Strange flying objects are still congregating high over Sweetwater County’s Red Desert and Jim Bridger Power Plant, the sheriff’s office says.
Sweetwater County Sheriff John Grossnickle saw the drone-like flying objects with his own eyes as recently as Saturday night, his spokesman Jason Mower told Cowboy State Daily on Monday.
That marks 13 months of lighted, drone-like objects congregating, often in coordinated formations, over the Red Desert and power plant, Mower said, adding that they’re too high to shoot down from the ground level.
“We’ve worked with everybody,” he said. “We’ve done everything we can to figure out what they are, and nobody wants to give us any answers.”
Mower said the sheriff took Wyoming U.S. House Rep. Harriet Hageman out to see the objects, and she watched them.
Hageman’s office did not respond to an email request for confirmation and comment by publication.
The phenomena are so pervasive, and any hope of addressing them so remote, that people have stopped reporting them to the sheriff’s office, said Mower.
He uses the terms “drone” and “unidentified flying object” interchangeably, noting that the objects are thousands of feet above the earth; they move like drones, but are fundamentally still a mystery.
“It’s like the new normal,” Mower said.
The objects haven’t done any harm to date, he added.
“It’s like this phenomenon that continues to happen, but it’s not causing any, you know, issues that we have to deal with — other than the presence of them,” Mower said.
If the objects pose an imminent harm at some point, “rest assured … we’ll certainly act accordingly,” he said.
But for now, with no answers or hope of getting answers, Mower said sheriff’s personnel are focusing on daily public danger and crime situations that they have the ability to address.
Lawmaker Dares To Ask
State Senate Appropriations Chair Tim Salazar, R-Riverton, on Friday asked the leader of the Wyoming National Guard about “UAPs,” or unidentified anomalous phenomena, during the agency’s discussion of its non-existent drone-combat budget.
UAP is the new government acronym for UFO.
Wyoming Adjutant General Greg Porter said he didn’t think he could discuss that in open testimony.
During the drone talk, Porter said the Guard doesn’t have — and isn’t asking for — drone interdiction equipment in its budget right now, though the state passed a law this year allowing the governor to deploy the Guard against drones over critical infrastructure.
Anything the Wyoming National Guard may acquire now would likely be obsolete in 12-14 months, added Porter.
Sweetwater Sheriff Not Alone
Grossnickle’s office was among the most outspoken on the issue of mystery drones this past winter, but the southwestern Wyoming sheriff wasn’t alone.
Niobrara County Sheriff Randy Starkey said he and others in his community watched mystery drones flying over the Lance Creek area all last winter — from late October through early March.
Starkey told Cowboy State Daily on Friday that with no sightings since March in his county, he’s “just glad they’re gone.”
But he never received answers on their origin, he said.
Six more sheriffs told Cowboy State Daily in January that they’d either seen potential mystery drones or had reports of them in their counties.
As of Friday, many of those sheriffs said they hadn’t had sightings since about late January.
And Here’s Why
Starkey was the first Wyoming sheriff to make headlines last December about his county’s strange flying object manifestations.
His interview coincided with nationwide fervor over pervasive, frequent nighttime drone sightings over the state of New Jersey that crashed news outlets throughout that month.
The mystery still hasn’t left the news cycle.
Eight days after his inauguration, President Donald Trump yielded a terse explanation, saying the drones were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration and did not pose a national security threat.
A private company at a high-powered Army conference took responsibility for setting off last year’s “UFO pandemonium in New Jersey,” the New York Post reported in an October news story that quoted an anonymous source.
As of Dec. 7, USA Today was reporting “a few major explanations” for the objects, which chalked them up to a combination of research drones, other night-sky lights and planes, and a culmination of “confirmation bias” among the thousands of tipsters.
But strange flying objects are not a shut case as far as Congress is concerned.
The House Oversight Committee hosted a Sept. 9 meeting on protecting whistleblowers who report UAP sightings.
In 2023, Congress heard what CBS News called “stunning” testimony of pilots’ UAP sightings.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
