The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 20: Irregular Drones
(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)
Chapter 20: Irregular Drones
The Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona has been America’s largest producer of power for more than a quarter of a century.
Located in the desert a few miles to the west of Phoenix, where the absence of water is a given, its three nuclear pressurised water reactors gulp more than 20 billion gallons of wastewater annually to keep them running as they should – without the merest hiccough, as the 4.8 million inhabitants of the Phoenix metropolitan area might reasonably expect.
Its populace would have been reassured, therefore, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told a reporter from the Arizona Republic, a local news source, it believed there were ‘no risk-significant vulnerabilities to nuclear power plants’, the Palo Verde plant included, following two nights of drone incursions there in September 2019. The NRC spokesman was reacting to a story that broke almost a year after the incursions in an online publication called The War Zone, which related the events of both nights in granular detail thanks to a trove of documents uncovered by a researcher, Doug Johnson, via the Freedom of Information Act.
The story started, The War Zone reported, on the night of 29th September, when an acting security section chief at the plant, Daphne Rodriguez, called the duty officer at NRC’s Headquarters Operation Center on the other side of the country in Rockville, Maryland. Rodriguez relayed the fact that five or six drones had been observed flying over a restricted area, Unit 3, where one of the three reactors was housed. The entry recorded in the HOC’s database described the drones as circling the Unit 3 site, that they had flashing red and white lights, were estimated to be at an altitude of 200-300 feet, and occasionally used spotlights to illuminate the ground. Rodriguez, who was reporting what was happening while it was happening, said the drones were still over the site at 21.47 pm, almost an hour after they were first spotted. Personnel who had seen them said they were ‘over two feet in diameter’.
The following night they returned.
‘Four drones were observed flying beginning at 2051 MST [on Sept 30, 2019] and continuing through the time of this report (2113 MST),’ the log entry at the HOC stated. ‘As occurred last night, the drones are flying in, through and around the owner-controlled area, the security owner-controlled area, and the protected area. Also, as last night, the drones are described as large with red and white flashing lights.’ This time, the log reported that local law enforcement surveyed the area, found no drones on the ground and were unable to locate anyone controlling them.
Jump now a few months later to a patch of flat featureless farmland several hundred miles to the northeast where Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas converge.
On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado received more than 30 calls from locals reporting drones ‘zipping all over the place’. At the same time, just across the state line in Nebraska, a deputy reported seeing 30 to 50 drones in the sky. Like his counterpart in Colorado, who had tried to follow a swarm of drones in his patrol car – at one point hitting 120 mph before losing track of them – this deputy gave chase and couldn’t keep up either. There were similar reports of drone sightings in neighbouring parts of Kansas. Descriptions varied – reported ‘spans’ ranging from six to ten feet - with all appearing very brightly lit.
This tri-state region – which houses no sensitive military facilities of any particular note- had been reporting ‘drone incidents’ since the end of 2019. Despite a multi-agency task force investigation by the FBI, US Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration, no official explanation for the incursion was ever given.
One of the deputies who had given chase lamented the fact that officialdom only got involved after the sightings had died down and the drones had moved on.
Some people had reported feeling ‘unsafe’ during the wave of incursions.
Others said the drones felt ‘creepy’.
An expert from The War Zone, which had reported this sightings wave, too, noted the drones ‘possessed longer flight times than most-off-the-shelf UAS (unmanned aerial systems)’, which was unusual – something I needed to return to.
Cut, meanwhile, to the next reported incident in the media: this one over water and several months before the American Midwest and Palo Verde sightings.