Be sure to listen until the very end of this final season one episode.

We have a special announcement.

You won't want to miss it.

Last time on OBSCURUM: Invasion of the Drones.

Yeah, so I can confirm that the drone sightings were not related to f you, Warren or the Air Force in anyway.

So that would include you know, contractors or one other you know, third parties.

That might be gentlemen.

But a vivid n ran the electric line in he nicked the communications cable and it's pressurized and I think they said twelve minutes of the Chumberber.

This all falls back on the federal government who refused to do anything.

There's a narrative and it's an fa narative and as if they know everything, they're in the face.

I mean, this is the way it works.

A story that a UFO or UAP was in.

It's not something they want to do with.

There are many nights.

I just wonder.

Where will this story lead.

I'm anxious, but.

I can't worry about what might happen or the consequences of revealing the truth.

My curiosity into looking for a connection between the strange sightings that occurred in Arizona in September of twenty nineteen, and the objects that began appearing over my hometown a couple months later led me to uncover a string of unexplainable encounters which seemed too related to actually be a coincidence.

I was able to confirm that in the same thirty day timeframe of December twentieth, twenty nineteen to January twentieth, twenty twenty, shortly after the craft first arrived in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas, clusters of unknown objects began popping up at night in large numbers and other remote areas of the country.

In the FAA was aware of it, Chapter seventeen, What's out There.

My name is Marc Colotti.

Last name is spelled Hla d y.

I'm the sergeant with the Rice County Sheriff's Office.

I've been doing this twenty eight and a half years with this department.

Race County is mainly rural.

We do have two towns of about twenty four thousand apiece.

Northfield is in the north end of the county and ferebl Minnesota's in the central the south end of the county.

I thirty five split us right and a half.

In Minnesota, Sergeant Halaate of the Rice County Sheriff's Office witnessed a wild spectacle in the night sky on New Year's Eve of twenty nineteen.

It was New Year's Eve, excuse me, so about six point thirty pm, dispatch gave out a report of several drones.

There's a small town, a very small town, unincorporated, basically just northeast of Fairball called Cannon City, and some reports started to come in between Cannon City and Fairbell that there were several drones flying over the area.

I got out to the Cannon City area.

They would hover, they would move, then one of them literally went right over my head, very very slowly, and it was probably eighty to one hundred feet up, but it literally went right over the top of my head about eighty ninety feet.

I was standing outside of my squad car and a small church parking lot and looking straight up.

I went north on the road from this small town, straight north, and it accelerated from forty to fifty miles an hour up to oh, I bet it was eighty was outrunning me and I was doing fifty five to sixty at most.

They did appear to you that these were aware that you were there, that you were doing that.

One, there's no reason to be doing twenty thirty miles an hour flying around eastern Fairbau and all of a sudden slowed down to five miles an hour to pass directly over me.

It was very obvious from the beginning that these drones were not being flown by line of sight, and it was obvious that these drones were being flown most likely over a cell service to receive the signals because these drones were going twenty to five, ten, fifteen miles.

Was a drone I watched when when it out ran me, I stopped on the top of the hill and parked in a field entrance and I watched this drone and then it stopped and it was a ways out, but I had my binoculars and it was flashing white.

And then it started to go up.

And what was odd is it when it started to go up, it started.

To go up slowly, but it.

Kept doing it for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes.

This this thing ended up being thousands of feet in the air, still flashing green and white, and I just I couldn't I couldn't figure it out.

But one to two hours after the drones left our area, they showed up, or most likely the same group we don't know, showed up in Goodhue and Wabasha Counties along the Mississippi River, and they were being chased around by deputies down there, to the point where the state Patrol even sent I believe it was a helicopter down in that area, but they never even never found anything, and the drones just up and disappeared.

As a seasoned investigator, Sergeant Haladi knew what needed to be done.

Next, I called the FAA and Air Traffic Control, and air traffic Control took the message, and then I had an FA supervisor from Texas somewhere call me and questioned me about this.

And it was interesting because I kind of got the idea that he wanted to blame it on.

It was that these were planes, and I'm like, these were not planes.

They were not moving the way planes move.

And I told him, I said I heard one they went right over the top of me at five miles an hour.

He goes, well, we don't have any record of anything.

I'm like, okay, I'm just letting you know.

I don't know.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

I'm not saying they were buying to me or you know, maybe they didn't know either, but it's odd.

That's all I can say.

When you talked to the FAA official, did you feel like they were gonna, you know, do follow up on this and figure out what was actually going on?

Oh?

Absolutely not.

I kind of got the idea that he wanted to be able to put these were planes so he didn't have to file a report.

That is the god's honest truth of what I after getting off the phone with some I'm Mike, I think I have perturbed him more than.

