A Chinese student at the University of Minnesota has been sentenced to six months in federal prison after authorities found pictures of Navy ships under construction on a drone he abandoned near a Norfolk, Virginia, shipyard.
But what authorities couldn’t determine is whether Fengyun Shi had anything to do with a spate of drone incursions over hypersensitive military installations in Virginia and Nevada in late 2023. The Wall Street Journal stitched together a report from unnamed government sources, police records, court documents, and social media photos that alleges drone swarms flew over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia over 17 nights in December and two months earlier at the Energy Department’s Nevada Security Site near Las Vegas.
The story says senior military officials saw the drones, but no action was taken because it’s against the law to shoot them down unless they pose an imminent threat.
Shi entered the picture January 6 when people in Newport News, Virginia, noticed him trying to free a drone that was stuck in a tree. They called police and he was questioned by officers who ultimately suggested Shi ask the fire department to retrieve his drone. Instead, he immediately returned his rented car, took a train to Washington, D.C., and flew to Oakland, California. The drone fell out of the tree on its own, and police found aerial pictures of a shipyard owned by Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), which builds nuclear submarines and Ford Class aircraft carriers.
The FBI arrested Shi in San Francisco on January 18, as he was about to get on a plane with a one-way ticket to China. He pleaded guilty to taking photos of classified naval installations, and on October 2 a judge didn’t buy his story that he was a hobbyist who liked taking pictures at night.
Despite the conviction, and his proximity to the drone incursions that had occurred two weeks previously, authorities couldn’t find any evidence directly linking him to Chinese intelligence organizations.
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AVweb.
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