Previously on OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones.

Colorado has what they call a multi mission aircraft.

They call it an MMA.

They can pinpoint of a.

Straight cap in the middle of a wildfire somewhere.

The man mentioned in the article who's apparently taking responsibility for the sightings is this guy named Matthew Spencer.

Everybody's knowing completely around that site, but it doesn't show right there at that site.

Very weird.

Why do you think the drone showed up when the trash can was let with fire.

I think it picked up the heat.

It was probably at least eight feet across.

It was intimidating.

Didn't know anything like that, was it even existed that could hover like that and then take off at that kind of speed.

Hong Kong health authorities have activated their most serious response level after an outbreak of a new type of viral pneumonia in China.

As the World Health Organization has declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of International Concern.

New York now confirming its first case.

We're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity.

The WHO has formally declared the coronavirus a global pandemic.

When the coronavirus pandemic ramped up in the spring of twenty twenty, I stayed focused, but experienced many setbacks.

Along with trying to find more about Matthew Spencer and if he was tied to the sidings, I didn't cover other things, things that didn't make sense and made me fear what technology may be hovering above the prairies.

Chapter eleven Outskirts of Yuma left here, old fashioned sign, rustic kind of text in the window.

To help get a clearer picture of Matthew's relationship with the Yuma Pioneer, I set a time to visit with the newspapers editor, Tony Rail.

Walking into the newsroom felt like going back in time.

The walls were a bit worn, and there was a scent in the air that smelled like an old five and dime store.

Tony, nice to meet you.

How many papers do you appront of?

Weekend?

Here?

Oh, are circuations about two thousand.

Tony's the kind of guy you'd imagine running a small town newspaper.

He had gray hair glasses, and you could tell he loved the news by the way that he talked.

He walked me to an empty room, then told me when he first became aware of the unknown aircraft for sure, it.

Was in December when it started started getting reports about him things in New Year's Even my kids said they thought they saw one too, and drove out in the country a little ways to kind of follow it.

There's somewhere around.

That night, when we talked for a couple minutes, I moved the conversation to Matthew.

Oh.

He was saying, there were the ones you know that were doing this stuff.

Some of found out more for him, and they just kind of disappeared and never heard fro him again.

After a while, Tony didn't reveal much.

After I left the office, I thought I'd chat with a few local residents to see if Matthew was a regular in Yuma.

No one had seen him.

Another name kept getting brought up, Tim Colin.

It was said that Tim may actually know what was behind a few of the sightings.

Tim lived in a white, historic looking home on the main drag right through town.

He was waiting for me on the front porch.

I got an old saying, and I take it from Einstein, the universe is not only stranger than you imagine it's stranger than you can't imagine.

I take that straight to heart.

I'm pushing seventy here, and I've learned a lot.

There no other way to look at it.

Tim has gray hair and a distinctive voice.

It didn't take long to realize why folks pointed me in his direction.

The night I was abducted to my wife and I were coming back from Denner because I had to go up to see a doctor, coming back from a doctor's appointment and coming up Highway fifty nine south of Yuma, about twelve miles south of Yuma at large ufo across the road in front of it was probably a hundred foot long, twenty foot wide and ten foot high, and it crossed over the fence but under the phone lines across the road.

Now it was kind alongside the car and backed up plenty of yards and put the car and parking and we're looking at it.

One light came on right above.

Now there was two bright lights.

Now A lot of people asked me what kind of alien did abducted me?

And I don't really know, got no clue.

Tim believed an alien had snatched him on the outskirts of Yuma and put some type of chip the size of a candalope seed in his arm.

I'd injured my hand working, so I went to the doctor and got next to Ray and he come back and he says, do you know you have a piece of metal in your wrist?

And no, And he said, got any idea where it come from?

He had a student nurse doctor with him, And I said, well, doctor, finish making your rounds and come back and I give you some info on where that piece of metal might have come from, because it was rapidly dawning on me that it was shouldn't have been there, and it had been interesting.

The implant was put in my body and it didn't have no port lantry.

There was no port lanty in my body for this thing to be put in there.

I mean there was a built for brise.

Tim was a character.

This was a fascinating story and a lot for me to take in.

He provided nothing new about the drone like craft seen in the region.

So did you ever find the guy that was mentioned in the article that you were looking for?

No.

I drove all the way to Yuma and I talked to the editor of the paper and he said he talked to that guy about the story, and then he just disappeared.

Everyone kept saying, if you're looking for information about the drones, you got to talk to this guy named Tim, and I went over to Tim's house and he started telling me this story that he was abducted by an alien.

Creepy, creepy, creepy.

Okay, I got to get on this other call, but anyway, I'll talk to late mom.

I look deeper into another theory while trying to find more about Matthew Spencer's background, and that was if these flying objects could be related to the oil and gas industry.