It was informative.

What he was trying to get me to say is they were down at five hundred feet.

I'm like, no, they're a hell of a lot higher than five hundred feet.

I think maybe he would have had to file a report if something was above a certain point, so he wanted to get me to say it was lower.

And he's like, yeah, the distance gets can make it look higher.

And I'm like, okay, I've got twenty twenty vision at fifty some years old, I know what I'm looking at, and I can tell you I've watched this thing go up for twenty minutes and it's a lot higher than you're thinking it is.

He never even, like you know, months later, no one ever called you to say, hey, did you ever figure that out?

Or nothing at all?

You had no follow up.

No follow up none.

I started reading about on the news about all these drones in northeastern Colorado and western Nebraska.

I'm like, well, sumpthing's up?

What's out there?

Thank you for calling City of Algians for one to one after hours.

If this is an emergency, please hang up and down nine.

To one to one.

After leaving a few messages, I was tipped off about a separate incident in a neighboring state.

I'm a sergeant Anthony Regano and that's rig A n O.

So I'm you can just go with Tony.

I'm a sergeant with the Elgin Police Department in Elgin, Illinois, which is halfway between Rockford and Chicago.

I sent in a Freedom of Information Act request with the department.

Then I was granted access to a report Sergeant Rigano filled out.

Take me back to that day, January eighth, twenty twenty.

What was that day like for you?

So at the time, I was a patrol sergeant, So I was a sergeant on the afternoon shift, which is about basically three pm to eleven pm.

We had had a call earlier in the day.

I remember it was a very cold day and it had been relatively busy.

A caller said there was drones in the air over Elgin High School.

As the day progressed, maybe fast forward about twenty thirty minutes, our dispatchers will routinely ask us to call up to their communications division when they have a question, or they have a call that they're not sure if they should dispatch, or they have just general questions.

So I called upstairs and spoke with dispatch, and they said, hey, we have more callers in a different area now, saying that there's at least thirty drones up in the air over the area of the water treatment facility, which is kind of north of the police department, not by very much.

I said, don't dispatch the call.

I'll just go check on it myself.

So I drove out of the police station and I went up to kind of check.

Now, it was a very cold day, and we have our own drone unit here at the police department, so I'm relatively I'm not on the drone unit, but I'm relatively familiar with them.

I know in cold weather they don't really fly for that long, at least not the ones.

We have some cold weather batteries, and they still really don't stay up for that long.

So I was kind of surprised that they were up in a different area that far away from the first dispatch.

So when I got out there, there were a lot.

Of them, and they were all kind of moving at the same speed in kind of in unison, and some of them were huge.

I'd never personally seen a drone that big.

There was probably I would say twenty of them at least that were I would estimate about.

Six feet from like tip to tip.

Those were kind of strange because again I don't really haven't seen anything that big before as far as a drone that's just being flown for you know, fun.

And so I drove back to the police station and a couple of them broke off from the formation, flying southeast and stopped over the police station.

It was kind of at that point that I reached out to the FAA.

I had our dispatchers called the FAA because we have it an FAA building in Elgince.

So I thought, well, maybe they know about whatever this is.

And our local FAA said, we don't know anything about that.

We don't show any scheduled flights, we don't show anything on our radar, we don't show anything in the air.

Kind of being a police officer, my mind started to spin a little bit, and I said, well, why don't you get a hold of somebody who might be able to tell me what's going on with this?

Because this is not normal.

I thought, what are some high target areas in our town?

So I started to kind of go to some different areas.

I mean, it started at the school, a large high school in the area.

Then it moved up to the water treatment facility, and then they started moving to the southeast side of town, over this huge salvage yard junkyard.

There were probably thirty of them by my estimation.

Just hovering.

I got on the phone with a guy from the FAA, actually ironically out of Nebraska, and he was apparently the point person for this, so I spoke with him.

So he said, well, see if you can drive and see if you can catch up with them.

So I ended up actually following some of them into the town just east of us, which is Bartlet and I was driving about thirty thirty five miles an hour, and they were pulling away from me.

That's also something I'm not really used to.

I didn't know.

I know drones do do that, because I actually do know somebody in my personal life who does drone racing, but those are not large drones six feet wide.

The FAA guy that I was speaking to from Nebraska, he actually told me to see if I could shine my.

Spotlight on one of the smaller ones.

So I did at his direction, and when I did so, the lights turned off completely and it flew away.

If the FAA had told police to spotlight drones, I was unaware of it.

At one point, as I was leaving Bartlett, I had to stop at a two way stop sign to cross the street, and one of the drones it stopped moving and then elevated and then it lowered itself behind a tree.

