X-Files of the Pikes Peak Region | Local News | csindy.com

This has been a tumultuous year. Preoccupied by the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing civil unrest and the political turmoil of a contentious election, it’s easy for stories to get lost in the news cycle as audiences decide which existential threat they should focus on on any given day. The U.S. government’s acknowledgment of the existence of UFOs is one of the stories that seems to have fallen through the cracks this year.

In April, the Pentagon officially released three videos recorded by  infrared cameras used by F/A-18 Super Hornets launched from aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2004, 2014 and 2015. The footage shows unidentified flying objects with acceleration and flight characteristics beyond that of any publicly known technology currently in use. On July 23, The New York Times reported on the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) Task Force, a program under the Office of Naval Intelligence, which studies and documents UFO sightings. The U.S. Government has acknowledged the existence of UFOs after decades of silence and denial.

The news comes as no surprise to the hundreds of people who claim to witness UFOs here in Colorado every year. The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a national UFO research nonprofit, reported 26 UFO sightings in Colorado during the month of August alone. While many skeptics point to prosaic explanations for UFO sightings — drones, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, aircraft flares, the Denver Broncos pyrotechnic skydiving team — Colorado residents continue to see, and sometimes capture on camera, unidentified flying objects.

Haley Pretzman, host of the Horror Comedy Potcast, which explores spooky experiences and sometimes UFOs, witnessed a UFO in Pueblo in 2017. “It was three lights, and they were in a line, equidistant to each other, and they were close, like four blocks away,” she explains. “It didn’t seem to be terribly far. We went towards it, and as we were getting closer it formed a triangle shape. At this point I pulled out my phone, to take pictures of it, and as I was watching it, it started to glow. There were all these little lights and colors and they were twinkling, and it didn’t look like anything… there’s nothing I could compare it to.”

The strange triangular formations of glowing spheres are a common sighting throughout Colorado, and are similar to the famous “Phoenix Lights” of 1997, which the Air Force officially declared the result of flares dropped from A-10 Warthogs. UFO enthusiasts have questioned the Air Force’s claims, and many of the glowing sphere sightings in Colorado, like Pretzman’s, seem to defy that explanation.

“In the center of this triangle, it almost looked like a galaxy,” continues Pretzman. “Just like that the lights dimmed and it was a plane, like a jet or something. It was very small, not a plane like I have ever seen before, and then it zoomed away. It was gone in like six seconds. It was gone super fast.”

On March 25, Brian Eastin, a fixture in the local music scene who passed away unexpectedly in May, witnessed strange objects in the skies over Colorado Springs. “I was driving up north on Academy [Boulevard] and Platte [Avenue],” he said during an interview after his sighting. “It was dusk and I looked left, over the town, and I noticed above the mountains I saw what I thought were like, tower lights at first. 

What I remember really seeing in detail is something between 15 to 20 objects that ranged in color from gray to some of them had like blinking white lights and what I thought were red lights — that’s why I thought they might have been tower lights — and they were moving in a frenetic, almost figure eight, like a pair of binoculars. There was some order to it, but then there was some frenetic-like swarm activity to a few of them. It was like a video game in the air. Then all of a sudden the figure eight flattened out and then they shot ridiculously fast directly over me, out east, and were gone. I’d say that whole thing lasted maybe 12, 15 seconds.”

Social media posts from that evening, from multiple people, corroborated Eastin’s account, although additional witnesses declined to speak about the event on record. While many people claim to have seen UFOs, few actually report them.

Eastin’s sighting came just two months after widespread reports, many by local sheriff’s departments, of mysterious drones flying over fields in northeastern Colorado, including near Sen. Cory Gardner’s home in Yuma, Colorado, and Nebraska. The sightings prompted an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force. A report from Dec. 31, 2019, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Douglas D. Johnson, a volunteer researcher affiliated with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies and published by aviation blog The War Zone, read, “Chase County, Nebraska sheriff’s deputy reported observing 30 to 50 [drones] flying independently of each other with a larger ‘mothership’ hovering for hours. The deputy stated the larger drone appeared to be way over 55 pounds. All at one time the smaller drones returned to the larger drone and departed the area to the west.” 

Aside from ruling out military involvement, the investigation has yielded no answers about the origin, nature or mission of the drones, and public sightings of the drones have ceased. 

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Colorado Springs Independent can be found here ***