Go inside some of the wildest secret government projects, from the proposed construction of a “bat bomb” to a plan to nuke the Moon.
At any given time, there are countless secret government operations underway in the United States. While this has always been going on, covert government projects really started to ramp up in the mid-20th century, especially during World War II and the Cold War, as increasingly advanced technology became more and more commonplace.
With this new technology came new ideas of how it could be used. War was deadlier than it had ever been before — but perhaps a solution could be found to end war once and for all. Optimistically, this was the idea behind the Manhattan Project: to create a super-weapon that would make America’s enemies cower and surrender. But while America’s use of atomic bombs against Japan did spell the end of World War II, it didn’t end war itself.
And in the years that followed, when open warfare was largely cast aside in favor of espionage, the U.S. government came up with even more ways to get a leg up on their adversaries. Some of these secret government operations were horrifying — take MK-Ultra, for example — but others were flat-out bizarre, and perhaps even a little bit funny in hindsight.
Acoustic Kitty: Using Cats To Spy On The Soviets
X (Formerly Twitter)The Acoustic Kitty project encountered several glaring issues when put to the test.
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union devised countless methods of spying on each other. It was a tense, fascinating time in history — one that required out-of-the-box thinking.
One strange example was a U.S. plan to use cats to spy on the Soviets. Known as Acoustic Kitty, this bafflingly bizarre project came about after CIA officers noticed an abundance of feral cats while trying to listen in on a Soviet official in the 1960s. If cats could get in close without being noticed, then perhaps the agency could use them to their advantage.
But how could a cat possibly relay information back to the CIA? That’s where a bit of 20th-century technology came into play. The CIA figured that by outfitting cats with a small radio transmitter and a microphone, they could create an “acoustic kitty” that could spy, in real-time, on the Soviets. They even started to test this theory out, recruiting a veterinary surgeon to perform an hour-long procedure on a cat, implanting the devices in its body.
As former CIA officer Victor Marchetti later remembered: “They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up.”
Unfortunately for the CIA — but fortunately for cats everywhere — the project was a failure. Officers had to use small batteries, so recording time was severely limited, and they also had to find a way to stop the cat from wandering off in search of food. Then, when they were finally ready to put the project to the test, disaster struck in the form of a taxi.
After the officers sent the “acoustic kitty” on its very first mission to spy on two men in a park in Washington, D.C., the small feline was almost immediately struck by a taxi cab, which killed it right on the spot.
Curiosity, it turned out, really had killed the cat.
Project X-Ray: Strapping Bombs To Live Bats To Attack The Japanese
U.S. Army PhotoThe U.S. military planned on outfitting Mexican free-tailed bats with small, timed incendiary bombs.
World War II was an experimental time for warfare. Obviously, it culminated in the creation of the atomic bomb, forever changing the landscape of international relations. But before the atomic bomb, the U.S. military toyed with the idea of another explosive weapon: the bat bomb.
But this was nothing like one of Batman’s bat-themed gadgets. This bomb involved very real bats, carrying very real bombs. Dubbed Project X-Ray, this secret government operation ultimately blew up in spectacular fashion.
First conceived by Lytle S. Adams, a dental surgeon from Pennsylvania, the bat bomb idea came to him after a trip to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which just so happens to house a great number of bats. Adams, as it turned out, was also not a huge fan of bats, as intelligence historian Vince Houghton pointed out in his book, Nuking the Moon.
Adams soon wrote a letter to the White House in January 1942 proposing the idea. It begins: “I attach hereto a proposal designed to frighten, demoralize, and excite the prejudices of the people of the Japanese Empire.”
He goes on to describe bats as “the lowest form of life… associated in history with the underworld and regions of darkness and evil.” Adams later declares, “Until now reasons for its creation have remained unexplained. As I vision it the millions of bats that have for ages inhabited our belfries, tunnels and caverns were placed there by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare to desecrate our way of life.”
Adams’ letter concludes by saying that if the bat bomb could “rid us of the Japanese pests,” then the United States should erect a monument of the bat in its honor. Shockingly, the proposal was actually approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and work on the bat bomb began.
