DronesThe Night A Mysterious Drone Swarm Descended On Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant

 

 

While the news has been filled with claims that strange unidentified craft with unexplainable capabilities are appearing over highly sensitive U.S. installations and assets in the last few years, a much less glamorous, more numerous, and arguably far more pressing threat has continued to metastasize in alarming ways—that posed by lower-end and even off-the-shelf drones.

 

 Less than a year ago and just days after the stunning drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's most critical energy production infrastructure deep in the heart of that highly defended country, a bizarre and largely undisclosed incident involving a swarm of drones occurred on successive September evenings in 2019. The location? America's most powerful nuclear plant, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station situated roughly two dozen miles west of Phoenix, near Tonopah, Arizona. 

 

In a trove of documents and internal correspondences related to the event, officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) described the incident as a "drone-a-palooza" and said that it highlighted concerns about the potential for a future "adversarial attack" involving small unmanned aircraft and the need for defenses against them. Even so, the helplessness and even cavalier attitude toward the drone incident as it was unfolding by those that are tasked with securing one of America's largest and most sensitive nuclear facilities serves as an alarming and glaring example of how neglected and misunderstood this issue is.

 

What you are about to read is an unprecedented look inside a type of event that is less isolated in nature than many would care to believe. 

 

A Rapidly Accelerating Threat

 

Troubling incidents of protracted activity by swarms of drones, including a series of very strange incidents in Colorado and neighboring states in 2019 that the mainstream media was quick to blow off without any real evidence to prompt such a dismissal, are occurring over and near some of America's most critical infrastructure. These events are occurring as lower-end and lower-performance unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have become weaponized to increasingly remarkable degree in recent years. Even those built-in sheds in the middle of warzones have been employed with not only deadly, but also a highly disruptive effects. As we mentioned a moment ago, drones have even inflicted major damage to one of the world's richest and most heavily defended country's cash cow—oil production. They have also been used in an attempt to assassinate a country's ruler. And yes, the potential for them to be used for similar purposes exists right here in the United States, as well.  

 

Even as lower-end drones that are armed with explosives and capable of precision attacks are being mass-produced overseas and America's adversaries are openly perfecting far more complex swarm capabilities, the U.S. military and federal agencies are desperately trying to play catch-up to the threat even though they had years to proactively work to nullifying it before its inevitable manifestation. It wasn't before weaponized drones were careening into and dropping bomblets on Iraq soldiers' heads during the Battle of Mosul that the U.S. military had no choice but to begin to take the issue seriously. Today, American soldiers deal with the ominous presence of drones overhead and even dropping munitions daily in overseas hotspots. America's top military commander in the Middle East is all too aware of this compounding threat and the lack of resources being placed on countering it: 

 

"I argue all the time with my Air Force friends that the future of flight is vertical and it's unmanned," U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said at an event hosted by the Middle East Institute last week. "I'm not talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with, as we would any other platform."

 

"I'm talking about the one you can go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for a thousand dollars, four quad, rotorcraft, or something like that that can be launched and flown," he continued. "And with very simple modifications, it can make made into something that can drop a weapon like a hand grenade or something else."

...

"Right now, the fact of the matter is we're on the wrong side of that equation."

 

With all this in mind, it isn't a matter of if similar events will occur in the homeland, it's a matter of when and of what scope. As it sits now, all the warning signs are there, especially in terms of where mysterious swarms of drones are popping up without explanation. 

 

Two Nights In Late September

 

Douglas D. Johnson, a volunteer researcher affiliated with the  Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), was able to obtain a large number of internal documents regarding the September drone incidents at Palo Verde from the NRC via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and kindly shared them with The War Zone. It is important to note that these documents primarily reflect the NRC's perspective rather than that of any other U.S. government agencies at the federal, state, or local levels. The Arizona Public Service Company, which operates the Palo Verde Generating Station, is also a private entity not directly subject to the FOIA.

 

Johnson did also submit a FOIA request for relevant documents to the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). DHS said it found 32 pages of documents related to the incident from CISA, but declined to release them, citing exemptions related to law enforcement activities. Another 17 pages of relevant records are still undergoing a review by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

 

This particular story starts on Sept. 29, 2019. Shortly before 11:00 PM local time at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, Daphne Rodriguez, an Acting Security Section Chief at the plant, called the duty officer at NRC's Headquarters Operations Center (HOC). Rodriguez reported that a number of drones were flying over and around a restricted area near the nuclear power plant's Unit 3, which houses one of its three pressurized water reactors.

 

 

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