Dozens of SUV-sized drones as fast as 120mph terrorized our town's livestock

The police chief of a small Nebraska city has come forward with a warning for New Jersey after his community was terrorized by mystery drones.

Ord, Nebraska Police Chief Chris Grooms revealed to DailyMail.com how Valley County, NE, and its surrounding regions, were besieged for weeks from December 2019 into January 2020 by ‘upwards of 40-50’ drone UFOs at a time. 

Across nearly three weeks of nighttime encounters, typically between 7pm and 11pm, these inexplicable SUV-sized drones operated ‘with impunity,’ Chief Grooms said, and sometimes seemed to be ‘toying with law enforcement.’

‘A lot of reports by ranchers stated that these objects were harassing their horses or cattle on a nightly basis,’ he added. Some of the drones reached speeds of 120mph.

The police chief said he ‘finds it alarming’ that the White House is insisting that the ‘drone incursion over New Jersey is not a known threat’ — particularly given that the size, shape and behavior of Nebraska’s mystery drones matched those in Jersey.

While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) looked into some of Nebraska’s drone cases, part of a wave that covered Colorado and Kansas, all the agency could do was confirm with ‘high confidence’ that the craft were ‘not covert military activities.’

While the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has downplayed the risks posed by these drones, their calming words have been contradicted by US military base officials, New Jersey mayors and NJ’s state Coast Guard, among others.

Although misidentifications of conventional planes have been rife amid the growing public panic, reports by from US military officials across America and Europe, alongside local police, have told matching accounts of these car-sized drones.

Nebraska’s 2019 and 2020 ‘drone swarms’ resembled cases seen penetrating the highly restricted airspace above Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in 2023. Above, a photo taken by an eyewitness of one of these Langley drones – provided to the Wall Street Journal and others

Ord, Nebraska Police Chief Chris Grooms (above) told DailyMail.com: ‘I find it alarming […] to think that the US government is telling us that the […] drone incursion over New Jersey is not a known threat.’ Cheap drones, he noted, have proven deadly on the battlefield in Ukraine

Chief Grooms told DailyMail.com his office ultimately reached out to US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the Pentagon group responsible for missile defense and nuclear deterrence, as well as the FBI, Nebraska State Patrol and the National Guard.

‘All those agencies told us they didn’t know what they were,’ he recalled, ‘or stated that it was not their equipment.’

‘It was starting to really irritate people that there was nothing we could do about it.’ 

Soon, he said, multiple cases emerged of the apparent drones ‘shining beams of light on their homes and livestock.’

These bright lights — beaming onto cattle in the dead of night — would spur the animals to flee beyond their enclosures in certain cases, forcing ranchers to go on a hunt to retrieve them the next morning.

As cases mounted of the drone swarms ‘harassing ranchers and their livestock,’ Chief Grooms recalled, many local police across multiple counties feared that ranchers would soon start to take matters into their own hands.

‘The ranchers [said] “If these things keep messing with my horses and I gotta go round up my cattle every morning [and] if the government’s not going to look into it and doing anything, we’re just going to try and shoot ’em down,”‘ Grooms recalled. 

In 2019 and 2020, the police chief was then a deputy to Valley County Sheriff’s Office, which protects the towns surrounding the city of Ord where he now serves.

As he remembers, multiple police and sheriff’s departments also became worried that locals might get into car accidents ‘when people were trying to find these things themselves […] running across the highways, running stop signs.’ 

Above, a swarm of drones that was apparently captured on camera a few miles outside Omaha, Nebraska – three hours east of Ord and Valley County – but taken in the same December 2019 to January 2020 time frame as Police Chief Grooms’ own baffling local cases

According to one NJ local, this image depicts roughly nine of the unidentified drones flying in to the Garden State from the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday night, December 5, 2024

A US Army vet with the 82nd Airborne, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Chief Grooms noted that most Americans are well aware of how dangerous even a small cheap drone can be — given their routine, deadly use in the war in Ukraine. 

‘A simple drone with just a few pounds of explosives connected to it,’ he said, ‘can bring down a small structure or take out a tank.’

And, in recent weeks, Chief Grooms noted that he would step down from his role as the police chief for Ord, NE, to pursue a US military support role with a private firm.

In one 911 call report, obtained by DailyMail.com, a rural resident of Lincoln County told police she witnessed ‘seven drones flying directly over her house’ and that these ‘suspicious drones’ were moving ‘east and west’ in a coordinated fashion.

The witness described the seven mystery drones ‘as having red, green and white flashing lights’ as they buzzed her property over two nights in early January 2020.

The drone swarm’s lighting colors, as well as the its behavior, match those that later made repeated brazen incursions over the restricted airspace above Air Force joint-base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, then home to America’s stealth F-22 fighter fleet.

For at least 17 nights in December 2023, swarms of these noisy, small UFOs were also seen at dusk ‘moving at rapid speeds’ and ‘flashing red, green, and white lights.’

And these cases are almost identical to what has been reported above sensitive sites in New Jersey, like the US Army’s Picatinny Arsenal. 

Base police have reported 11 confirmed and unauthorized drone sightings over the arsenal since November 13, meaning security officers ‘visibly witnessed a drone.’

But the White House has continued to minimize these cases — with a joint statement released Tuesday from DHS, FBI, FAA and the Pentagon claiming that they ‘do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk.’

