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For the third time this year, Iran is claiming it shot down an American robot warplane trying to snoop on Tehran’s nuclear facilities. "An unmanned U.S. spy plane flying over the holy city of Qom near the uranium enrichment Fordu site was shot down by the Revolutionary Guards’ air-defense units," lawmaker Ali Aghazadeh Dafsari told Iranian state television.

As with all "news" reports coming from Tehran’s official media apparatus, it’s wise to take Dafsari’s claim with a grain of salt. Notably, no one is showing off any fresh wreckage of an American robot — a popular pastime in other countries where drones have gone down.

That said, there’s reason to believe Dafsari — and reason to believe the drone in question is one of a small fleet of radar-evading ‘bots the Pentagon saves for the most important, and difficult, missions. That would make the latest U.S. drone casualty the first stealth robot to be shot down, that we know of.

That’s a lot of "ifs," to be sure. But in the world of secret aircraft, a >>>