The Arrival

They say that you have to learn from the past to prepare for the future. That's never been more true than now. Sightings of unidentified aircraft are on the rise, with new eyewitness accounts, congressional hearings, and US fighter pilots taking down four high altitude flying objects under strange circumstances. The quest for answers has never been greater. Tensions escalated in late twenty twenty four when unexplained drones began appearing in the New Jersey skies, sparking rumors in questions that no one could answer. But in late twenty nineteen, an equally bizarre phenomenon started unfolding over Colorado. In Nebraska, she.

Said that there were three drones that camp beside her. One was to the right, one was directly above her, and one was to her left, and they followed her roughly about nine or ten miles. I think in the movie with Tom whatever his name is, Tom Cruise with all the.

Aliens, the world a war or whatever it is, and.

Yet it just feels like you're being locked buy these machines.

Authorities are calling it a mobile command vehicle with antennas, And this morning there was a very active search.

For there's one right over the top of me right now. It has to be about three hundred feet in the air. It could be looking at me.

When they first arrived that night in late December, hovering over farms, I didn't know what would transpire, how it would all end, or if the end was actually the beginning of a much bigger story. My name is Gabe Lenners and this is OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones. Chapter one, Phillips County. It was late twenty nineteen, just days before Christmas. I was at the Burbank Airport ready to fly home for the holidays. I had originally gone to college to be a meteorologist, and I still love to report on a good storm. However, an unexpected summer job shifted my path, leading me into a broadcasting career as a host and producer in Los Angeles, working with companies like Radio Disney, ABC News in CMT. Like many people who moved to the city, I'm from somewhere else, one of those no stoplight towns you see from the sky while munching on pretzels or waiting for the flight attendant to bring you a drink. It's in Nebraska and called Imperial. There are two grocery stores, one coffee shop, and no MacDonald's. It's a place where agriculture drives livelihoods and people talk more about the local weather than the latest fashion. Dia is the closest major airport to western Nebraska, so when I flew in, my parents picked me up in Denver and we drove east. In this part of Colorado, there are no mountains, ski resorts, or cities. Instead, the area is flat with fields and rolling grasslands, but that time of year, everything was frozen. Once we traveled a couple hours in the car, we eventually crossed the state line. It was a couple nights before New Year's Eve. We were sitting in the living room after eating one of my mom's home cooked meals when we heard a knock at the door. Through the living room window, I could see a uniform with a radio flashlight and gun holstered to one side. I turned the porch light on and immediately recognized who it was. The cop has a family friend, and whenever I'm in town, he'll drop by and tell a funny story or crack a joke. He's your typical laid back small town cop. But that night. He stopped by late. It was after ten PM, and there was concern in his eyes. He began telling us about giant drones lighting up the night sky and wanted to see if we'd noticed anything weird near our home.

I had when I believed you had over or ya.

Knowing I work in the entertainment industry, he thought this wild story may interest me as well. It had to be a hoax, but living in has taught me that fact is almost always stranger than fiction. So I grabbed my phone, hopped in the pickup, and headed out to investigate. It was eleven PM when I started to see what all the fuss was about. I'm canning at least one, two, three, four, five, six seven.

The brightest light that looks the biggest is load to the ground. In access on these remote country roads could be a challenge, but I'm going to see how close I can get. I saw more lights in the sky than I could have imagined.

This was no hoax. I wasn't sure what I'd seen that night, but I had to find out. I started making calls to neighbors and was told the objects were first spotted in Phillips County, Colorado, just over the Nebraska border or some aircraft were I had to be as big as small cars.

We've a got in the country, so lots of empty fields. We actually lived fourteen fifteen miles from town.

This is Sarah. She and her husband Chris were a couple of the first people to report these aircraft. It took a bit of hometown charm to get them to talk about what they witnessed. I've changed their names at their request.

What do you remember happening on that night of December sixteenth.

My son and I were at his band concert, so we were coming home. I would say it was probably about nine point thirty and we were coming up our driveway, which we have our driveways about three quarters of a mile to our house. It's a private driveway. We were driving up at and as we got closer to the house, I noticed that there was a drone flying right above the porch, the front porch. Then it actually rotated around our house, almost looking as if it was peering in each window of our home.

Wow, gosh, it's so crazy.

Yeah, when it's in your window, it's different. When they were all flying high up in the sky, that that's one thing. But when they're intruding on your home. It's completely different. It flew for a very long time. It was a very high tech machine.

What happens next to your husband gets in his separate vehicles in and continues to pursue the drone.

Yeah, so he got in his pickup when he just followed the drone and it continued west. We just stayed in contact with him.

So then that's when I took off chasing. And there were several times where I was going ninety five to one hundred and five appreciated I'd be a mile even two miles behind this and it blew me away how fast it could move. All of a sudden, there was a there were two drones flying in perfect unison, probably fifty feet apart from each other, one just a little bit higher than the other.

How big do you think this run was that you saw?

It had to be at least a five foot wingspan?

You know when you talked to law enforcement, what did they think?

They were a ways behind me or ways of way? And they just told me to just try to stay with it until it landed. You know, I had a quarter tank and I pick up and I soak off and I'd just about use it all up, so I just part and ship my life off and my sad there for probably twenty minutes, waiting to see if I saw any vehicles any were around, and never did see anybody.

After talking with Chris, I had way more questions than answers. I had no idea how strange the story was going to become. In all honesty, strange doesn't even begin to describe what I was about to discover Chapter two. Their rumor mil All right, let's go in there DJ's bar and grill. The morning after first seeing the objects, I was restless. I'd spent most of the night scrolling through social media to see who else spotted the aircraft.

