This would definitely be UFO two or three decades ago.
Also the number of spelling and grammatical errors in the sheriff's email was quite... surprising. Or maybe not, for small town police...
I think it's just a matter of what you've focused on in your life, purposely or not.
I'm honestly more surprised the vice editor left out a [sic] after "fdar", did they really miss that one?
If you photographed a drone without a light it would look like the night sky. If you photographed a drone with a light it would look like a light in the sky.
If I was there in person I might notice that the light seemed to be moving quickly through the sky, shifting elevation, or recognize the whirr of a drone's rotors. My eyesight might be able to distinguish the body of the drone, in the sky, at night, behind the light, where the camera might not.
Multiple government organizations, at the local, state and federal government level, investigated. They claim not to have found any evidence of strange groups of large drones flying around. No physical evidence or recordings exists of groups of large drones flying around. There are eyewitness reports, but they are definitely not independent--People were primed to see drones after the first reports. The local news report is a good example of a relatively easy debunked sighting that seems to have resulted from a strong expectation of seeing drones. And almost all of the reports were debunked, according to government claims.
It's possible there's a large-scale government coverup of a large-scale drone flight operation. The operation must be pretty important for so many levels of government to be convinced to lie about it. Very important, very secret, but for some reason still had to be done over populated areas, continuing for weeks after it became a big story--so it wasn't actually a very high priority to hide the drones from eyewitnesses. Coincidentally, and very luckily for the government coverup, not a single one of the many eyewitnesses has any convincing physical evidence or imagery of the flight operations.
I feel like someone is being overly credulous, but it's not Vice.
In reality, the government team investigating said they couldn't find any evidence of illegal drones. You don't have to invoke a conspiracy to explain this - they didn't find any evidence. As I've written before, what evidence would we expect them to find? Drones flying through the air tend not to leave tracks.
Much of what you write here is incorrect. For example, you say that the government investigation found no evidence of strange groups of drones. That's wrong, in the week of January 6 to January 13 the team investigated 23 sightings and listed 4 of them as "confirmed by law enforcement but unable to identify." [1]
You write that the eye witnesses reports aren't independent because they were influenced by earlier reporting. The story was first reported by The Denver Post and in that story there were multiple reports from different people. [2] Subsequent reports may, or may not, be influenced by the initial story, but the multiple reports in the initial are independent.
You say that there is no imagery or photographs of the flight operations. This isn't true. Here's a photo of one of the drones they are investigating [3] and there are news stories referring to the collection of videos and photos though I didn't find them with a Google search. [4]
Regarding your implication that I'm being credulous - I hardly think so. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that many people simultaneously imagined a drone fleet flying over them, but I need better evidence than "a government team investigating weeks later didn't see the drones that weren't there any more". A good video would be more compelling, but it doesn't surprise me that it's difficult to take a good video at night with a phone.
1 - https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/publicsafety/news/updates-i...
2 - https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/23/drones-mystery-colorad...
3 - https://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/2020/01/09/colorado-hom...
4 - https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/31/drone-video-yuma-count...