Denmark's airports sat in darkness, not the ordinary darkness of a September night, but something different.

Runways empty terminals hushed, thousands of travelers stranded, while security officials scanned the skies for intruders that kept appearing and vanishing like ghosts.

The nation's defense minister would later call it systematic.

The Prime minister would declare it the most serious attack on Danish infrastructure to date.

But according to Yuri Geller, watching from his home in Israel, everyone was looking in the wrong direction.

I'm Darren Marler, and this is weird Darkness.

Welcome, weirdos.

This is weird Darkness.

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The mysterious drones that paralyzed European airports in September twenty twenty five triggered an international crisis, and one psychic's claim is that we're witnessing something far stranger than Russian aggression.

Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the weird darkness.

The first major incident forced a near four hour suspension of lights at Copenhagen Airport on the evening of September twenty second, after two to three large drones were repeatedly seen inside controlled airspace.

These weren't small hobbyist quad copters accidentally straying into restricted zones.

Witnesses reported multiple drones approaching from different directions, flickering lights, and vanishing without a trace.

The drones were first sighted at about nine forty four pm local time on that Wednesday, according to police, and remained in the airspace for several hours.

The pattern was deliberate, methodical.

The Defense Minister said it appeared a professional actor was behind the systematic lights.

Copenhagen Airport, Scandinavia's busiest hub, handles hundreds of flights daily.

When those flights stopped, the ripple effects spread across Europe, but Copenhagen was just the beginning.

Oslo gardamone and neighboring Norway also briefly closed its airspace that night, following a separate sighting two capitals.

Two sets of mysterious drones appearing almost simultaneously the next day brought no relief.

Alborg Airport, which also hosts some military air base was twice affected on September twenty fourth and twenty fifth, and then September twenty fifth and twenty sixth, and police received additional reports near Asburg and other airports near the southern town of Sorg and had a key military installation, the main base of Danish F sixteen and F thirty five jets.

The military base houses Denmark's most advanced fighter aircraft, the kind of target that would interest hostile intelligence services.

They also noted that the drone sidings in Alborg followed a similar pattern to those halted flights at Copenhagen Airport for four hours on Monday, when a number of large and unidentified drones responded.

The consistency suggested coordination planning expertise.

The Danish Prime Minister met Frederickson declared a hybrid war in Europe was underway, describing it as the most difficult and dangerous situation since the end of the Second World War.

Her words carried weight.

Denmark had not seen this level of thread to its infrastructure since World War II.

Danish authorities characterized the activity as a likely hybrid operation intended to unsettle the public and disrupt critical infrastructure.

Hybrid warfare the Turmer intelligence agencies use for attacks that blur the lines between criminal activity, espionage, and acts of war.

Drones appearing over airports fit the pattern perfectly, causing maximum disruption with minimal risk to the operators.

The timing was particularly suspicious.

Top European leaders had been scheduled to descend on Copenhagen for a European Council meeting to discuss defense and Ukraine, followed by a European Political Community summit with European leaders gathering to discuss the war in Ukraine.

The drone appearances took on darker implications.

The Danish police chief, Superintendent Jens Jesperson told reporters that authorities were investigating several theories as to the origin of the drones, including that they may have been launched from nearby ships.

A Danish newspaper reported that a Russian warship was spotted off Denmark's coast with a transponder turned off during those critical days, but the drones themselves behaved strangely.

The drones appeared to be flying around the airports with their lights turned on, but authorities decided against attempting to shoot down the drones.

Why would covert operators fly with lights on making themselves visible.

It seemed almost like they wanted to be seen.

NATO announced that it was upgrading defense measures in the Baltic Sea region.

Soon after, a German air defense frigate, the FSG Hamburg with NATO's Baltic Sentry Mission, arrived in Copenhagen to help strengthen airspace surveillance during the EU summit.

Denmark's response was unprecedented.

Denmark barred all civilian drones from its airspace before the European Union summit, following reported sightings of drones at several military locations overnight on that Saturday.

A violation of the prohibition could result in a fine or imprisonment for up to two years.

Ukrainian military personnel traveled to Denmark to support their partners in response to the recent appearance of unidentified drones over the country.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced I was not lost on observers Ukraine fighting its own war against drones, sending experts to help Denmark.

The government never officially pinpointed who staged the drone flights, but the Prime Minister said there's only one country willing to threaten us, and it is Russia, and therefore we need a very strong answer back.

While Danish authorities scrambled fighter jets and NATO deployed warships, Uri Geller was composing a very different analysis from his home.

The seventy eight year old Israeli British psychic, famous for his spoon bending demonstrations and controversial claims about extraterrestrial contact, saw something else entirely in the Danish crisis.

His statement on social media platform x was extraordinary, even by his standards.

Quote, friends watched the skies.

