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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.
Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects
that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature
can look.
No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a
number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are
trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with
computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their
bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.
The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.
The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.
"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defence Department Rapid Reaction Technology Office.
But the CIA
secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s.
And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance
that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.
Full article
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