I hesitated to post this, fearing the elevated reaching/paranoid level this is likely to invoke. It's a case of science fiction becoming science fact on us. But the conservative Washington Post is covering the story - and soberly - and with photos. Anti-war protesters are reporting seeing these critters and describing them independently and consistently.
DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the Defense Department's weird science division. As such, it is a fertile source of science fiction ideas becoming science fact or, in some cases, science flopped. Limb regeneration, the gay bomb … the list is long, fanciful, and sometimes ignominious.
I teach courses in science fiction (other things too, but they don't pertain here). To me, DARPA is a godsend of weird science.
Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes.
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Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.
"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."
Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.
"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "
That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.
But this is serious. This surveillance-besotted administration was spying on Americans, listening in on our phone calls before 9/11. And they used 9/11 to declare people who torched SUVs at dealerships, harming no one in the process, as "terrorists," rather than spending their time and money looking for people intent on carrying out actual terrorist attacks.
Can further covert surveillance from this government really come as a surprise? They've been hacking away at our Fourth Amendment protections for years. This is simply another facet of that same disdain for our Constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seisure.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her group is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several federal agencies. If such devices are being used to spy on political activists, she said, "it would be a significant violation of people's civil rights."
I'm posting this in the interest of letting us all know. We have a lot of other important issues, but this new spying tech seems, to me, something we should all know about. The WaPo article includes photos and video of some smallish spybots, and describes other robot and cyborg insect models. Check it out.