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It was 2019, one week before Christmas, when witnesses spotted an array of slow-moving lights in the night sky over the snowy plains northeast of Denver.
They hovered low, ominously soundless.
Like me, you might have missed them, had you not been outside in the cold of winter, perhaps driving out in the rim of the metro Denver area just beyond the cities of Thornton and North Glend, Colorado.
In fact, the mysterious low-flying nighttime invaders drone on in groups as large as 17, while some say they spotted as many as 30 across the skies over Washington County, Colorado, even as far as western Nebraska and Kansas.
Whatever they were, they flew in a synchronized group without identifiers, without any visible human controller, without transponders, without any heads-up to the FAA or local authorities.
After chasing the lights, driving as fast as 70 miles an hour, one thing witnesses could all agree on was, it's more unnerving than anything.
Chelsea Arnold to NBC News Affiliate December 2019.
Welcome to this episode of Phenomena Case Files with Robert Cavaliere.
Let's dive right into the Colorado Swarm Lights.
Divided right down the middle by the majestic Rocky Mountain Range, Colorado is a mysterious state.
The Centennial State is replete with urban lore stemming from World War II-era secret projects, numerous sightings across the infamous 37th parallel, all the way up to the secret of construction said to be part of the Denver International Airport.
Continuously inhabited perhaps as far back as 30,000 years, the state has a long history of natural and, some say supernatural phenomena.
As recently as the last few years, even the Aurora Borealis was visible for the first time in my memory.
Yes, the state, skirted by its equally enigmatic neighbors in New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Kansas, is a rich playground to those who seek to investigate the unexplained.
The Colorado Swarm Lights, dubbed so by local and national media outlets, was only one of many strange happenings in a long catalog of baffling events that defied explanation.
Witnesses from the rural outskirts beyond the northeastern plains of the Denver metro area described their ordeal in the evening hours as low-flying groups of lights with a south-to-southeast heading as they descended from the borders of the Colorado-Wyoming border.
Drones certainly were already widely in use by this year, but these hovering flying objects, if they were drones, had wings that spanned six to seven feet by most eyewitness descriptions.
These were certainly not the kinds of drones mere amateurs could conceivably pilot or maneuver remotely, especially in the large groupings described that night.
According to aviation experts and local model plane drone enthusiasts, FAA regulations of the time did not yet require, and probably still don't, advance notice from the military.
This is not worthy, as the area wherein the swarm was said to have ominously flown is sandwiched between the F.E. Warren Air Force Base, a mere 30 to 40 miles near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the newly constructed Buckley Space Force Base on the eastern plains of the city of Colorado.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Denver International Airport, i.e. DIA, is only about 15 miles northeast of the Space Force Base.
Indeed, the area seems to be teeming with both legitimate and possibly more covert commercial and military flying operations.
Besides the obvious culprits, some speculative, rogue amateurs flying drones over the front range plains or a quiet military exercise, what makes this occurrence meaningful was the effect it had on those who experienced it.
The mum's the word from federal entities, and the complete left out of the loop by stumped local authorities from county sheriff offices, state patrol, and local police.
The whole event harkens back to Cold War era secrecy and public vexation.
Given the lack of transparency about the night of the swarm lights, it is no wonder reporters and curious minds swarmed to the area, converging on any number of hypothetical explanations or sharing a common denominator.
Unsubstantiated conjecture.
But what is one to do in the absence of reliable information and lack of official notification for or after the fact?
Yet this is what makes this event so fascinating.
If in fact the military or some commercial operation had been responsible for the rogue light show, why wouldn't these entities simply notify the public in advance?
Alternatively, whoever piloted these untagged and unidentified flying objects could have managed the story after the fact, providing some plausible explanation local authorities and news media alike are usually only so happy to accept and pass on.
But that didn't happen either.
Nor did any local authorities issue an intent to investigate the matter as a possible criminal matter.
Blaming a disconcerting bad actor.
Maybe some teenagers out on a night of beer drinking and hijinks, somehow orchestrating an elaborate hoax, might have been the perfect scheme to cover up the real culprits.
Though that might have still left that nagging question unanswered.
What teenager, what rascal out there would have had the funds to own and deploy 70 to 30-something commercial-slash-military-grade drones?
Let alone the piloting expertise to pilot them.
Pilot them at high-velocity speeds and withdraw them swiftly and quietly into some unseen hangar in an area, though rural, sandwiched and well-patrolled by any number of local FAA and military operatives within a 40-50 miles radius?
Instead, we were left with few answers.
Those wishing to point to the suspicious presence of some low-to-high-level conspiracy are not standing on terra firma either.
You only have to think, as pointed out above, that if a conspirator were to have deployed these drones like lights over the planes,
he or they would have to be seriously incompetent in the business of conspiracy and slash or covert operations.
A virtual flunky of the art of spycraft could have executed a better sleight of hand than what occurred on the night over Washington County, Colorado.
Still, questions lead to more questions, and in turn, those questions spur the story-making machine that is mankind.
So we end up with whispers and contrition over rumors, hearsay and confabulation.
The story got big, bigger than it should have, for what is still news from a sparsely populated and remote western state.
So big that national news picked it up, and later even a local Broomfield-based filmmaker produced a thought-provoking documentary about it.