Generally, the plan was to put the bats into a state of hibernation, transport them in chilled compartments, then equip them with timed incendiary devices that would go off after they had reached their destination. They were to be dropped by the thousands into Japanese cities, whereupon, the theory went, they would roost under the eaves of wooden and bamboo buildings, explode on the structures, and then burn the cities down.
A formal test of this proposed plan was carried out on May 15, 1943 at New Mexico’s Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base, though it didn’t quite go as planned. The bats were accidentally released earlier than they were supposed to be, and they ended up burning down a barn and a general’s car.
Public DomainThe fire that broke out at the Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base after the bat bombs were released.
Despite this, many higher-ups still wanted to go through with the explosive plan. The only reason that the bat bomb was never carried out is because Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King was told that the project wouldn’t be ready until mid-1945, and he didn’t want to wait that long.
Still, by that point, more than $2 million had been spent on the project — which is roughly equivalent to over $35 million today.
Project A119: A Plan To Nuke The Moon
Armour Research FoundationProject A119 proposed nuking the Moon to show the Soviets that America had beaten them to the lunar surface.
While the Cold War was going on, a much less subtle conflict was unfolding before the public’s eyes: the Space Race. Both the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to flex their technological prowess, and there was seemingly no better way to do so than a competition over space exploration.
But before the United States could send mankind to the Moon, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite into orbit, in 1957.
After the launch of Sputnik, the U.S. needed something to best the Soviets, and one of the early ideas came in the form of Project A119. The plan was bizarre but also rather simple: nuke the Moon.
As strange as it may sound, that really was the proposal. The U.S. Air Force reached out to leading scientists and asked them, not-so-hypothetically, what would happen if they struck the lunar surface with a nuclear bomb. They wanted to set off a mushroom cloud explosion on the dark side of the Moon so that the Sun would illuminate the cloud, making it visible for billions of people across the world — especially the Soviets — to see.
Of course, there was concern about leaving a giant crater in the Moon, and there was also the risk of public backlash. Ultimately, the plan was left on the drawing room floor and only came to light again in 2000, when the information was publicized. Even then, it drew criticism. British nuclear historian David Lowry called the plot “obscene,” but others still defended it, saying it could have provided a new understanding of lunar chemistry.
Although it might seem like an insane plan today, there was very nearly a world where the secret Project A119 came to fruition — and who knows how differently history might have played out if it had?
Operation Fantasia: A World War II Plan To Scare The Japanese With Glowing Foxes
Public DomainA Japanese scroll depicting a group of kitsune, supernatural foxes said to bewitch humans.
Japan is a richly spiritual nation. More than 87 million people in the country are associated with Shinto today, and shrines dedicated to various deities can be seen all over the country. Japan is also known for its folklore, particularly the legendary creatures known as yōkai. One yōkai that makes frequent appearances in folk stories is the kitsune, a supernatural fox known to play tricks and sometimes bewitch people.
During World War II, these folk beliefs nearly became a tool for the United States to wage psychological warfare on the Japanese people. The plan, Operation Fantasia, came about after William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services, told his scientists to figure out how they could “outfox” enemy soldiers in the Axis powers.
OSS psychological warfare strategist Ed Salinger took this advice a little too literally. Since he used to run a business in Tokyo, he was somewhat familiar with Japanese folklore, including the kitsune. And he thought Americans should take advantage of this belief to scare the Japanese into defeat.
One version of Operation Fantasia went as follows: Fly fox-shaped balloons over Japanese villages to frighten the local populations. To accompany the balloons and add to the overall effect, it was proposed that soldiers would also play instruments that imitated fox cries, thus fooling the Japanese people into believing that they were being attacked by kitsune.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but this entire plan was deeply rooted in racism. Look no further than Salinger’s own memo outlining the idea, in which he writes, “The foundation for the proposal rests upon the fact that the modern Japanese is subject to superstitions, beliefs in evil spirits and unnatural manifestations which can be provoked and stimulated.”
In essence, Salinger’s plan hinged on the notion that Japanese people were more gullible than Western folk. Salinger seemed to think that the average Japanese person believed in yōkai, beyond the realm of folklore.
The balloon and whistle plan was ultimately cast aside in favor of a different plan to capture live foxes in China and Australia, spray-paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint, and release them in Japan. To see if this would actually scare the Japanese, as they hoped, the OSS decided to put the plan to the test by releasing 30 painted foxes in a park in Washington, D.C.
