Yup, I have to agree with the caution warnings here. The coon incident was a last straw deterrent after other means to capture/drive off the critter had failed, and the bird investment was taking quite a hit. Also, both my friend and I have been temporarily blinded by spurious reflection flashes across our eyes. At the 200 mW power level, it takes nothing more than a quick strobe of reflected beam to KO your eyeballs for a good 10 to 20 minutes. I doubt that the coon suffered permanent injury, as he was moving and we only swept his face with the beam, so we're talking milliseconds of exposure, similar to what we experienced.

Believe me, it is more than enough to overwhelm you, especially at night when your pupils are well dilated. Like the website says repeatedly, "THIS IS NOT A TOY!!!!!".

Something else to note; even at 200 mW, the beaconing effect of the beam in the atmosphere is not very impressive. We concluded that it'd take several watts to make a bright enough column in nominal atmospheric conditions that searchers would be able to see where you were from miles away. That's not practical in a portable platform. I think even 25 mW is too much to direct at the eyes of a searcher, but it is a tradeoff.

One thing we did discover was that if you diverge the beam of a 200 mW green laser, the resulting spot you create is much more intense than even an U2 is capable of (orders of magnitude brighter, in fact), and diverging the beam enough would reduce the hazards proportionately.

20 lumens of cohesive light of a single wavelenght in a 10 foot diameter spot is intensely bright.