Amazing video shows protesters in Chile using dozens of pocket lasers at the same time to crash a police drone
- New footage from Chile shows protesters targeting a police drone with lasers
- The group aim what appears to be 40 to 50 handheld lasers at the drone
- Soon after being targeted, the drone falls out of the sky
This week, amazing video showed protesters on the streets of Chile teaming up to bring down a police drone with what appear to be simple pocket lasers.
The footage shows a huge group of people aiming around 40 or 50 green handheld lasers at a police drone hovering overhead.
After about 20 seconds of being targeted by the communal green laser beam, the drone appears to malfunction and slowly falls toward the ground.
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Protesters in Chile teamed up to bring down a police drone with handheld laser beams in a viral video
Yet, as it descends out of the laser's line of sight, the drone appears to momentarily regain control,
Around ten seconds later, protester re-aim their group laser at the drone and it finally drops all the way into the crowd.
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Just how pocket lasers were able to cause a drone to malfunction remains unclear.
According to Christopher Williams, CEO of Citadel Defense Company, a private defense group specializing in counter-drone technology, one explanation for what happened is that the lasers blinded the drone pilot.
In an interview with NextGov, he said that if the drone were being remotely piloted, the lasers could have overloaded its navigational cameras and caused the pilot to lose their orientation.
Another possibility is that the lasers could have made the drone’s infrared landing sensors malfunction, triggering an automated landing sequence or some other ‘uncontrolled drone behavior.’
Users on Reddit, where the video was originally posted, theorized that the combined heat of 40 or 50 lasers could have melted the drone's internal circuitry.
The most powerful consumer lasers are around 3,000 milliwatts, and can pop a balloon and ignite a match in a few seconds of continuous pointing.
Protests in Chile broke out in October after the government raised the fare of the metro in Santiago. When students and workers refused to pay, the government increased the penalty for non-payment to the equivalent of $660
However, the average consumer pocket laser, which can be found online for $15 to $20, emit a beam that’s typically between three and five milliwatts.
Even with 50 of this type of consumer laser, the collective power would likely be far less than it would take to ignite a match, making it a long shot that they would be able to burn through the armored shell of a police drone.
Another possibility is that the drone just ran out of battery power.
This might be the simplest explanation given that most drones have maximum flight times of between 20 and 30 minutes.
Protests in Chile began in October, after metro fares in the capital city of Santiago was raised.
When student began coordinating mass fare evasion, President Sebastián Piñera led the government to increase the penalty for fare evasion to the equivalent of $660.
Piñera would later describe the protesters as an 'implacable enemy that respects nothing and no one, that is ready to use violence and crime without limit.’
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