Mystery Lights Keep Buzzing a Wyoming Power Plant — and Nobody’s Saying What they Are

The original story by Caitlin McCormack for New York Post.

For more than a year now, fleets of drones — or something that looks a lot like them — have been showing up over a Wyoming power plant, lighting up the night sky and leaving local law enforcement with the same frustrating conclusion: still no answers.

The Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office says it has documented repeated sightings of bright, drone-like objects circling the Red Desert and the Jim Bridger Power Plant near Rock Springs over roughly the last 13 months, according to Cowboy State Daily. Officials haven’t pinned down an exact count, but described it as scores of incidents.

Sheriff John Grossnickle was among the first to see the objects himself and last spotted the formation on Dec. 12, his spokesperson Jason Mower told the outlet. Mower said the objects sometimes gather in coordinated formations directly over the plant — enough to raise eyebrows, but not enough to produce evidence.

And that’s the problem: nobody’s been able to recover one.

The sheriff’s office told Cowboy State Daily that the objects typically hover too high to shoot down, leaving deputies stuck watching from the ground. Grossnickle even reached out for help from US Rep. Harriet Hageman, and Mower claimed she also saw the phenomenon during a visit to the plant. Hageman couldn’t be reached for comment.

“We’ve worked with everybody. We’ve done everything we can to figure out what they are, and nobody wants to give us any answers,” Mower said.

At first, the sightings sparked a wave of calls from rattled residents. Now, Mower says, locals have mostly shrugged and chalked it up as “the new normal.” The sheriff’s office says the objects haven’t damaged the plant or threatened public safety — at least not yet.

“It’s like this phenomenon that continues to happen,” Mower said, “but it’s not causing any… issues that we have to deal with — other than the presence of them.”

Meanwhile, it’s not just Sweetwater County. Niobrara County Sheriff Randy Starkey told Cowboy State Daily that residents reported mystery drone sightings over Lance Creek, more than 300 miles away, from late October 2024 through early March. Starkey said he was simply “glad they’re gone.”

All of this echoes the broader drone panic that flared nationally last year, especially in New Jersey, where sightings triggered a mini-hysteria. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump publicly said those drones were FAA-authorized, pushing back on national security fears — but skepticism lingered, and the story eventually fizzled as reports dropped off.

Now Wyoming has its own lingering version: recurring lights, a critical site, and a lot of unanswered questions — with law enforcement watching from below, waiting for someone, anyone, to explain what keeps showing up in the sky.