Colorado-Nebraska Mystery Drone Swarms

December 20, 2019. The Phillips County Sheriff's Office in northeastern Colorado posted a notice on Facebook. Residents had been calling in about something flying over the plains at night.

The Colorado Department of Public Safety would later count reports back to November 23, 2019. Most came from Phillips and Yuma counties, around the small towns of Haxtun and Paoli. Soon they came from Washington, Morgan, Logan and Weld counties, then from Nebraska and Kansas. An FAA memo counted reports from 16 Colorado and Nebraska counties.

They came out in the evening, usually between 7 and 10 p.m. Witnesses described craft with roughly a 6-foot wingspan, flying 200 to 300 feet up. Groups of six to ten were typical. In Palisade, Nebraska, 19 were reported at once. A Chase County deputy reported "30 to 50 flying independently of each other with a larger 'mothership' hovering for hours." Over Paoli, one craft reportedly hovered all night.

The lights were flashing or steady. White, red, green. Sheriff Thomas Elliott described a search. "They fly one square and then they fly another square." "Overhead they were probably doing 30, 40 mph," said Undersheriff William Myers. "They weren't racing or flying around." In Washington County, Wyatt Harman described more. "They can sit there and hover. They can descend very fast. They can take off very fast."

In Oakley, Kansas, a Highway Patrol trooper watched "anywhere from 10 to 15 drones that flew all kinds of patterns around that stationary drone." The stationary one had a "really bright light on it, like a spot light." It "made absolutely no sound at all, even though the wind was calm."

January 6, 2020. Brush, Colorado. Morgan County Sheriff Dave Martin convened a closed-door meeting. More than 70 agencies attended, including the FBI, Air Force investigators from F.E. Warren Air Force Base and NORAD. Deputies hunted for a command vehicle, "a closed box trailer with antennas or a large van that does not belong in the area." None was found.

Inside the FAA, Administrator Steve Dickson wrote that "not too long ago we would have called these 'UFOs'." The agency contacted approved drone operators in the area. None was found to be the source. A January 16 summary recorded "high confidence these are not covert military activities." At F.E. Warren, one Air Force email read: "100000000000% not us."

On January 13, 2020, the Colorado Department of Public Safety reported that most confirmed sightings were planets, stars, commercial aircraft or small hobbyist drones. Of 23 reports checked during the active investigation, 13 were planets, stars or hobby drones. Six were commercial aircraft. Four remained unexplained.

Skeptics pointed to Venus and Saturn, close together in the sky around December 12, 2019, and to planes approaching Denver International Airport. Mick West wrote on Metabunk of one video: "Nothing in the footage really screams 'drone'." Benjamin Radford, in the Skeptical Inquirer, warned that "people are likely to see what they're looking for." A letter from a Wichita group, ArchAngel RECON, claimed its drones were searching for the "Tic Tac" UFO. It was never verified.

By January 22, the task force had no plans to meet again. On January 30, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said: "We don't know who they belong to, we don't know who's operating them, to this day we do not." The FAA never determined what people were seeing. When drone sightings swept New Jersey in 2024, 9NEWS looked back at the eastern plains and found a lot of similarities.