Every night from November to February, Jezriah Krubeck could watch from his porch as nearly two dozen mysterious lights rose from Cedar Mountain west of Cody.
“Just like orbs floating up over the mountain,” Krubeck said. “They would float up and move toward each other. There were quite a few that basically followed the ridge line from left to right.”
Then they stopped, and he thought the mysterious phenomenon might have moved on. This week, he said, they’re back.
“Within the last two or three nights, I'm starting to see them again,” Krubeck said.
Orbs On The Mountain
When he noticed the lights last year, Krubeck said he didn’t jump to the conclusion of UFOs.
“I have my doctorate in education, so I wanted to approach it more from an empirical perspective,” he said. “I wanted to disprove it. I think if you go into it looking for a logical explanation and you're left with none, then there's more credence.”
Krubeck said he wasn’t the only one. When he started seeing the orbs, he asked his friends in the neighborhood to take a look out their windows, too.
Many saw them, he said, but nobody quite shared his curiosity.
“I wanted to have as many people see it as I could, just to verify,” Krubeck said. “I was always kind of shocked. They had the initial fascination, but then they’re like, ‘Oh, OK, whatever.' I think it’s just the way we've been so desensitized, it just wasn’t a big deal.”
Krubeck has yet to come up with a logical explanation, but he said he’s safely ruled out stars, meteors or any other natural cosmic event.
“They would interact with each other,” Krubeck said. “I don't think it was a naturally occurring phenomenon in the way that they moved. Because not only would they change directions, they would stop. I had a little laser that I'd shine on them, and they would stop.”
The orbs, he said, also never matched any satellite tracker and they didn’t have the flashing lights required on aircraft.
But, Krubeck said, the flashing lights of a human-piloted plane often weren’t too far behind.
“The other thing that I found interesting is once they kicked off and they were doing their thing, the number of conventional aircraft would increase pretty dramatically as well,” Krubeck said. “Typically, you'll see a few aircraft moving across the sky, but there would be like four or five aircraft moving up and over the mountain.”
Weird Stuff, All the Time
Krubeck isn't the only one looking up. On Wednesday night, Casey Edwards, a gold miner and tattoo artist, had just turned off the highway near Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn Mountains when he spotted a single light ahead of him that moved, then stopped dead.
“I'm like, ‘All right, that's just weird,’” Edwards said. “I started videotaping it, and then I could see a couple other ones. There were like four other ones.”
When he started driving again, the mysterious light did not disappear into the rearview mirror.
"It almost, like, followed me down the road,” Edwards said. “Once I got into camp over there, I counted five or six of them in the air. They were just hovering, and you could see them kind of dance back and forth a little bit as they were trying to stay stationary and the wind was moving them around.”
Like Krubeck, Edwards said he looked for the logical explanations first. He thought they could be drones ranchers use to monitor cattle. Archery season had also just started, and he thought maybe they could be drones from hunters.
But as the night went on, Edwards said the lights didn’t behave like typical drones.
“Small drones, they got maybe a 30-minute flight time,” Edwards said. “These things were up there for two-and-a-half, almost three hours.”
Later, Edwards enhanced the videos and found that, upon a closer look, they didn’t resemble machinery at all. With the caveat that he feared “sounding like a f*cking wacko,” Edwards said the light looked more like a sentient being.
“I'm not paranoid about it,” Edwards said. “I just want to know what the hell it is.”
Strange lights are only the latest unexplained experience Edwards has encountered on the mountain. He filed his gold claim there 13 years ago, and he said the odd occurrences started well before that, back when he and his wife were still searching for a place to prospect.
One of the strangest, he said, was caught on a trail camera.
“Two little balls of light, looks like a snowman, coming down from 25, 35 foot up in the tree line,” Edwards said. “Just kind of moves around, nice and slow, and comes down right in front of my trail cam.”
After years on that mountain, Edwards said the unexplained has stopped feeling like an exception.
“Weird stuff happens all the time,” Edwards said.
‘No Explanation’
Most strange lights in the sky have ordinary explanations, and Richard Beckwith, Wyoming's director of the Mutual UFO Network, is the first to say so. Meteors, planes, birds, balloons and drones account for the vast majority of sightings.
But he estimates 5% to 10% never get explained.
Beckwith reviewed the two recent videos filmed near Cody and shared his take with Cowboy State Daily in a text message. He said Edwards' footage showed no "novelistic movement, beyond the jiggling of the camera."
Beckwith said he didn't have enough information to say for sure, but Edwards might have simply been watching an airplane in the distance.
Krubeck’s video, Beckwith said, was not so easy to explain.
“It clearly depicts several disparate objects, all glowing white orbs, moving in different directions,” Beckwith said. “They cannot be aircraft because they lack the navigation beacons required by FAA regulations. I am inclined to dismiss drones because most commercial drones exhibit similar lighting.”
Because the orbs moved in different directions under their own power, Beckwith also ruled out balloons or Chinese lanterns.
“Right now, I have no explanation for the objects recorded in the video,” Beckwith said.
Beckwith said the surge in conventional air traffic Krubeck described around the orbs is similar to other Wyoming sightings, and he has no explanation for that either.
“It is easy to speculate that these objects are being chased or pursued by military aircraft,” Beckwith said. “But again, that is just speculation.”
‘New Normal’
The National UFO Reporting Center lists 450 Wyoming reports, including a Douglas family's 2020 account of a nearly transparent object that changed direction for 45 minutes.
In April 1991, Cheyenne attorney Richard Barrett and his father, James Barrett, a former Wyoming attorney general, were driving between Gillette and Wright when a bright light in the sky suddenly hung over their car. Richard Barrett estimated it was 10 stories tall. It made no sound, lit the road like daylight and then went dark.
The two kept it quiet for decades.
"We didn't want people to believe we were off our rockers," Barrett told Cowboy State Daily in May.
In Sweetwater County, Sheriff John Grossnickle took U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman out to watch drone-like objects hovering regularly over the Red Desert and the Jim Bridger Power Plant. The sheriff's office said the objects, often flying in coordinated formations, had been there for 13 months.
“It's like the new normal," the sheriff’s spokesperson Jason Mower previously told Cowboy State Daily.
In Sweetwater County, the sheriff's office has stopped expecting answers. In Cody, the lights over the mountains are the latest chapter in a mystery Wyoming has yet to solve.
Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
