The Colorado Swarm Lights

03.07.24

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 Northglenn, Colorado.  In fact, the mysterious, low-flying, nighttime invaders droned on in groups as large as 17 while some say they spotted as many as 30 across the skies over Washington County, Colorado and 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.

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 secretive 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 in the last few years even the aurora borealis was visible for the first time in this writer’s memory. Yes, the state, skirted by its equally enigmatic neighbors, 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 north-eastern 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 conceivable pilot or maneuver remotely, especially in the large groupings described that night, according to aviation experts and local model-plane and drone enthusiasts.

FAA regulations of the time did not yet require–and probably still don’t, advanced notice from the military. This is noteworthy as the area wherein the swarm was said to have ominously flown is sandwiched by both 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 Aurora, Colorado. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Denver International Airport (DIA) is only about 15 miles north-east 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 that night of the swarm lights, it is no wonder reporters and curious minds swarmed to the area, converging on any number of hypothetical explanations all sharing a common denominator: unsubstantiated conjecture. But, what is one to do in the absence of reliable information and lack of official notification before 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, who ever piloted these untagged, unidentifiable 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 17-to-30-something commercial/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 forty-to-fifty 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 drone-like lights over the plains, he or they would have to be seriously incompetent in the business of conspiracy and/or covert operations. A virtual flunkee of the art of spy-craft could execute a better sleight of hand than what occurred on that 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 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 Krista Alexander, 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 sometime 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 fly over, the American public is well-used to the expectation of feeling shut out from relevant details, all, as ever, under the auspices of national security.