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‘Flying aliens’ harassing village in Peru are illegal miners with jetpacks: cops
- quechimba 3y agoThey have seen these beings in villages near Iquitos too. They call them pelacaras, face peelers. Someone I know saw 4 beings flying about one meter above the ground outside her house last week. Would illegal miners even have access to jetpacks?
- telaelit 3y agoHonestly, it's a lot easier to believe that it's aliens and not "illegal miners with jetpacks". Seems like an even more ridiculous explanation.
- sterlind 3y agoseriously! it's literally a Scooby Doo plot. what's next, Shaggy and Velma manage to tie them up, and Fred unmasks them to discover it's an evil developer who wants to scare the locals away?
- kcplate 3y agoI was thinking the same thing. Back in the 70s we were promised jet packs by now…so far, bupkis. I am starting to think the bastards lied to us.
- theptip 3y agoYou know jetpacks are a thing now right? https://youtu.be/DkZPI5m9SIE https://youtu.be/DkZPI5m9SIE “Illegal miners get their hands on some surprisingly niche tech” seems many many orders of magnitude more likely than anything related to aliens.
- yellowapple 3y agoIllegal miners getting their hands on military prototypes seems pretty damn far-fetched, though. Not to say that "aliens" is necessarily less far-fetched... but it's up there for sure.
- tennisflyi 3y agoI would have believed it was aliens until I saw what you posted.
- nhinck2 3y agoThat thing has to be so bloody tiring to use, it'd have to be like constantly holding a dip right?
- theptip 3y agoGood Q, hadn't thought of that. I think the back is providing most of the thrust and the hands are just to steer you, so you don't need to support the full bodyweight.
- nhinck2 3y agoDidn't see the thruster on the back! However, their marketing claims you still have to support a little less than 50% of your body weight in forward flight. I probably couldn't do that for the full 10 minute flight time though.
- idontwantthis 3y agoIllegal miners in the Peruvian jungle would not be illegally mining in the Peruvian jungle if they had enough money and training to use one of those.
- ozim 3y agoIllegal gold mining gangs from Colombia and Brazil. It is not some bootleg mining to scrape by.
- idontwantthis 3y agoThat’s going to take about 4% less evidence to convince me than aliens would. I’d much sooner believe illegal miners and drones.
- theptip 3y agoStill seems more likely than aliens.
- NBJack 3y agoTo be frank, as cool as that is, it is easy to overlook the same problem with drones: they are distinctively LOUD unless at a distance (and even then). Would be interesting to corroborate whether unusual noises are associated with their arrival.
- dogma1138 3y agoThe sound signature is relatively localized and for ship to ship boarding it wouldn’t be difficult to mask it through an approach. Sound doesn’t reflects well of water so if you can easily mask it by flying close to the water and quickly jumping over.
- euroderf 3y ago> many orders of magnitude more likely Money motivates+enables narco-traffickers to acquire some pretty amaze-level tech. So why not miners too ?
- colordrops 3y agoAre jetpacks that easy to manufacture?
- yellowapple 3y agoAnd if they are, why can't I buy one at Wal-Mart?
- coolhand2120 3y agoBack in the 80’s this is the sort of news I was promised would happen in the 2000’s! Finally! Now if only the LLM controlling the jet pack found an ethical dilemma in its new life of crime and decided to cut power mid flight and avenge the villagers we’d be fully in a William Gibson novel!
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- harshalizee 3y agoI wonder if there's a word in English to describe this. A headline/sentence like this would be so absolutely ridiculous in a work of fiction, but there's no such bar, so to speak, for real life!
- jauco 3y agoI think the phrase “stranger than fiction” is commonly used for this. That is also the title of a pretty funny movie.
- sidibe 3y agoSeems like there's a lot of easier and more lucrative ways to make money off of being the first folks to create and operate useful jet packs than illegal mining