Kyle Tequila (0:00)

My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. He was a fricking crazy man. He was my father and I had no idea about any of this. Until now. Crook county is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pod. Welcome to the Criminalia podcast. I'm Maria Tremarke. And I'm Holly Fry. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season we explore a new theme. From poisoners to art thieves, we uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story. Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. This season explores women from the 19th century to now. Women who were murderers and scammers, but also women who were photojournalists, lawyers, writers and more. This podcast tells more than just the brutal, gory details of horrific acts. I delve into the good, the bad, the the difficult and all the nuance I can find because these are the stories that we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice and the fascinating workings of the human psyche. Join me every week as I tell some of the most enthralling true crime stories about women who are not just victims, but heroes or villains, or often somewhere in between. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. He was out of his mind and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its KN. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. They say that you have to learn from the past to prepare for the future. That's never been more true than now. Sightings of unidentified aircraft are on the rise with new eyewitness accounts, Congressional hearings, and US fighter pilots taking down four high altitude flying objects under strange circumstances. The quest for answers has never been greater. Tensions escalated in late 2024, when unexplained drones began appearing in the New Jersey skies, sparking rumors and questions that no one could answer. But in 2019, an equally bizarre phenomenon started unfolding over Colorado. In Nebraska, she said that there were three drones that came up beside her. One was to the right, one was directly above her, and one was to her left. And they followed her roughly about 9 or 10 miles, I think in the movie with Tom. Whatever his name is, Tom Cruise, with all the aliens, the world at war or whatever it is. And that's. Yeah, War of the world. Like, yes, it just feels like you're being watched by these machines. Authorities are calling it a mobile command vehicle with antennas. And this morning there is a very active search for it. There's one right over the top of me right now. Has to be about 300ft in the air. It could be looking at me. When they first arrived that night in late December, hovering over farms, I didn't know what would transpire, how it would all end, or if the end was actually the beginning of a much bigger story. My name is Gabe Lynners, and this is Obscurum. Invasion of The Drones Chapter 1 Phillips County it was late 2019, just days before Christmas. I was at the Burbank airport, ready to fly home for the holidays. I had originally gone to college to be a meteorologist, and I still love to report on a good storm. However, an unexpected summer job shifted my path, leading me into a broadcasting career as a host and producer in Los Angeles, working with companies like Radio Disney, ABC News, and cmt. Like many people who move to the city, I'm from somewhere else, one of those no stoplight towns you see from the sky while munching on pretzels or waiting for the flight attendant to bring you a drink. It's in Nebraska and called Imperial. There are two grocery stores, one coffee shop in no McDonald's. It's a place where agriculture drives livelihoods, and people talk more about the local weather than the latest fashion. DIA is the closest major airport to western Nebraska, so when I flew in, my parents picked me up in Denver and we drove east. In this part of Colorado, there are no mountains, ski resorts or cities. Instead, the area is flat with fields and rolling grasslands. But that time of year, everything was frozen. Once we'd traveled a couple hours in the car, we eventually crossed the state line. It was a couple nights before New Year's Eve, we were sitting in the living room after eating one of my mom's home cooked meals when we heard a knock at the door. Through the living room window I could see a uniform with a radio, flashlight and gun holstered to one side. I turned the porch light on and immediately recognized who it was. The cop has a family friend and whenever I'm in town he'll drop by and tell a funny story or crack a joke. He's your typical laid back small town cop. But that night he stopped by late. It was after 10pm and there was concern in his eyes. He began telling us about giant drones lighting up the night sky and wanted to see if we'd noticed anything weird near our home. I had what I believe to be a drone pass over meal and it was headed east towards Yuma. Knowing I work in the entertainment industry, he thought this wild story may interest me as well. It had to be a hoax. But living in LA has taught me that fact is almost always stranger than fiction. So I grabbed my phone, hopped in the pickup and headed out to investigate. It was 11pm when I started to see what all the fuss was about. I'm counting at least 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The brightest light that looks the biggest is low to the ground and access on these remote country roads could be a challenge. But I'm going to see how close I can get. I saw more lights in the sky than I could have imagined. This was no hoax. I wasn't sure what I'd seen that night, but I had to find out. I started making calls to neighbors and was told the objects were first spotted in Phillips County, Colorado, just over the Nebraska border, where some aircraft were said to be as big as small cars. We live a lot in the country, so lots of empty fields. We actually live 14, 15 miles from town. This is Sarah. She and her husband Chris were a couple of the first people to report these aircraft. It took a bit of hometown charm to get them to talk about what they witnessed. I've changed their names at their request. What do you remember happening on that night of December 16th? My son and I were at his band concert, so we were coming home. I would say it was probably about 9:30 and we were coming up our driveway, which we have. Our driveway is about 3/4 of a mile to our house, just a private driveway. We were driving up it and as we got closer to the house I noticed that there was a drone flying right above the porch, the front porch. Then it actually