or anywhere else inside the United States, for that matter?

While looking this morning for something else totally unrelated, I came across this website that documents articles involving UAVs; one in particular, about unmanned drones crashing near people's homes, caught my attention.

The explosion nearly jolted Barbara Trent out of bed. At first she thought someone had bombed the high-desert scrubland where she lives in southern Arizona.

When daylight arrived a few hours later April 25, Trent and her neighbors realized that what they heard wasn't a bomb at all. Instead, an unmanned drone the government uses to monitor the nearby Mexican border had slammed into a hillside near several homes.

The Predator B, which weighs as much as 10,500 pounds and has a wingspan of 66 feet, had been crippled when its operator accidentally switched off its engine. It glided as close as 100 feet above two homes before striking the ground, says Tom Duggin, the owner of one of the houses. "If it had hit my house, I'd be dead," says Trent, whose home is about 1,000 feet from the crash site.

Kind of bizarre reading this article. UAVs are not regulated at this point. If they crash, they aren't investigated by the NTSB, because it only deals with aircraft with people aboard. There aren't any rules about how these unmanned aircraft should even FLY in civilian airspace.

Creating those standards will not be easy. There are no rules for how to build unmanned planes that fly in civilian airspace, who is qualified to fly them and how they should steer clear of other aircraft.

The Federal Aviation Administration has set case-by-case standards for operations such as border surveillance. The agency is reviewing how Customs uses the Predator.

So, theoretically, these unmanned aircraft could fly INTO a craft filled with people and are not monitored by air traffic controllers?

I had thought of unmanned aircraft as being something we did in WAR when looking to see who we bomb, and that is enough of a scary and intrusive