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Dragonfly-Sized Insect Spies Spotted, Denied
SRA8 sends in a Washington Post piece about work at various academic, government, and military labs on insect-sized flying spies. A number of people reported what appeared to be flying mechanical insects, larger than dragonflies, over an antiwar rally in Washington DC last month. The reporter got mostly no-comments from the agencies he called trying to pin down what it was they saw. Only the FBI said through a spokesman: "We don't have anything like that." The article describes work on insect cyborgs as well as purely mechanical flying spies, but quotes vice admiral Joe Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command now at iRobot in Burlington, Mass., as follows: "I'll be seriously dead before that program deploys." The article also mentions an International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland in August, at which Japanese researchers demonstrated radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths.
No this is actually interesting. The foto's for example clearly illustrate that these people are not afraid of falsifying evidence, then denying they did so.
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Which is a good thing to remember the next "atrocity" commited by, oh I don't know, Bush, Marine, Israeli soldier, republican senator, what have you
They're paranoid. And why are they so paranoid? Its all the drugs they're taking.
Well, good luck getting a photograph from a cell phone camera of a small moving object to work.
But decent digital cameras are small and cheap now; you can get an 8MP camera with a rather ludicrous zoom range of 28-504mm equivalent for about $350, and a 7MP camera with an only slightly less ludicrous zoom range of 35-420mm for about $270. (Panasonic FZ8 and FZ18, respectively. Canon/Olympus/Fuji/Sony/everyone else you might expect make similar products, but they're more expensive and not as good.) Both of these fit in a (largish) pocket.
If I were going somewhere where News might wind up happening like a protest, I'd be sure to take mine along.
Cell phone cameras are a wonderful thing for ensuring that things make it to the news: q.v. "Don't Tase me, bro", and think about what would have happened if there'd been a bunch of cell phone cameras at Tiananmen Square rather than a newsman standing in a window a quarter mile away with a 400mm lens, who had to hide his film in the toilet when the Chinese police showed up. Said cell phone cameras aren't going to do too well with snoop-bugs or whatever in flight, though.