Was that really a UFO being driven down U.S. 77 in Cowley County?
That’s what residents thought when they saw a 32-foot thing on the back of a flatbed truck Monday.
“It was this funny sphere that went through on this big trailer, and my first thought was that looks like a UFO,” resident Kammi Root told NBC affiliate KSN.
The strange sight was captured on video, and has set the Internet abuzz with claims that Kansas might have a new type of undocumented alien.
Local officials were told it was an aircraft, but “they asked us not to say a whole lot about it,” said Sheriff Don Read. “They” being the transportation company.
It appears, however, that the craft is not some celestial voyager, but a drone – the X-47B built by Northrop Grumman – being shipped from California to a naval air station in Maryland.
So why was it being driven through Cowley County, which is southeast of Wichita?
“It’s difficult to fly an unmanned drone through commercial airspace,” a Northrop Grumman spokesman told the website Life’s Little Mysteries.
“Piloted aircraft are one thing, but long trips for large aircraft without a human pilot on board are frowned upon for both aviation security reasons and practical concerns,” wrote LLM’s Benjamin Radford.