Equally maligned as admired, the 2020 documentary Lights in the Sky by Christa Alexander Case cast a bright, shining light over the swarm lights of unknown origin.
The Colorado swarm lights did add something, after all, to the lore of the Mountain West, and maybe that is all we can ever hope for.
Though headlines sometimes later appear to point a tacit finger to military actors as those who might have quietly owned up,
albeit behind doors to the eerie nighttime flyover, the American public is well used to the expectation of feeling shut out from the relevant details, all as ever under the auspices of national security.
So there you have it. That's the Colorado swarm lights.
It's a bit of a light subject, and pretty much in the synopsis of this little blurb I prepared for y'all,
pretty much all the facts are mentioned, the significant things, what was seen, where it was seen.
And again, here in Colorado, a state that in a lot of ways, unassuming a sports state, a western state,
a state that compared to its neighbors, I don't know, a thousand miles in either direction, is pretty darn small.
Bigger maybe than Wyoming and Kansas, Utah, New Mexico, but not by much, not by much.
And yet this area is very interesting to me. I happen to live here. I'm from the area.
So I have experienced a lot of these things. And for me, the Colorado swarm lights was not the most eye-opening thing in the world by any means,
but it adds yet another layer to this region. And it's relevant to me because I'm making this show,
I'm preparing it in a way that is more experiential, that's coming more from what I've seen, what I'm exposed to.
And yes, I'll take trips to places where other things, other interesting things, especially out here in this big old land, have happened.
I'm interested in investigating lore, mysteries, and even just the metaphysical aspects of all of these things.
What do they mean to us? Why are they significant? Why have we always wondered about them?
And why is this region so replete with these kinds of developments, these kinds of interesting stories?
It makes it so interesting to live here. And wherever you happen to be, I'm sure that you have a rich history.
Also, whether it's an urban area or a rural area, I like the idea of people investigating for themselves what lies behind that thin veil.
What's out there? Why do we assume that we're sitting here leading our lives, busy with the mundane things,
and yet all of these strange things are happening around us?
So it opens up kind of a portal to inquiry, to curiosity, and maybe to some risk-taking.
We talk about conspiracies a lot when we think about, I don't know, speculation, when we start to wonder.
That's a big label, and it's kind of become a very big pejorative, a big negative in the way that we just think about the unexplored.
A conspiracy is a plot that is orchestrated by quite a few actors, but there's a lot of blind conspiracies, right?
There's a lot of things that are born out of this very act of no information.
It's a phenomenon from World War II. It is something that was either very well intended in the beginning, maybe because of national security concerns.
After all, we have lived through Cold War, and we're probably entering a new Cold War type of spy crap, type of secrecy.
But when that happens, we, the public, we, the people, and even scientists, and even people that are specialists,
scratch their heads, and they begin to wonder about the complexity of it all.
It doesn't help when we don't get a concrete answer.
This little case here, the Carlos Wormlights, is a great example, and it's why I chose it to kick off phenomena case files.
Not because, like I said before, it's the most eye-opening or the most baffling case in the world, but because it's from this region, because it's very American,
and because it exemplifies a pattern that we're going to see as we begin to dive into different mysteries and different phenomena.
I hope that you'll join me in my adventure. This is something that's very exciting to me.
I've thought about it for a long time. I've prepared these things during the snowy days of the winter and now early spring,
and I've wanted very much to reach out to the world, to reach out to any curious minds with my own views,
and not to impose my conclusions, because really, we're going to be asking questions together, and we're going to be asking good questions,
and we're going to be looking at the facts, as I did with this case.
I encourage you to reach out to me. I'm on X under X-Files, and I'm also launching on an Apple podcast, and soon on pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts.
So this is that perhaps a little awkward, perhaps a little funny beginning, but we've got to start somewhere, and this is where I'm starting.
I think that my show is going to be a little bit different than what I see out there, and I love what I see out there and what I hear out there.
I myself listen to podcasts and find myself enjoying them and also asking myself, I wish there was something a little different.
I wish there was something that wasn't so cursory. I wish there was something that wasn't so off-the-headlines, kind of repetitive type of thing,
and I wish that someone could share their experiences with me, and that's what I hope to do with you, to be completely honest about what I perceive, what I see, what I think.
I've been diving into these things for a long time, and sort of inadvertently. It sort of happened, I would say, 10 years ago, and I was a very skeptical person, and in a lot of ways I still am.
I have a rigorous training in logic and empirical thinking, and I think that none of these things should be excluded from that tool, that methodical way of thinking about things,
but also we have to realize that there is a frontier that is unexplored, and that perhaps will always be somewhat unexplored, and that our subjective experience is very valuable.
In fact, many major philosophers nowadays are really putting into the front this idea that our experiences, our subjective experiences, are really quite a bit more important than this idea, this notion of objectivity.
That's not to say that we're going to just throw all reason out there, out the window. Of course not. But we're also going to be open to the spiritual dimensions, the mysterious quantum physical fiber of this world.
There is something more, perhaps, and we're going to be asking questions. I'm just excited to be here with you, and whoever's out there listening, let me know.
I'll have a way to contact me by email, and again by X in the show notes, and if you're listening to this first episode, thank you so much, and I'll see you the next time.
In the meantime, keep your eyes wide open. Look over your shoulder. You might see something you've never seen before.
Thank you.