rotated around our house almost Looking as if it was peering in each window of our home. Wow. Gosh, it's so crazy. Yeah. When it's in your window, it's different. When they were all flying high up in the sky, that, that's one thing. But when they're intruding on your home, it's completely different. It flew for a very long time. It was a very high tech machine. What happens next? Your husband gets in his separate vehicle then and continues to pursue the drone? Yeah. So he, he got in his pickup and he just followed the drone and it continued west. We just stayed in contact with him. So then I. That's when I took off chasing it. There were several times where I was going 95 to 105. Pretty soon I'd be a mile, even two miles behind it. It blew me away how fast it could move. All of a sudden there was a. There were two drones flying in perfect unison, probably 50ft apart from each other. One just a little bit higher than the other. How big do you think this drone was that you saw? It had to be at least a five foot wingspan. You know when you talk to law enforcement, what did they think they were a ways behind me or a ways away. And they just told me to just try to stay with it until it landed. I had a quarter tank in my pickup and I took off and I just about used it all up. So I just parked and shut my lights off and I sat there for probably 20 minutes waiting to see if I saw any vehicles anywhere around. Never did see anybody. After talking with Chris, I had way more questions than answers. I had no idea how strange this story was going to become. In all honesty, strange doesn't even begin to describe what I was about to discover. It takes one guy out there to say, who's that? Kyle. Who thinks he can just get on a microphone on a podcast. And from Iheart podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit. And that was my mission, to snuff the life out of this guy. He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Torn between two worlds. I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing. He was a freaking crazy man. We don't know who he is, really. He is my father and I had no idea about any of this. Until now. Welcome to Crook county series premiere February 11th. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo Clay. It's thick, burnt orange, and it's got a reputation. It's terrible, terrible dirt. Yazoo clay eats everything, so things that get buried there tend to stay buried until they're not. In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery. 7,000 bodies out there or more, all former patients of the old state asylum. And nobody knew they were there. It was my family's mystery. But in this corner of the south, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets. Nobody talks about it. Nobody has any information. When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo Clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think. The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. Larson I'm Larison Campbell. Listen to under yazukle on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Mark Seale. And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is based on my co host Mark's best selling book of the same title. And on this show we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the Godfather's birth. From start to finish, this is really the first interview I've done in. We sift through innumerable accounts. 35 pages isn't very much, many of them conflicting. That's nonsense. There were 60 pages and try to get to the truth of what really happened. And they said we're finished, this is over. It only is not going to work. Try to get rid of those guys. It's just that Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Kahn, Talia Shire and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to share my podcast with you. Math and stories from the frontiers of marketing. This week I'm talking to the CEO of Moderna, Stephane Bonsell, about how he led his team through unprecedented times to create, test and and distribute a COVID vaccine, all in less than a year. It becomes a human decision to decide to throw by the window your business strategy and to do what you think is the right thing for the world. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever important creative spark, the magic. Listen to math and magic stories from the frontiers of Marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Chapter 2 the Rumor Mill all right, let's go in there. DJs Bar and Grill. The morning after first seeing the objects, I was restless. I'd spent most of the night scrolling through social media to see who else spotted the aircraft. How's it going? How are you? Good, good. I'm gonna get some coffee too. Do you take creamer or sugar? Hi, Shelly. I'm gonna do a little cream in there. There was one local farmer in particular I wanted to visit with, but before I did, I needed caffeine and stopped by a bar to grab a cup of coffee. You could probably guess what the topic of conversation was about. You think they're aliens? I think the funnest one is the fact that we're missing a nuclear war. I like that one. Is that what they're saying now too? There's a few individuals that have said, well, they've come down into the yard or looked in their house. Someone has to be automatically or manually, excuse me, taking over that control of that UAV for it to do that. I hadn't heard about warheads or aliens, but I wasn't surprised to hear there were more wild rumors. I quickly grabbed my coffee, hopped in the truck, and took the back roads out of town. Freezing out here today. Literally out here in the middle of nowhere. I have no cell service. There's this county road and a small farmhouse right next to these fields. Supposed to be meeting this guy named Tim. I'm kind of like thinking about how this reminds me of that movie Signs with Mel Gibson. If I was by myself right here at night, there's no lights. This could get creepy. Good. How are you doing? When I pulled up to Tim's house, I didn't know much, just that he and his wife may have experienced a few close range encounters west of Imperial. You could tell Tim's a family man. There were toys around the house and the farm dog greeted me right when I stepped out of the truck. How does that make you feel? That someone could be watching or at least surveying what's going on? Drug or sex trafficking and all that kind of stuff has kind of been Big news locally recently. And so we're, you know, with, with kids. We don't have, you know, we don't have the police driving by every 20 minutes or anything. Shoot, I don't even