Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Washington, D.C.'s Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those'," the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," said the Washington, D.C., lawyer. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington, D.C.,  and New York. Some suspect the insect-like drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.