-By Warner Todd Huston
The Iranian military recently announced that its “scientists” had created a drone program that successfully built the first Iranian drone capable of vertical takeoff and landings. The Mullahs also released a photo to prove to the world that they had done so. But the photo of the “Iranian drone” came as a surprise to the folks at the Japanese university where the photo and the drone really came from.
For whatever reason newswire service Reuters reported the Iranian’s claims on November 4. “Iran has built an advanced drone that can take off vertically and without a runway,” the wire service reported.
The Mullahs called their drone the Koker-1.
To accompany reports of their wondrous new drone program, the Iranians included a photo of their drone showing the craft floating just above the latticework at the top of some nondescript building.
It turns out, though, that this photo was stolen from a Japanese university. Aircraft enthusiast and blogger Gary Mortimer noticed that the photo the Iranians sent out as proof of the Koker-1 bore a suspicions similarity to a photo of a tilt-rotor UAV built by Japan’s Chiba University in 2008.
The only difference between the photo the Iranians tried to palm off on the world as the Koker-1 and the photo of the UAV from Chiba University is that the Iranians photoshopped out the wind blade devices that sat on top of the building in the Chiba U. shot.
So, it’s more like the Kroaker-1.
The Atlantic listed a few of the other outrageous claims recently made by the Iranians.
This isn’t the first time Iran has been caught manipulating reality: Just last month their state news agency was caught passing off a scene from the disaster-thriller The Day After Tomorrow as a real scene of Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath, and in 2008 the Iranian government released some doctored photos of a successful rocket launch. According to the Mehr news agency, the drone — whatever it does, or whether it even looks like the thing above — is scheduled to be unveiled for real in the coming weeks when, presumably, Iran upgrades to CS6.
The sad thing isn’t that the nuts in Iran continue to make such laughable claims all the time, but that the western media reports their claims straight as if they are all true. It takes bloggers to reveal the truth the to world because the Old Media establishment won’t do it.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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