In one 911 call report, obtained by DailyMail.com, a resident of Lincoln County told police she witnessed ‘seven drones flying directly over her house’ and the ‘suspicious drones’ moved ‘east and west’ in coordinated fashion. Lincoln is southwest of Chief Groom’s own county

Readers Also Like:  GIS After Dark: Mapping for National Security - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

Police Chief Grooms told DailyMail.com that he too had witnessed a similar mystery drone with red and green lights, just a few days prior on December 28th, 2019. 

At the time, Grooms then-boss Valley County Sheriff Hurlburt also dealt with the drone invasion, witnessing this incident alongside him. 

‘Upon linking up with the Sheriff,’ Chief Grooms recalled of the Dec 28th encounter, ‘we decided to pursue the object the best we could by going westbound on 799th Rd, Gravel Rd, towards the object.’ 

‘While we traveled westbound in our patrol trucks the object clearly knew our intentions,’ he said. ‘It had picked up speed to avoid us.’ 

‘I will note that I found it to be odd or suspicious that the object was clearly avoiding us but at the same time it never veered away from the gravel roads. It always paralleled the gravel roads,’ Chief Grooms continued, ‘as if it was toying with us.’

Local and national news covered this wave of drones sightings in Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska in late 2019 and 2020. Sheriff’s deputies in other parts of Nebraska told the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that they witnessed the drones coordinating with a ‘mothership’

Sheriff Hurlburt and then-Deputy Grooms chased the ‘large drone’ in two vehicles from two different lines of sight, as it flew about 20 miles south of Ord near the Davis Creek Reservoir.

‘While witnessing this object in the sky I noted that it had red and green blinking lights and was hovering and maneuvering slowly west of Ashton Ave,’ Grooms recalled.

‘If it really wanted to avoid us completely the object could have just veered away from the gravel roads,’ he noted, ‘to where we wouldn’t have been able to pursue the object any longer.’ 

As former senior Pentagon security official Chris Mellon told DailyMail.com, speaking of the 2023 Langley base incursions, Chief Grooms’ encounters also fit ‘part of a much larger pattern.’

‘These craft are making no effort to remain concealed,’ Mellon noted. ‘In fact, in some instances, it is clear they want to be seen as though taunting us.’

Valley County dealt with much stranger cases alongside their weeks-long invasion of these mysterious night flights, however, similar to those cases where the drones were ‘messing around with ranchers, cattle and whatnot.’

A US Army vet with the 82nd Airborne – who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan – Chief Grooms noted that most Americans are well aware of how dangerous even a small cheap drone can be, given their routine use in the war in Ukraine. Above, Chief Grooms in his Army uniform

Chief Grooms – above right when he was a deputy with Valley County Sheriff in 2020 – gave the following assessment: ‘With what I have seen and what other LEO’s [law enforcement officers] have told me […] these objects had a mission and purpose and a well-funded budget’ 

Chief Grooms recalled being close enough to the craft to be unsettled by the fact that they produced ‘no noise.’

And, he said, his law enforcement colleagues also were blasted with the same incredibly bright lights as Nebraska’s livestock themselves.

‘I was told by a sheriff who had two deputies with him that a large object that they pursued at upwards of 120mph had stopped and hovered not far from their patrol trucks,’ Chief Grooms said. 

‘As the sheriff and his deputies went to shine their search lights on the object,’ he continued, ‘the object shined a bright light on them as well […] it seemed like daylight all around them for about 150 to 300 yards.’

‘The light was so bright they had to look away,’ Chief Grooms said.

This drone, the sheriff told him, the was about the size of a Chevrolet Suburban.

Journalist and author Michael Shellenberger, who testified to Congress last month on his reports of a hidden UFO data collection program, has obtained a recording where New Jersey mayors have complained of similarly SUV-sized drones. 

The recording documented a White House drone briefing for New Jersey mayors with presentations by the FBI, DHS and FAA.

‘The mayors are livid,’ Shellenberger told Fox News. ‘One of them got up there and said, “I had two automobile-sized drones hovering over my house.”‘

The FBI and other agencies are investigating the strange activity. One representative from the Department of Homeland Security said on December 11: ‘We have no more information as to where these drones are coming from, where they’re launching from, where they’re landing’

Above, a military witness testifies to the drones displaying ‘flashing red, green, and white lights’ above AFB joint-base Langley-Eustis in December 2023. This testimony was released via the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), along with 50 pages of other Air Force records

For his part, Chief Grooms is most open to the theory that the so-called ‘mystery drones’ are either a secretive government program or some form of nonhuman, ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ (UAP). 

‘I do not believe these UAP/drones could be a foreign adversary due to the fact of how far inland Nebraska is,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘If it is a foreign adversary, the US government has failed the citizens of the United States.’ 

‘These UAP/drones are showing up in great numbers of 30 or more,’ the career law enforcement officer and veteran said, ‘imagine the damage that could be done if they all dispersed to their locations with intent to do harm.’

Chief Grooms noted that, given the volume of cases in 2019 and 2020, which stretched around a 100-mile radius of quiet, rural Valley County, he has a hard time imagining what the purpose of a secret US military operation would be.

‘With what I have seen and what other LEO’s [law enforcement officers] have told me […] these objects had a mission and purpose and a well-funded budget,’ he said.

‘If these UAP/drones are US military or private contracting technology, then what exactly was its purpose over Nebraska in 2019?’ he asked. 

‘Other than to burden its citizens and waste local taxpayer dollars on 911 calls and take law enforcement away from its normal duties.’