People who passed by the glowing foxes were indeed frightened, and so it seemed like Operation Fantasia might be somewhat successful. The other issue, however, was how they would get the foxes into Japan. The OSS decided to drop the foxes into the Chesapeake Bay near the shore and see if they swam to the land. By some miracle, this actually worked — except, once the foxes arrived on land, most of the paint had washed off.
Salinger proposed several other versions of Operation Fantasia, including having Japanese citizens who were sympathetic to the Allied cause pretend to be possessed by fox spirits, but none ever made it past the planning stage. The OSS ultimately canceled the secret government project, largely because it was impractical at best and outright foolish at worst.
Operation Monopoly: Digging A Tunnel Underneath The Soviet Embassy
Wikimedia CommonsThe Russian Embassy (formerly the Soviet Embassy) in Washington, D.C.
In 1977, the embassy of the Soviet Union was moved to a new building complex in Washington, D.C., but this new location’s proximity to the White House and the Capitol Building made some intelligence operatives anxious. Could the Soviets use new technology to spy on the U.S. president and other prominent American officials now that they were so close?
These concerns culminated in Operation Monopoly, a plan that would allow the FBI to spy on the Soviets from beneath their very noses — literally. The bureau purchased a house across the street from the Soviet Embassy and then began digging a tunnel that led to an area beneath the embassy building. From here, the FBI planned to install surveillance equipment that would relay information from within the Soviet Embassy back to them.
Construction on the tunnel started soon after the new Soviet Embassy was complete, but it was clear from the start that things were going awry. The project was poorly planned out, and water constantly leaked into the tunnel. Most of the technology installed in the tunnel ended up failing, and it was more than likely that Soviets knew what the FBI was up to the whole time, especially since the FBI’s house across the street had cameras set up, the curtains were almost always drawn, and no mail was delivered to the home.
The tunnel construction continued on for more than a decade, only to produce, in the words of FBI assistant director John F. Lewis, “no information of any kind.” The project had cost the bureau hundreds of millions of dollars — and all for nothing. To make matters worse, an investigation in 2001 revealed that FBI agent Robert Hanssen had been a double agent and revealed details about the tunnel’s construction to the Soviets.
In the end, Hanssen was charged with 14 counts of espionage and an additional count of conspiracy to commit espionage, and he was eventually sentenced to life in prison. And today, Operation Monopoly is remembered as one of the biggest wastes of time in FBI history.
Project Chariot: The U.S. Government’s Plan To Nuke Alaska
Wikimedia CommonsThe plans for Project Chariot.
It wasn’t just the Moon that the U.S. military considered nuking — far from it. In fact, for a time, it seemed like the United States was a little too quick to resort to nuking any issue it faced. Take, for example, Project Chariot, a plan to detonate nuclear explosives in Alaska to create a manmade harbor.
The plan was devised in 1958, one year before Alaska reached statehood, as part of a larger initiative known as Operation Plowshare. Essentially, Operation Plowshare sought to investigate alternative uses for nuclear weapons — so, anything other than killing people, really. As part of this initiative, the goal of Project Chariot was to use five thermonuclear explosions to create a new deep-water port on the Chukchi Sea in the hopes of boosting the economy by making it possible to export coal during the three months of the year when the nearby water wasn’t frozen.
It didn’t take long for the plan to receive pushback. Activists, scientists, and locals all took issue with the proposal. The locals, many of whom still lived in sod houses and spoke Inupiat, worried that the explosions would obliterate their way of life. They largely hunted caribou and caught fish and whales — all of which would be majorly disrupted if nuclear blasts were set off.
The larger scientific community also criticized Project Chariot, with one report from the Atomic Energy Commission even saying that it would be a “great stretch of one’s imagination” to try and predict the outcome of a hypothetical nuclear explosion on the Chukchi Sea.
By 1962, Project Chariot was dead in the water. The U.S. military did still perform tests on the effects of radioactivity on the soil in Alaska, which was discovered in the early 1990s and led to a 20-year clean-up effort.
Project 1794: When The U.S. Military Tried To Construct A Supersonic Flying Saucer
Public DomainThe Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar, a saucer-style craft created by Avro Canada as part of a secret U.S. government operation.