Remember last year's mysterious drones over military bases in the UK, Germany and the US.

They forced a state of emergency in New Jersey, and now it's happening again.

Been making claims about alien contact for decades, but his most explosive assertion involved NASA itself.

Geller says he was shown the bodies of beings from outer space by a NASA engineer and an astronaut.

In recent claims made by the illusionist, the massive aliens are said to be kept in a refrigerated room well below the surface of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The story, as Geller tells it, begins in nineteen seventy four, after Geller used his will to bend a famous rocket scientist's wedding ring, Werner von Braun, to convince him of his powers.

The pioneer opened his safe to reveal a mysterious piece of metal, which he said was a piece of a UFO that crashed on Earth.

The former Nazi rocket scientist who became the architect of America's space program, allegedly showed Geller something that officially didn't exist.

They drove to a concrete building on a NASA base.

Geller described going down three or four floors underground.

They put on orange Antarctica style coats with NASA logos before entering a refrigerated room.

What happened next, according to Geller, changed his understanding of reality.

A total of eight corpses were on display in the building, according to Yuri's recollection, with the intact but mangled bodies preserved in glass containers.

Geller claims to have seen alien bodies in glass tubes, many of which appeared mangled, as if forcefully removed from a craft.

According to Geller, the Danish drones weren't drones at all, at least not human controlled ones.

The excuses are the same as last year.

Hobby drones or foreign military tech ridiculous.

It's the same playbook used to dismiss Roswell in nineteen forty seven as a weather balloon.

He wrote.

His argument centered on the drone's behavior.

If these were hobby drones, how could they hover over airports for hours, evade detection and disappear at will?

If they were military drones, why flash lights like a show?

The lights were the key detail for Geller.

Military drones conducting espionage would operate in stealth mode.

The theasecraft seemed to want attention to be witnessed to cause disruption without actual damage.

Uri claims aliens bestowed him with psychic powers when he was a toddler aged just three.

He had a UFO encounter on Christmas Day nineteen forty nine near the working class neighborhood in Israel where he grew up.

After hearing kittens, the young Yuri is said to have wandered into a piece of land at the back of his house.

Suddenly, a bright light appeared above him and struck him, apparently activating his powers.

Geller's interpretation of the medal that the rocket scientist allegedly showed him was equally unusual, saying I felt it wasn't terrestrial.

It was metallic, elongated and had a hue I have never seen before.

It felt like it was alive, like it was breathing.

The Denmark incidents weren't occurring in isolation.

On the nineteenth of December twenty eighteen, shortly after nine pm, a security officer reported seeing two drones while waiting at a bus stop at Gatwick Airport, one above a vehicle and the other above a nearby perimeter fence.

Due to the risk of collision with aircraft, Gadwick immediately closed its only runway and suspended all flights.

The investigation into the disruption lasted eighteen months, cost eight hundred thousand pounds and involved five different police forces.

One hundred and seventy drone sidings were reported, one hundred and fifteen of which were deemed credible by police.

No videos or photographs of the drone were given to the police.

The Gatwick incident remains one of aviation's most puzzling mysteries.

The investigation was closed on September twenty seventh, twenty nineteen, citing lack of new information, no culprit or evidence of drone use was found.

Some experts later suggested there might never have been a drone at all, just misidentified aircraft lights and mass hysteria.

Economists estimate that during the thirty three hour closure, with over one thousand flights canceled, airlines lost fifty million pounds and Gatwick Airport lost one point four million pounds.

The financial damage was enormous, but the psychological impact was greater.

Airports worldwide suddenly realized their vulnerability to tiny flying machines.

Frankfurt Airport in Germany experienced similar shutdowns in twenty twenty three.

Last year, Ry Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, ironically, the same base long associated with UFO conspiracy theories, closed for four hours due to drone sidings.

A freedom of information request in twenty twenty four showed that the NPAs recorded no drone sidings at Gatwick between the nineteenth and thirty first of December twenty eighteen.

This revelation raised troubling questions if professional pilots and security personnel were reporting drones but surveillance systems recorded nothing.

What exactly were people seeing.

The Danish incidents showed similar patterns.

Professional observers, pilots, military personnel, air traffic controllers reported multiple sightings, yet the drones seemed to appear and disappear at will, evading both detection systems and pursuit.

Danish authorities said they were still unclear, and the country had yet to decide whether to invoke NATO's Article four, which enables member states to request consultations over security concerns.

Article four had only been invoked a handful of times in NATO's history.

Considering it showed how seriously Denmark took the threat.

In twenty seventeen, declassified documents from the CIA showed that Geller convinced America's top intelligence agency in scientific testing that he did have some psychic abilities.

The CIA's Project Stargate, which investigated psychic phenomena for intelligence purposes, had taken Geller seriously enough to conduct extensive testing.