Tell me just a little bit about what your company does and what the priorities are of your company.

We're a small on min aircraft company that we focus primarily on the use of onman aircraft systems for scientific applications, so that can range everything from atmosphere can sense you're sampling to a remote sensing.

That's Jack Elston of Blackswift Technologies out of Boulder, Colorado.

His company not only flies drones for different clients, but builds them too.

So we started out focusing on fixed wing on men aircraft and the reason why we did that is because of the endurance.

They're far more efficient than quad roaders, and so we can fly for a lot longer with the same amount of battery, carrying more payload, And the payload, honestly, is the real reason why these things exist in the first place.

Without a sensor to gather data, you're just having fun flying something around in the air.

So the payload refers to, you know, anything that we're putting on board to gather the data that doesn't have to do with the flight control of the aircraft or actually keeping the aircraft aloft.

Is thermal imaging pretty common in your line of work, Yeah.

I'd say it's second only to just regular visual imagery.

Thermal camera can be used again, you were talking about search and rescue.

It makes it a lot easier to find individuals rather than just trying to look at visual data.

We've also used thermal cameras as well to detect things like pipelines underneath the ground because you can actually see their thermal signatures coming to the surface.

Do people use drones a lot like in oil?

In oil and gas or pipelines like that.

The oil industry, I know they're doing a lot of infrastructure inspection, So inspectrum pipes and things like that, stuff that you normally have to have people climb up on ladders and kind of deal with the risk of that.

It's much easier to just have the aircraft fly the camera up there for you.

They're also doing things like looking at methane detection so see if there's any leaks in the area.

The mysterious aircraft didn't belong to Jack's company, but I thought he could have some ideas as to why they might be flying.

Sounds like they were a fixed wing aircraft from based one of the explanations that I heard, I don't know exactly what people are doing.

I mean, normally I have to get permission to go do that without permission.

The most plausible thing I heard, though, was that it was somebody that was conducting experiments as far as figuring out whether these things could do perimeter surveillance or missile.

Sites missile sites.

When Jack said those words, I had a flashback to high school.

On the way to a football game, I remember somebody pointing out an area on the side of the road where a bomb was buried in the ground.

Weeks rolled by with few developments.

Eventually, a new piece of information emerged Douglas Johnson, volunteer researcher affiliated with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a group that analyzes unidentified aerospace phenomena, obtained a trove of internal FAA emails.

They were published online and provided a glimpse into how the FAA was approaching the unidentified drone mystery.

Looking to verify the authenticity of the messages, I noticed a couple interesting notes in the endless pages of text.

One of them was dated January second, twenty twenty, and written by Special Agent Michael Bumberger of the FAA's Law Enforcement Assistance Program.

Michael Bumberger, who I refer to as Agent Bumberger, wrote that he was chasing a lead about someone who may be behind the sightings.

In the email, he insinuated that he wanted the FBI to visit this person.

Chapter twelve The hunt.

Was the FAA is zeroing in on Matthew Spencer or was he even real?

I contemplated that question many times.

I was beginning to wonder if he was just a joke drummed up over a poker game by some drunk at the bar.

Then everything changed.

Through a series of recurring visits to a couple people who didn't want to be recorded.

I was able to figure out that Matthew Spencer did in fact exist.

I finally believed that I knew how to approach him.

The conversation started with a DM to a random Twitter account.

There wasn't a person's name linked to it and very few details In the bio.

I wrote, I'm a journalist based in la I'm originally from the area.

I'd like to chat with you about the mystery aircraft.

Interested in learning more.

I received a long and detailed reply.

The words were jumbled and confusing at times.

The writing style was similar to the article in the Yuma Pioneer.

I was ninety percent sure I was messaging with Matthew.

I've never seen this guy's face before.

He told me he's wearing Gene Schortz, I believe, a T shirt and a ball cat.

I persuaded Matthew to talk with me in person.

After many hours of driving through Kansas, I slowly pulled up to a location.

He chose, the Old Cowtown Museum in Wichita.

It's a western town that resembled the city in the late eighteen hundreds.

He was waiting in the gift shop.

He had a stocky build with a black hat, car go shorts and glasses on.

We set a brief hello, then began walking through the town's dirt road streets.

We turned past the blacksmith shop, then grabbed a couple of saasparillas from the saloon.

We sat down at some picnic tables.

You're an old town square.

All right, So first go ahead and tell me your name.

Yeah, it's Matthew Spencer.

And what is it exactly that your group does.

Basically, when you start forming together and you're picking up people, and you're picking up you know, property, and you're doing different things.

We decided to form a group.

You know, in a group you're not gonna find on the Internet or a website per se.

But what we want to do in the trick and we want to do is essentially the identifying mark of who we are.

The tracking we want to do is an identifying mark of who we are.

Surely I didn't drive all the way to Kansas for a vague recon sponsores like that.