know if I've ever seen this sheriff drive by out here. That's, that's just the rural Nebraska that we live in. When Tim's wife saw the aircraft, she was worried. Yeah, she was a lot more concerned, you know, in case they're trying to find people and find kids to nab. Like sex traffickers have gone extremely high tech. And the numbers of drones, I mean, the first one reports we heard was like, you know, 6 to 10. Then we heard 16, now we've heard 20 to 30. A friend of mine, he had, and he said two nights ago he had 20 flying over his, over his house. And, you know, we had four over our house a couple nights before that. Tim was now the third person I'd spoken to who'd confirmed these drones, as he described them, were flying really low to nearby homes. Yeah, they were about 2, probably 3 to 400ft is probably where they were. My dad flies ultralight airplanes. They're a small aircraft, but it's, you know, a 30 foot wingspan. And it was about the same height that dad flies when he comes over to see the grandkids. They were just over the trees about a hundred feet over here. And it was, you know, they were up there. I mean, dad's airplanes, they're gas powered. You can barely hear them when he's flying, putting along. And those drones, yeah, it was silent. You couldn't, you couldn't hear anything. You just saw the lights basically and saw him as they were headed west, basically. Champion Nebraska resident Dallas Behney recalled a similar description. Well, they were quiet, but they had definite two, like spotlights coming out of the bottom of them. It was hard to tell the shape of them because it was dark, but you could definitely see the two spotlights coming out of each side and actually started seeing several of them just everywhere. Even the close one, I could barely make it out. But you just remember the lights and it's not an airplane. Dallas is as real as they come. He's one of those guys you just want to go have a beer with. We talked in his garage, which he's converted to a lounge area with a hot tub and flat screen on the wall. When was the first time you started to see things appear in the sky? Well, I was going out to actually flip hamburgers on the barbecue and I just looked up and I was like, holy cow. So I'm yelling for the guys to get out here. So I did at least have a few people witness it with me. So I wasn't, you know, people thinking I'm crazy. But I had some of the neighbors, you know, they came out and they're like, wow. You know, they. By the time they got over there, it was just going over the lake. The geese were just going crazy. They freaked out. I mean, it just brings up more suspicion. You wonder what these drones are doing here and why. If they're thermal imaging or. I seen something the other day on the news where a drone could actually take someone's temperature flying over, and I was just like, wow, who knows what they're doing or why they're here? But to be that size would cost probably millions of dollars. So I don't think it's. Someone definitely has some money that's back in this. To me, it seemed like they were looking for something. If these unidentified aircraft were searching for something and hovering outside the windows of folks I'd grown up with, I couldn't let it go. One thing was for sure, there were many theories about what was happening in the skies over Colorado and Nebraska. Theories that prompted more questions. Why would someone be flying groups of drones at night? And why would they choose to do it here? I was driving down the road processing all of this when my phone rang. Hello? Making a voice note. I just talked to one of the local authorities. He did not want to be named as a source, but he told me that someone on his team talked to the FBI and the FBI instructed them to shoot one of these objects out of the sky if they got the chance. Coming up on Obscurum Invasion of the Drones. We were testing the ability to be able to tie remotely piloted vehicles to a mothership, and that was in the late 80s. We've heard that there's a missing nuke and that they're looking for that with the green stuff. I'm a little, you know, I'm like, oh, what if it's something like dangerous? If you have any information surrounding the events detailed in this podcast or have your own similar account, please visit our website@obscurumseries.com and share your story. You'll also find exclusive behind the scenes content on the site to connect with us on social media. You can follow obscurumseries and Abelurs on all social platforms. Obscurum is produced by Imagine and Leonhars Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is written, hosted and produced by me, Gabe Liners it's executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carl Welker, Nathan Cloke, Nikki Etour and me. Additional production by Jacob Plew. Music and sound effects courtesy of Epidemic Sound Brand Management in digital design by Labyrinth Branco Video editing by Alex Semy Kopenko. This project was mixed and mastered by Jacob Plew. Special thanks to Dan Bodansky, Josh Hiller, Keaton Stortz, Bryson Keyes, Ailey Burchfield, David Wasserman, Katrina Norvell and my family. Obscurum Invasion of the Drones is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Follow now. My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. He was a fricking crazy man. He was my father and I had no idea about any of this. Until now. Crook county is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremarke. And I'm Holly Fry. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves. We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story. Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast Math and Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm having conversations with some folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reach the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use. I'll be joined by innovative leaders like Chairman and CEO of Elf Beauty Tarang Amin, legendary singer, songwriter and philanthropist Jewel Being a rock star is very fun, but helping people is way more fun. And Damian Maldonado, CEO of American Financing. I figured out the formula. I just have to work hard. Then that's magic. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever important creative spark, the magic. Listen to math and magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hellbent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. He was out of his mind and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Listen to Divine intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.