How's it going?

How are you good? I'm gonna get some coffee too.

I'm gonna do a little.

Cream in there.

There was one local farmer in particular I wanted to visit with, but before I did, I needed caffeine and stop by a bar to grab a cup of coffee. You could probably guess what the topic of conversation was about.

I think the funnest one is the fact that they were missing a nuclear warhead.

I like that one is that what they're saying now too.

There's a few individuals that have said, well, like them down into the yard or looked them in their house. Someone has to be automatically or manually excuse me taking over that control that uav for to do that.

I hadn't heard about warheads or aliens, but I wasn't surprised to hear there were more wild rumors. I quickly grabbed my coffee, hopped in the truck, and took the back roads out of town. It's freezing out here today, literally out here in the middle of nowhere. I have no cell service. There's this county road and a small farmhouse right next to these fields, supposed to be meeting this guy named Tim. I'm kind of like thinking about how this reminds me of that movie Signs with Mel Gibson. If I was by myself right here at night, there's no lights, this could get creepy.

O good, how are you doing?

When I pulled up to Tim's house, I didn't know much, just that he and his wife may have experienced a few close range encounters west of Imperial. You could tell Tim's a family man. There were toys around the house, and the farm dog greeted me right when I stepped out of the truck. How does that make you feel that someone could be watching early servying what's going on?

Drug or sex trafficking and all that kind of stuff has kind of been big news locally recently, and so we're, you know, with kids, we don't have you know, we don't have the police driving by every twenty minutes or anything. And you shoot, I don't even know if I've ever seen this sheriff drive by out here. That's just the rural Nebraska that we live in.

When Tim's wife saw the aircraft, she was worried.

Yeah, she was a lot more concern. And in case they're trying to find people and find kids to nab, like sex traffickers have gone extremely high tech. And the numbers of drones, I mean, the first one reports we heard was like, you know, six to ten, Then we heard sixteen. Now we've heard twenty to thirty. A friend of mine he had he said two nights ago he had twenty flying over his house. And you know, we had four over our house a couple of nights before that.

Tim was now the third person Night spoken to who'd confirmed these drones as he described them, were flying really low to nearby homes.

Yeah, they were about two probably three to four hundred feet is probably where they were. My dad flies ultra light airplanes. They're a small aircraft, but it's you know, a thirty foot wingspan, and it was about the same height that Dad flies when he comes over to see the grandkids. As they were just over the trees, about one hundred feet over here, and it was you know, they were up there. I mean Dad's airplanes. They're gas powered. You can barely hear them when he's flying putting along and those drones. Yeah, it was silent. You couldn't you couldn't hear anything. You just saw the lights basically, and saw them as they were headed west basically.

Champion, Nebraska resident Dallas Baney recalled a similar description.

Well, they're quiet, but they had definite two like spotlights coming out of the bottom of them. It was hard to tell the shape of them because it was dark, but you could definitely see the two spotlights coming out of each side. And I actually started seeing several of them just everywhere. Even the close one I could barely make it out. But you just remember the lights and it's not an airplane.

Dallas is as real as they come. He's one of those guys you just want to go have a beer with. We talked in his garage, which he's converted to a lounge area with a hot tub and flat screen on the wall. When was the first time you started to see things appear in the sky.

Well, I was going out to actually flip Hamburgers on the barbecue and I just looked up and I was like, holy cow. So I'm yelling for the guys to get out here. So I did at least have a few people witness it with me, So I wasn't, you know, people thinking I'm crazy. But I had some of the neighbors, you know, they came out and they were like wow, you know they by the time they got over there, it was just going over the lake. The geese were just going crazy.

They freaked out.

I mean, it just brings up more suspicion. You wonder what these drones are doing here and why if they're thermal imaging or I seen something the other day on the news where a drone could actually take someone's temperature flying over and I was just like, wow, you know, who knows what they're doing or why they're here, but to be that size would cost probably millions of dollars, So it's I don't think it's someone definitely has some money that's back in this. To me, it seemed like they were looking for something.

If these unidentified aircraft were searching for something and hovering outside the windows of folks I'd grown up with, let it go. One thing was for sure. There were many theories about what was happening in the skies over Colorado in Nebraska, theories that prompted more questions. Why would someone be flying groups of drones at night and why would they choose to do it here. I was driving down the road processing all of this when my phone rang hello, making a voice note. I just talked to one of the local authorities. He did not want to be named as a source, but he told me that someone on his team talked to the FBI, and the FBI instructed them to shoot one of these objects out of the sky if they got the chance. Coming up on Obscure Invasion of the drones, we were testing the ability to be able to tie remotely piloted vehicles to a mothership, and that was.

In the late ages.

We've heard that there's a missing nuke and that they're looking for that.

With the green stuff.

I'm a little you know, I'm like, oh, what if it's something like dangerous?

If you have any information surrounding the events detailed in this podcast, or have your own similar account, please visit our website at obscurumseries.com and share your story. You'll also find exclusive behind the scenes content on the side. To connect with us on social media, you can follow @obscurum_series and @gabelenners on all social platforms. OBSCURUM is produced by Imagine Entertainment and Lenners Entertainment for iHeartMedia. This series is written, hosted, and produced by Me Gabe Lenners. It's executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl Welker, Nathan Kloke, Nicki Etour and Me. Additional production by Jacob Plough. Music and sound effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Brand management and digital design by Labyrinth Brand Co. Video editing by Alex Semi Kopenko. This project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough. Special thanks to Dan Bodansky, Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Birchfield, David Wasserman, Katrina Norvel and my family. OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Follow now.