I know you're responding to the single point as a conversational thing, but it gives a collective theory of: teenagers mucking around, who have enough money tha

I know you're responding to the single point as a conversational thing, but it gives a collective theory of: teenagers mucking around, who have enough money that throwing away a $10k+ experimental drone is no issue, and they just happen to live near an air force base where there are definitely no actual experimental drones being tested. My issue then with that is that the modern teenager typically films things for credibility, and this sort of stunt isn't going to be very satisfying at night. (I fly drones. Flying at night, I try to get the footage I'm paid for and then land.) IMO, either the story as reported has been exaggerated in many dimensions (altitude above the chopper, size of drone, time in the air, distance before landing) or it's something from the air force base that's not commercially available.