The Plains Drone Swarms

Thirty to fifty drones flew independently across the night sky over the high plains, according to the archive's telling, while a larger mother ship hovered for hours near nuclear missile silos. The telling links the scene to events in 1965. The mother ship and the 1965 parallel come from a commentator and are not in the official record.

What the record does hold is strange enough. From mid-December 2019 until about 7 January 2020 residents and sheriff's deputies reported groups of drones with wingspans of about six feet. The reports came from Phillips, Yuma and Logan counties in Colorado and from Chase and Perkins counties in Nebraska. The drones flew grid patterns for hours after dark in groups of up to dozens, and some were reported near Minuteman missile fields.

What is on the record

This was a regional flap and not a single sighting, and the archive anchors it on the Chase County reports. Sheriff Kevin Mueller of Chase County is named in the record among the officers involved. A multi-county law enforcement task force was formed. The FAA and the FBI looked into the reports, as did the Department of Homeland Security and the Air Force. F.E. Warren Air Force Base said the drones were not theirs. FAA records were later released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The investigators found that many of the reports were planets or stars or ordinary aircraft. The FAA did not identify any operator for the rest. The flap was never resolved, and it was reported widely in national and local press while it ran.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 on three resolved claimants from one video on one channel. Only one of the three is a person, a single Chase County deputy. The other two are whole groups, law enforcement and civilians, each standing in as one witness. The underlying record is broader than the archive's holding, with a task force and federal paperwork behind it. The archive does not yet hold any of those documents. What flew over the plains that winter is not resolved here.