I asked Matthew to clarify, so we.

Caught some attention.

When you get into what you're referred to as the Colorado Drawn Mystery, naturally, but it's about a decade of work.

And essentially what we're doing is we track high value aerospace targets, so to break down into the business world.

But our many focus is to go after the UAPs that are within the news right now.

I thought back to a few stories I'd seen about UAPs.

Oh, queen of them.

Look on the Afah going against the wain.

They went one.

Hundred, went out of the class.

While the mission of Matthew's group was unusual, I wanted to get straight to the point.

It seemed highly unlikely that one man or team could operate large numbers of drones in multiple locations hundreds of miles apart at the same time.

How many drones were you using, like five, ten, fifteen, twenty.

So the groups of drones, let's say ten to twenty five?

No, not at the same time.

Yeah, do we have a fleet?

Of course?

Was it you know, twenty five the night sky looking any windows?

No?

Well, I pressed Matthew on the characteristics of his drones and if he was actually flying them at night.

I didn't get much information.

So what type of process do you use and do with those drones?

Yeah?

I wouldn't say there's an exact method, But the idea is that you have to get in the air one way or another with your devices and with your tools, and then essentially, based on that data, your picking at your next location.

Matthew avoided the question, and I was losing my patients.

Do you know who is responsible for the drones in Colorado?

You have to get down to the basis.

Were there other drones there besides mine?

Yeah, without a doubt.

Can I tell you who they were?

No, Matthew was adamant that the small number of his drones, along with others, were flying in the night sky.

You know what I do when I'm tracking, or when anybody's tracking, what do you do?

You're flying a grid.

That's just how it works.

And so you hear all the reports coming out, Well, they're flying in a grid.

Kind of makes me think that you know, you got you know, I don't want to stay fool because I wasn't trying to fool anybody, But you've seen something in your brain kind of figured out the rest.

Was there drones in the area, Definitely, But anytime you have drones in the area, there's always a why.

So who's gonna be right on the why?

And it's always the facts and the burden of proofs on you, and I think there's more.

Of a story there.

But I think it was evolving more than just you know, Drnes for no reason.

We're flying in with people there who referred to as the middle of nowhere, and I mean, I'm from a place like that, so there's no disrespect there.

But something was going on.

I was able to confirm that.

On January second, Agent Bumberger emailed Matthew directly saying that he'd been advised by the Yuma County Sheriff's office that the mysterious drones in question were his.

You want to send me down and say I had lives going You want the clearest to understanding.

I think when you get down to it, and that he said, She said, especially federal agencies put me on a polygraph.

I couldn't verify the majority of what Matthew told me.

It appeared that when the FAA wouldn't allow a polygraph, he reached out to different newspapers to claim responsibility for his drones.

If Matthew was breaking any laws, he hadn't been arrested yet.

Was he just screaming for attention behind the scenes?

FAA investigators clearly had an interest in him.

I could tell he wanted to share more.

When we finished visiting, I fired off an email to Ian Gregor to see if he could arrange a short interview with Agent Bumberger.

In a nutshell.

Ian wrote back that he wouldn't make Bumberger available.

I pushed through further correspondence he shut me down.

Since the origin of the sightings was a mystery, I thought the FAA would want to provide as much transparency as possible.

I was wrong.

I had to find another way to Bumberger.

I re examined the FAA emails i'd seen online.

As I analyzed them again, I discovered a paragraph i'd previously skimmed over.

This was part of a message sent on New Year's Eve of twenty nineteen, notating paragraph six.

The drones are reported to have six foot wingspans, and there are several reports that indicate the drones are operating in coordination with a big drone that may be stationary in the area.

There's also an unverified report of the larger drone potentially landing and taking back off from an airport and Imperial, Nebraska.

I closed my eyes and thought back to those first couple nights, I saw the mysterious lights in the sky.

It's what we like to call God's country out here.

You look into the sky, you see a few stars, but then you see all of these blinking lights kind of just moving around in irregular patterns.

I'm looking at one now and it has green and yellow light, and there's one with a solid white light on it.

It looks bigger and lower to the ground, and it looks like it's stayed in the same area since I pulled up here, just kind of hovering, counting at least now one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen fourteen.

I'd seen the unexplained aircraft.

You're the exact spot the FAA official had written about.

Had I missed a landing coming up on obscure invasion of the drums.

Eat a living beat.

I mean they show curiosity, They just show different emotions here.

You can feel it.

They did not look like anything that I had ever seen from this planet.

They backed those things up and were started to.

Come after me as I was coming down the road.

When it comes to the active missile silos, I assume that there's some type of counter drum technology was that in place, I.

Got things to do and it ain't play with drones.

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 @obscurum_series and @gabelenners on all social platforms.

OBSCURUM is produced by Imagine 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, 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 Simikopenko.

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 Invasion is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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