Featured Image Credit: Reddit/u/XiaoHao2
Topics: North Korea, Reddit, China, Viral
Emily Brown
North Korea is a country famously shrouded in mystery, especially since it sealed itself off at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, but one social media user claimed to get a unique insight into the nation with the help of a drone.
About a year before North Korea welcomed - and then promptly restricted - Western tourists from visiting for the first time in five years, one drone owner took to Reddit to claim they'd managed to fly their device over the border from China into North Korea.
They shared the images they'd caught online, alongside the caption: "Drone pics of North Korea, I was in China, my drone flew across the border."
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The images are indeed taken from the high perspective of a drone flying over a metropolitan area, and they quickly caught the attention of intrigued users hoping to get an insight into the notoriously secretive region.
The post has received more than 145,000 upvotes, and features images of a large building which is decorated with pictures of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, as well as Kim Jong-il.
Users have noticed that the streets in the images appear to be eerily empty, especially for what looks to be a large city. It's unclear what time the images were captured, but it's clearly light outside.
In some of the images, people can even be seen on the ground looking up and pointing at the drone as it flies over.
Sharing their thoughts, one person wrote: “Am I tripping or is there no street drainage at all? Definitely no traffic lights. Looks like a concrete model of a city."
A second said: "It’s interesting how the uncanny valley exists for inanimate things as well. This is close enough to being an actual city that it’s disturbing."
Above all though, one of the most common responses to the images wasn't about their content at all, but about the person who captured them.
Reddit users pointed out the person controlling the drone could likely have got in serious trouble for infiltrating the border, with one writing: "That seems like a dangerous game."
Other users questioned exactly how the user had apparently managed to cross the border so easily, writing: "Guy singlehandedly invaded N. Korea."
Another joked: "If this random dude with a drone from a store can this easily spy on North Korea, imagine the intel the US has. US intelligence are probably like 'wait s***, we spent hundreds of millions on spy satellites and could have just used a f****** $500 drone?'"