She stands at the lectern, looking down at her notes. Her face is grim. She appears shaken.

“At a top robotics company in Japan this week,” she says into the microphone, “four robots being developed for military applications killed 29 humans in the lab.”

Gulp! And it gets worse.

“The scariest part is that lab workers deactivated two of the robots and took apart the third.” The woman’s voice is quavering now. She manages to continue: “But the fourth robot began restoring itself, and somehow connected to an orbiting satellite to download information about how to rebuild itself even more strongly than before.”

The teller of this tale isn’t a Hollywood screenwriter. Linda Moulton Howe’s background is in journalism.

A Stanford graduate, as well as a former Miss Idaho, Howe won awards in the 1970s and ’80s for her work at Denver, Atlanta and Boston TV stations.

But somewhere along the line she became fascinated by UFOs and conspiracy theories.

“She is probably the most preeminent UFO investigator in the world,” fellow ufologist Ike Bishop said of Howe in 1998.

Howe believes space aliens have visited Earth many times, but right now she’s more concerned about robots created by Earthlings. She says the massacre of the scientists has been hushed up because “the robotics company has too much to lose, and the government wants AI robot soldiers.”

Her speech took place back in February, but it’s only just taken off online. The Independent reports that the video of Howe’s talk has been viewed more than 100,000 times on Twitter this week. The very same week, it so happens, that a mysterious drone (or drones) repeatedly dive-bombed London’s Gatwick Airport, forcing the airport to close for more than a day.

To be sure, Howe’s robot-massacre story is a tough one for any rational person to buy into. It’s apparently based on a phone interview she conducted with someone allegedly from the CIA, who told her: “This is serious s—t, Linda, but you’re not going to hear about this in the news.” When you’re a prominent conspiracy theorist like Howe, you’re going to be the target of pranksters and nuts.

None of which means we don’t have anything to worry about. Robots might not have secretly murdered a clutch of scientists in Japan – but that could change.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, for one, believes AI one day could be a very real “threat” to humankind.

“As AI gets probably much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is probably similar to that between a person and a cat, maybe bigger,” Musk said recently. “I do think we need to be very careful about the advancement of AI.”

Watch the video of Howe below.

-- Douglas Perry