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Sunday
Dec112011

Iran Video: Authentic Footage of The Capture of the US Drone? (Not Quite.)

State outlet IRNA, describing last Sunday's landing of the US RQ-170 Sentinel drone in eastern Iran after it was allegedly taken over by Iranian cyber-warfare, has been showing footage of the airplane. Descriptions on YouTube say the channel is claiming this as authentic images of the incident:

Hmm. Not quite. The video is actually promotional footage from Lockheed Martin of a LM Skunkworks Polecat, a possibly forerunner of the RQ-170. The protoype of the Polecat crashed in December 2006 due to an "irreversible unintentional failure in the flight termination ground equipment, which caused the aircraft's automatic fail-safe flight termination mode to activate". A 30-second extract from the film:

So did IRNA put off "fake" footage, by implying that years-old footage was that of last Sunday's incident, or did it make clear this was file imagery of a different, if related, aircraft?

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