Theories about UFOs have circulated ever since they were first seen in the skies above. While many believers claim that flying saucers are the technologies of extraterrestrials, there are also those who have theorized that UFOs could in fact be human-made — that they are, perhaps, some secret vehicles developed by various world governments.
Despite most scientists agreeing that no technology on Earth could do what many UFOs allegedly can, that doesn’t mean experts haven’t tried.
Enter Project 1794, a now-declassified project undertaken by the U.S. Air Force that sought to create a saucer-type aircraft. This aircraft was meant to be a supersonic, combat-ready saucer that could be used to shoot down Soviet bombers — though, obviously, this never came to fruition.
The project began in the 1950s as a joint collaboration between the U.S. Air Force and the Canadian company Avro Aircraft. The Air Force specified that they wanted this craft to be unlike anything ever seen before. This saucer-shaped craft would be able to travel through the Earth’s stratosphere at a top speed of 2,600 miles per hour, reach as high as 100,000 feet in altitude, and take off and land vertically. It could be deployed practically anywhere, and the shape would make it perfect for stealth operations.
In theory, it would be exactly like the UFOs it took inspiration from. Some have even suggested that test units accounted for some UFO sightings in the 1950s — except this aircraft couldn’t do most of what it was supposed to do.
Similar military-funded aircraft, such as the VZ-9 Avrocar, also made thrilling promises. The VZ-9 Avrocar was supposed to travel at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour, but, according to The National Interest, it only reached 35 miles per hour. It also only made it a few feet off the ground, and it was effectively inoperable because it constantly pitched and rolled.
Clearly, in the 1950s, the technology just wasn’t there for a supersonic flying saucer, and Project 1794 was shuttered in the early 1960s. Funnily enough, the failure of Project 1794 only adds to the mystique around actual flying saucers, because it shows just how advanced this technology really is.
The CIA’s “Vampires” In The Philippines
Wikimedia CommonsAn artist’s depiction of an aswang, a vampire-like creature from Filipino folklore.
There seems to be something of a recurring theme with U.S. intelligence operations and taking advantage of Asian folklore to frighten Eastern and Southeastern nations. Not long after OSS personnel were tossing around the ideas behind Operation Fantasia in Japan, another group of officials from the CIA developed a similar scheme in the Philippines.
In 1950, years after World War II had ended, American Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale arrived in the Philippines. By then, Lansdale was working for the CIA, but before that, he had been in the Air Force and previously worked in the advertising business. This background made him uniquely suited for psychological warfare — and he put this skill to use.
At the time, the Filipino government was embroiled in a civil war against the communist Huk rebellion, but Lansdale was tapped specifically to help diminish enemy forces through more discreet methods. He believed that local folklore held the solution to his problem. As author William Blum explains in Killing Hope, there was a locally held belief in the aswang, a legendary creature that has often been compared to vampires.
Public DomainCIA operative Edward Lansdale.
Lansdale used the aswang to stoke the fires of fear across the Philippines. He and his team would fly over villages, projecting Tagalog curses from a loudspeaker, claiming that those who continued to aid the Huk forces would become cursed. Some superstitious villagers seemed to believe this, as they began turning in Huk fighters who had been hiding out.
But Lansdale took it a step further. His team kidnapped a Huk fighter, killed him, poked two vampire bite-like holes in his neck, and then hung him upside down so that his blood would be drained out. Before long, fellow Huks uncovered the body, saw the bite marks, and presumably believed that the soldier had been brutally murdered by an aswang.
Whether or not they really believed in the aswang, the fighters did flee from the region — so the CIA’s “vampires” did accomplish that goal. But it was certainly a brutal (and bizarre) way to go about things.
The Gay Bomb: The U.S. Military’s Plot To Make Enemy Soldiers Fall In Love With Each Other
Wikimedia Commons/Edited in CanvaThe gay bomb was intended to turn enemy soldiers gay, with the assumption that they would neglect the ongoing battle.
Would soldiers stop fighting in wars if they all suddenly became gay and fell in love with each other? It sounds ridiculous, but this hypothetical concept was once considered — far too seriously — by the U.S. military in 1994.
