I've been following the story and this has been discussed on the local Reddit subs. They are almost certainly PteroDynamics XP-4 drones flying from and to the military bases in question for testing purposes. There literally was a public demo of them on the USNS Burlington in Philadelphia a year ago.
I really like that it switches off the outer pair of propellers in level flight, that's a nice feature.
Changing the vertical alignment of the wings to horizontal after takeoff is also really cool, an interesting alternative to 4 vertical propellers with a separate pair of wings. It seems to eliminate the extra moving parts to control those vertical propellers.
The wing folding mechanism is pretty novel as far as I'm aware. The idea of quad hover to forward flight isn't new or unique but the specific configuration is something I haven't seen before. NASA was working on some that tilted the whole wing not this folding design which uses fewer motors compare to the old NASA Greased Lightning test article.
Osprey has a common power shaft between the engines for fault tolerance, constraining the structure's design, such as the lack of dihedral. This has a different set of design constraints and a different solution to propulsion failure.
> should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid.
The stupid take is the one you propose, it's ridiculous. So USAF has secret decoys in WWII and before, that followed WWII fighters, and hovered over people's houses, among millions of other sightings worldwide? So advanced yet they don't send them to war?
> People should've already learned this, if they were not so stupid.
You're falling in the same trap as conspiracy theorists, though: Putting out almost non-falsifiable statements, and then claiming you know better and are smarter. Either it will be revealed that it was USAF and you can feel smug about being correct, or it will not come out and you can still feel smug about being correct because no one can prove you wrong.
