There's only one person in the world who knows what the flying rods are with any certainty and you may find it interestingly enough, that is 1gooey.
1gooey used to be one of the worlds leading scientists working on secret military projects based out of the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Most of, if not all, of his research is classified at the highest level. Rumor in the scientific community is that his research for the Japanese government was a deniable operation born out of the ashes of Unit 731 (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731) which on all official state documents is simply refereed to as Project O.T.A. Some scientists speculate- and again this is only speculation- that the project was in fact an attempt to make anime real. What we do know for sure is that it involved human test subjects. At some point in 1994 something went horribly wrong in his research. He was branded an enemy of the state and bullied from Japan. No one heard from him for years. In 2003 I was doing work for the US Government hunting Iraq's WMD's. I can't say what we found because it's classified but I can say that there was an connection to Project O.T.A. I thought it was tenuous at best but my superiors thought differently. I was pulled from the WMD hunt and all of my resources were reassigned to finding 1gooey. I was able to track him down in 2005 to a remote village in the Canada by following reports of children going missing and reappearing months later with grotesque, yet specific, deformations. I can't tell you what I found in Canada, nor can I tell you specifically what happened after we left. I can tell you, however, that just because 1gooey lost his grants and government sponsorship he didn't stop his research. He had traveled to Canada to take his research to a new metaphysical level under the guidance of a Metis shaman and that it directly ties into the flying rods phenomenon.
After a extradition to the US I never saw 1gooey again, until a few years ago when he showed up on GNFOS. I was debriefed and told that 1gooey and the Event in Canada is no longer my concern. In 2011, there was a rumor going around the intelligence circles that 1gooey may be employed by DARPA working on a secret project with a man called "Dr. Paul". I never thought much about it until 2012, when pic related - which is a US Government psyop - starting making the rounds on the internet. And then I knew. 1gooey was close to succeeding with his research.