Dubbed the “gay bomb,” the idea was to create a theoretical chemical weapon that would not kill enemy troops, but would distract them long enough for them to neglect their wartime duties. For some reason, the only thing the U.S. Department of Defense could think of was sex — but how would they get enemy soldiers to have enough sex to distract them?
The solution was simple: Make a bomb that would turn the enemy soldiers gay, and lace it with enough aphrodisiacs so that they would become so attractive to each other that they wouldn’t be able to control themselves.
This is not a joke. In a three-page proposal for this plan — which would have cost an estimated $7.5 million — researchers at the Wright Laboratory in Ohio wrote that the gas in this bomb would contain a chemical “that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another.”
There were, of course, no real studies to back this idea up. After all, there is no proven chemical that would be able to change a person’s sexual orientation. And even if there were, there would be no guarantee that everyone exposed to it would immediately start having sex afterward.
Most likely, the idea was inherently rooted in early 1990s homophobia and, thankfully, it never made it past the initial planning stage.
Edgewood Arsenal: A Cold War-Era Human Experiment Program
U.S. National ArchivesA still from a U.S. Army video showing the effect of LSD on soldiers.
On a much darker note, secret U.S. government operations are not always just laughably ridiculous or strange. In some cases, they were truly horrific, and the Edgewood Arsenal program is a perfect example of that.
During the Cold War, at a Maryland facility known as Edgewood Arsenal, the U.S. military secretly conducted gut-wrenching experiments on their own soldiers. One involved exposing soldiers to sarin, a deadly chemical developed by the Nazis that can kill a person within minutes. Other soldiers were subjected to tear gas, mustard agents, and dangerous drugs.
Some soldiers were given LSD without knowing what it was, and most of the soldiers who signed up to be at Edgewood Arsenal were misled about what would happen there. They were often told they were simply testing out army equipment. Had they known the truth, they likely wouldn’t have signed up.
Edgewood Arsenal’s director, L. Wilson Greene, laid out specific reactions he aimed for with these tests. He saw value in any chemicals that could induce “fits or seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium, extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do even simple things, suicidal mania.” He often got the results he was looking for — to the detriment of the soldiers who volunteered, of course.
Many volunteers were left psychologically or physically scarred from the experiments. Some were hospitalized, others remained paranoid for weeks after the drugs wore off, and others went temporarily blind or suffered from long-lasting hallucinations. In most cases, volunteers felt the effects of the experiments for years afterward, struggling with depression and suicidal ideation. Some even developed nervous system disorders.
Disturbingly, the program lasted from 1948 to 1975. It only ended when a Congress investigation exposed Edgewood Arsenal’s coercive recruiting process and failure to obtain informed consent from their volunteers.
Project Capricious: The U.S. Military’s Plan To Stop Germany’s Afrika Korps With Goat Poop
Wikimedia CommonsThe minds behind Project Capricious suggested making synthetic, pathogen-laced goat poop to weaken the Afrika Korps.
There was no shortage of odd ideas during World War II. The Allied forces were facing a great threat, fighting on multiple fronts, and when the United States joined the conflict, the tides began to turn — partly due to the unique ideas of American military scientists. Of course, there were a few stinkers in the bunch, too, and in this instance, that’s quite literal.
Project Capricious was a plan devised in early 1942 to deal with German General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa. The Afrika Korps proved to be a major threat to U.S. forces there, and a fear was growing that if they should prevail, Spain might join the Axis powers. The U.S. needed a plan to prevent that, and OSS Research Director Stanley Lovell believed he had it.
Lovell proposed using flies to spread sickness among Rommel’s troops in Morocco. But how could Lovell guarantee flies would carry a disease? He thought of the one thing flies are attracted to more than anything else: dung. As it turned out, Morocco at that time had a bigger population of goats than it did people — and goats are known to poop quite a lot.
But rather than infecting real goats with a disease, Lovell thought it would be better to create a synthetic goat poop that was loaded with pathogens, which would inevitably attract flies. These flies would then spread disease among the Afrika Korps troops. The U.S. planned to drop this synthetic poop from the air in the middle of the night, though there was the issue of innocent civilians potentially contracting the illness as well.
In the end, the goat poop plan was canceled after the Germans were withdrawn from Morocco to be deployed at Stalingrad.