That's the one part that really kind of messed with me a little bit.

That was a part that was the most.

Responsive, I guess, other than the spotlighting, where it just kind of it was clearly why else did it stop?

It knew I was, you know, it might I guess.

I guess apparently must have noticed I was following it.

For every one small one, there were two of the larger ones.

Did you ever have any follow up from the FAA.

Were they able to help you conclusively, like gather more information about this?

No, I did have contact with another agent, and I did forward my report to them, and as well as the two callers I think that called it in.

They said they were going to follow up and talk to them and see if they saw anything further.

I certainly went on the internet and saw started reading some of the stuff about the task force forming out in Colorado and Nebraska, and some people theorizing, you know, what it may or may not be from.

But no, I never got any further interactions so to speak with the FAA in regard to what it was or.

Nor have I and I you know, I check every once in a while out of curiosity to see if I can google and get any answers, and to my knowledge, I have yet to see anything that really explains it.

The impression I got was they said that these are very consistent sightings that were getting into these various different areas, and you know, their stance at that point was that they were just waiting any day that the military was going to tell them, Hey, that was us, don't worry about it.

But they said that, you.

Know, in times past where we have some strange sightings, the government's pretty quick to confirm, yeah, that was us, you know, because they don't really obviously, if they're dealing with some type of technology they don't want out there, they're not going to want it to become some big article.

So I you know, he kind of seemed surprised.

I would say that they have not gotten a phone call to that point indicating it was it was done.

I guess the overall sense I got from them as well, we hope we just get a phone call that explains this, and to that point, we don't really know what else to point a finger at to say what it could even be.

What Sergeant Ragano didn't tell me about his report was just as compelling as what he did.

In the last line, he wrote that the investigations into these drones in Elgin were not even carried over to the next shift because they were dismissed by the Police Department iss UFO sidings.

To my knowledge, there wasn't another agency that played a larger role in the investigation than the FAA agent Ragano's account solidified that there was high FAA confidence the sidings were not related to covert military operations.

An off the cuff interview comment by then United States Transportation Secretary Elaine Chow further echoed that stance.

We heard recently that there was the these covees of drones flying at night over in Nebraska, in Colorado.

We don't know who they are, we don't know who they belong to, we don't know who's operating them.

To this day, we do not.

And so.

The law enforce the local law enforcement initiates the action.

We're very lucky nothing happened.

So the local law enforcements have have stepped down, so we're not we're not actively uh investigating that because the local law enforcements stood dead.

It's been over five years since I began looking into this story.

With the government shooting down weird objects and the sky, Congressional UAP hearings in reports of an agency harboring and reverse engineering alien aircraft, interest in strange sightings has never been higher.

I continually look to the sky, but on the ground, I've been left with a revealing web of theories, lies, and shocking truths.

I'm frustrated, but hungrier than ever to connect the dots.

When I travel to my hometown, I still hear accounts from locals who may be out in the tractor late one night, are coming home from a high school football game, and see lights in the sky that aren't supposed to be there, sometimes following them ever so slowly before going dark.

The first few episodes of this podcast have been released, and I'm back in LA figuring out my next steps.

I'm reminded of the stark differences between southern California mountains and prairies in Middle America.

I'm turning right towards a beach in Malibu.

It's humid but mild.

The water is glistening in the sunlight.

Pausing workout.

Hello, Hey, Gabe, how's it going good?

How are you doing?

I'm doing okay, doing okay.

You know, I've been listening to the podcast.

I think it's great, really interesting.

But I actually have something you may want to look into.

You know my background, well, you know my background and covering national security for a lot of years, and I've been talking to some of my friends who are sources and who are sources and who are off the grid.

You'll never hear from these people in person, but you know these aircraft or drones or whatever the hell they are that you're looking at.

I can't share any more with you right now on it.

I'm going to try to get some more on this, but it could be a problem.

This whole thing is just crazy.

This could be a real national security threat.

That call in your many tips have opened new doors.

The team and I are actively chasing fresh leads to document how this story continues to evolve.

Reports of unidentified aircraft or popping up in other areas of the country.

In late twenty twenty four, mysterious drones began appearing in the Northeast.

We were on the ground investigating possible connections between those sidings and what occurred over the Midwest five years earlier, Which brings me to our special announcement.

Next Tuesday, We're dropping a raw teaser of what we first experienced in New Jersey.

Is the Chaos Unfolded right here on our podcast feed.

Stay tuned.

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 site.

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, Kara 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 Semikopenko.

This project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plough.

Special thanks to Dan Bodanski, Josh Hiller, Keeton Storts, Bryson, Keyes, Ailey Birchfield, David Wasserman, Katrina Norvell and my family.

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

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