But we can say that this resembles a model of hybrid warfare we've seen elsewhere in Europe, a security official said during a press briefing.

I would remind you, as some of you, of course know, that we assess the risk of Russian espionage in Denmark to be high, and we also assessed the risk of Russian sabotage in Denmark to be high.

The timing supported the Russian theory.

The Baltic Sentry Mission had launched in January in response to a string of incidents that damaged power cables, telecom links, and gas pipelines on the Baltic Sea bed.

Russia had been accused of sabotaging underwater infrastructure across the Baltic region.

The Russian embassy in Denmark suggested the drone sightings are a staged provocation.

Undoubtedly they will be used as a pretext for further escalating tension in the interests of forces seeking by all means to prolong the Ukrainian conflict and extend it to other countries, the embassy wrote on telegram.

But Russia's denial came with its own strange twist, suggesting the incidents were staged by someone else to frame Russia.

If true, it meant someone was conducting sophisticated operations to heighten tensions between NATO and Russia.

Suspected drone activity forced Denmark's Aleborg Airport to close for a second time just twenty four hours right before midnight on that Friday, the latest in a slew of similar incidents that prompted Danish authorities to alert NATO and the EU.

The drones kept coming, following patterns that suggested intimate knowledge of airport operations and security responses.

The Danish Police commissioner said many people had reported drone sidings.

Of course, many of these reports do not cover activities that are of interest to the police or the military.

But some of them do.

But I think the one inn al board does.

The sheer volume of reports creates its own problems.

How could authorities distinguish between actual hostile drones, misidentified aircraft and pure imagination fueled by media coverage.

The uncertainty itself became a weapon.

I predict more sightings in the coming months across airports, cities, and military bases worldwide.

Watch the skies, but don't believe the lies, because it's about to get busy up there, Geller wrote in a statement.

This theory represented the extreme end of speculation, but it highlighted a troubling truth.

Nobody really knew what was happening in Denmark's skies.

Yuri dismissed a US Defense Chief's report, in which they claimed to have found no evidence ETS exist as a massive pile of hot, steaming bull.

US intelligence whistleblower David Grush has claimed officials had recovered debris and alien biologics from ten UFOs that have crashed on Earth.

He said scientists had been secretly tasked with reverse engineering ET technology and a bid to give the US an advantage in the global arms race.

Grush's testimony to Congress has given new credibility to UFO claims.

Even if most experts remained skeptical for years, I had to deny my true mission and camouflage my work, Geller said, adding few people know the truth.

I presumed all world leaders do Obama, Trump, Natan, Yahoo, We're all communicating with ET.

As October arrived and Denmark slowly returned to normal operations, fundamental questions remained.

If Russia was behind the drones, why make them so visible?

If they were surveillance operations, why use lights that announced their presence.

If the goal was disruption, why not cause actual damage.

Little was known about what kind of drones were used in Denmark's sightings.

However, the use of high tech drones had become more widespread as the technology developed, making it difficult to draw conclusions as to those responsible.

Drone technology has become very sophisticated, said Edward Arnold, a senior research fellow for European Security, a UK defense and security think tank RUSSIE.

A lot of people are trained and use drones almost for recreational purposes, so this isn't now the preserve of elite state based actors.

The Danish crisis revealed a new kind of vulnerability.

Airports, military bases, critical infrastructure all could be paralyzed by machines that cost less than a used car, whether operated by Russian intelligence, criminal groups or something else entirely the drones.

It exposed weaknesses that couldn't easily be fixed.

Living in Denmark, you might have, just as maybe also in Sweden until a couple of years ago, kind of thought that you were shielded from these developments.

That a farmer Swedish ambassador who directs the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

But this is obviously no longer the case.

Uri Geller, watching from AFAR, remained convinced that humanity was misunderstanding the entire situation.

The drones weren't attacking or surveilling.

They were demonstrations, messages, perhaps even warnings from intelligence that didn't originate on Earth.

Most dismissed his claims as fantasy, But in airports across Europe, security officials scanning empty skies for threats they couldn't identify or stop might have wandered, just for a moment if the strangest explanation might somehow be true.

After all, the conventional explanations weren't working either.

The skies above Denmark had returned to normal, filled again with the orderly procession of commercial aircraft, but everyone watching knew it was temporary.

The drones would return, whether Russia, criminal, or something else entirely, and when they did, the world still wouldn't know how to stop them.

Thanks for listening.

If you'd like to read this story for yourself, you can read it on the Weird Darkness website.

I've placed a link to it in the episode description.

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All stories used in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise.

And now that we're coming out of the dark.

I'll leave you with a little light, Ezekiel one, verses four and five.

I looked and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north, an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light.

The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures.

And a final thought, the universe is a pretty big place.

If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

Carl Sagan, I'm Daryn Martler.

Thanks for joining me in the weird darkness.