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 Defense
Department's 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.



"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel
and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research institute.

 

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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