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Tech

Just a Drone, Landing

It almost looks cute from so high up. Almost.

Call it What a Drone Looks Like From a Drone.

It's a quiet, almost graceful companion photo to Dronestagram, James Bridle's deceptively grim Google Maps-inspired mission to map the blast sites that have pocked America's ongoing and covert drone wars throughout the Middle East and Horn of Africa. Only fitting, then, that it was Bridle who sniffed out the above photo--a lone drone, either coming in hot or taking off (it's unclear which), at Creech Air Base in Nevada.

Creech, of course, is part of constellation of bases fitted to house drone ops headed up by the US military and the CIA. This is where pilots are packed tightly in air conditioned trailers, and fly all manner of unmanned aerial vehicles--typically hunter-killers like the Predator and the Reaper, and massive spy planes like the Global Hawk--throughout the new robo-theatres of war, nearly 7,000 miles away.

So that said, the drone seen here is most definitely not returning from raining Hellfire on, say, a group of adult-looking males (the telltale terrorist "signature," right?) chilling at a barbeque on the outskirts of a remote Pakistani village. It more than likely is being used for training, the remote crags of Nevada being not that unlike, say, remote Pakistan. Or, just maybe, it's part of the shadow fleet of military drones already being flown throughout domestic airspace.

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson