Featured Image Credit: Reddit/u/XiaoHao2
North Korea is a notoriously secretive nation.
It's 'one of the most repressive countries in the world', according to NGO Human Rights Watch, and one which has limited contact with the outside world.
Human Rights Watch says: 'Since 2020, under the pretext of protecting against the spread of Covid-19, the North Korean government has imposed extreme and unnecessary measures to close its borders and tightly restrict domestic travel.'
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That's why it's surprising that a set of images has gone viral on Reddit, claiming to be taken inside North Korea.
The caption from Reddit user XiaoHao reads: 'Drone pics of North Korea, I was in China, my drone flew across the border.'
While it's difficult to truly verify the shots, particularly as the Redditor is posting anonymously, what the images do appear to show is fascinating.
The first shot seems to be some kind of official building, with portraits of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un and his father, Kim Jong Il, on the front.
What's perhaps eeriest about this alleged drone footage of North Korea is how empty everything looks. There are only a handful of people on the streets, and one shot shows a solitary traffic warden at a crossroads, with no cars in sight.
Of course, there could be reasons for this - perhaps it was extremely early in the morning, before people woke up, or maybe the shots were taken in a quiet area, or for example, during the height of the pandemic, that could also explain the empty streets.
And the anonymous poster seems to confirm this theory, with a comment on another thread from the same user telling one Redditor it was 'Filmed in 2020, during the pandemic'.
But it did cause the top comment - with 4.6k votes - to read: "Crossing guard/traffic cop on NK is loneliest job."
Others in the comment section were struck by how strange everything seemed.
"Am I tripping or is there no street drainage at all? Definitely no traffic lights. Looks like a concrete model of a city," one comment read.
While another Redditor 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."
The poster said in the comment section that they took the snaps in a city that is around two kilometers from the border with China, causing some commenters to speculate they were taken over Sinuiju.
The post has obviously sparked a lot of interest, racking up 140k votes in less than a week.
