Watch the First Drone Ever Shot Down With a Laser in 1973
After years of FOIA requests, I finally found footage of the test.
Laser weapons have become a new addition to the battlefield in the 2020s, with the U.S. Army and Navy both conducting extensive tests in recent years. But, believe it or not, the first time a laser was used to shoot down a drone was almost 50 years ago. And after a long search, we now have video of that historic moment.
Back in 2015, Paleofuture showed you photos from Project Delta, the laser project run by ARPA, now called Darpa, and the U.S. Department of Defense. But my FOIA requests to the U.S. Air Force for any videos of the project came up with nothing. I knew photos existed of the demonstration, because they appeared in a book published in 1994 titled Airborne Laser: Bullets of Light by Robert W. Duffner, showing the progression of an unmanned plane before it’s zapped out of the sky. But every FOIA request came back empty.
The video of that historic 1973 drone test has finally surfaced in an entirely predictable location (YouTube) through a slightly unexpected source. The video shows up in a Polish TV show called Sonda that aired in 1986.
In the video, which you can watch at the Paleofuture blog, you can see four men removing the propeller-driven drone from a truck at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and loading it onto a catapult launcher. The video then cuts to the enormous laser system that’s been developed by ARPA’s Project Delta. The viewer also sees footage of the drone operator using a large joystick that’s tethered to the drone communication system. The drone flies around for a bit and then we see the laser again, rotating to fix its sights on the drone. The laser itself appears to be invisible, but viewers see the aftermath of the hit, with the front of the drone disconnecting in a puff of white smoke.
The drone also has a parachute, presumably so that the damage done can be be properly evaluated. If the engineers just let the drone pieces fall to the ground it might be difficult to determine which damage was caused by the laser and which damage was a result of the plane’s impact with the ground.
Before it showed up on a TV news segment in Poland, the film clip was shown to military contractors and members of Congress, according to press accounts from the time. That’s how I knew there had to be movie footage out there somewhere. And it’s tremendously satisfying to finally see, even if I don’t speak a word of Polish.
The first practical laser was built in 1960 and the U.S. military almost immediately tried to figure out how to weaponize this new technology. In 1962, the U.S. Air Force started its own laser development program. And by the end of 1962, ARPA already had two programs to weaponize the laser: Project Seaside and Project Defender.
Charles Townes, one of three people credited with inventing the laser, explained in an oral history decades later that ARPA was throwing a ridiculous amount of money at lasers in the 1960s, hoping the U.S. could develop something useful for the battlefield before the Soviet Union could get their own laser weapons. In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963 seemed to be a turning point for President John F. Kennedy, who worried the Cold War could become very hot sooner rather than later.
ARPA launched a laser project called Eighth Card in 1968, which would eventually become known as Project Delta in the early 1970s. And it was on November 13, 1973 that the U.S. military made history by shooting a drone out of the sky with one of its lasers. The drone was a Northrop MQM-33B, known at the time as a “radioplane” because it was controlled by radiowaves the same way a toy airplane might be handled.
We often think of drones as a 21st century invention, but they were already being used in World War II, albeit largely for target practice. And drones were also used for surveillance in the Vietnam War, including in Operation Igloo White, the program that dropped sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to computerize the war in Southeast Asia.
I’d still love to get an unedited version of this drone video that may or may not include a voiceover in English and perhaps more than one laser shootdown of the drone. There were actually 14 drone tests over two days in November of 1973.
As Robert W. Duffner explains in Airborne Laser: Bullets of Light:
Shortly after noon on 13 November, the beam hit the aluminum fuselage aft of the fuel tank. The beam remained on the drone long enough to burn through the skin, causing the drone to lose control and make one last diving left turn before crashing into the desert floor. Inspection of the debris revealed the beam had burned and shorted out the internal electrical control cabling, forcing the drone into a rolling pitch-down maneuver. Although the experiment disabled the drone, it suffered only minor damage.
Duffner also explained that an earlier unsuccessful test of the laser accidentally hit a nearby water tower. The laser even “left scorch marks on the tower’s metal supports,” according to Duffner.
It’s great to finally see what this drone test looked like in action—an innovation of the Cold War that’s much older than most people would guess. Many thanks to Paleofuture reader Leopold for the tip about the video being posted to YouTube. And if you’ve seen an expanded version of this video anywhere, or even film from the unsuccessful test that hit a nearby water tower, please drop me a line.