscurumseries.com and send us an email.
To connect with us on social media, you can follow
(24:22):
@obscurum_series and @gabelenners on all social platforms. OBSCURUM is produced
by Imagine and Lenners Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is written, hosted,
and produced by Me Gabe Lenners. It's executive produced by
(24:44):
Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl Welker, Nathan Kloke, Nicki etour
in Me. Additional production by Jacob Plough. Music and sound
effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Brand management and digital design
(25:04):
by Labyrinth Brand Co. Video editing by Alex Semikopenko. This
project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough. Special thanks
to Dan Bodanski, Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Birchfield,
(25:25):
David Wasserman, Katrina Norvel and my family. OBSCURUM
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite podcasts. Follow now
Host
Gabe Lenners
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