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Wikimedia Commons1 of 10
The Department of Defense is the driving force behind much of American research. We owe the military for a number of amazing and essential inventions, but for every time they create the Internet there are ten examples of them tying a confused animal to a bomb and hoping for the best. Here are ten examples of (understandably) cancelled military projects...
INNOVATIVE WAYS TO DIE
As the US Army was first experimenting with helicopters and the airmobility concept, a number of inventors and design firms were presenting the Pentagon with ideas for personal flying platforms designed for swift, versatile reconnaissance. Unfortunately, the designs invariably involved putting some luckless grunt on a little stool-thingie at the center of a system of rotating blades and having him steer the doohickey by shifting his body weight towards said blades like a Segway designed by a serial killer.
The de Lackner HZ-1 Aerocycle was particularly unsettling as the rotors were completely unshielded and if the operator tilted too far in any direction the machine would start oscillating uncontrollably. Incredibly, de Lackner originally intended the Aerocycle to be flyable after only twenty minutes of basic instruction; as it turned out, the brave GI who tested the device received a Distinguished Flying Cross for surviving a series of crashes and occasionally even managing to land it.
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Diseno-art2 of 10
IT'S A BOAT! IT'S A JET! NO, IT'S A BAD IDEA
Flying boats and amphibious aircraft were a major part of pre-war civil and military aviation-while major airports and airbases were few and far between, harbors, lakes, and seaports were practically everywhere.
Flying boats were key in the anti-submarine and search-and-rescue roles during WWII, but after the Allies had more or less covered every flat surface in the world with tarmac suitable for landing heavy bombers on, it was becoming clear that the big clumsy ship-shaped airplanes were less and less necessary for airlines and air forces.
Nobody mentioned this to renowned British flying boat designer Saunders-Roe, however (or maybe they just ignored it), so they designed the SR.A/1 "Squirt," the pudgiest fighter plane ever built, which was quickly shown to be too heavy and clumsy to fight even propeller-based airplanes.
The US Navy later upped the ante with the Martin P6M (a jet bomber/patrol craft intended to carry nuclear and refuel from submarines) and the Convair F2Y Sea Dart (to this day, the only seaplane ever to exceed the speed of sound) before they remembered "oh yeah, we built a gigantic fleet of aircraft carriers."
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The Modern History Blog3 of 10
ICE TO SEE YOU
The Royal Navy had a problem-they needed aircraft carriers badly, but capable aircraft carriers took a lot of time and expertise to build. Stop-gaps like the Merchant Aircraft Carrier (basically a freighter with a flat deck and a handful of planes on top) and literally shooting fighter planes off regular boats with a rocket catapult (the pilots were expected to try and reach friendly territory or ditch in the ocean close enough to not freeze to death and drown) were helpful but not enough.
Enter well-placed eccentric Geoffrey Pyke and his extremely optimistic Project Habakkuk: a gigantic aircraft carrier made almost entirely of ice treated with wood pulp so it wouldn't melt... much. The "bergship" would be big enough to launch regular RAF aircraft without the use of catapults or arresting gear and strong enough to resist all sorts of explosives and projectiles.
Unfortunately for Pyke, his sponsor Lord Mountbatten decided to demonstrate Pykrete's strength by firing his service revolver at a chunk of it at an Allied conference; the .38 slug ricocheted off and grazed the pants leg of an American admiral, who was subsequently less than enthusiastic to support the ambitious plan.
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randomwarp via YouTube4 of 10
PSYCH!
One of the few things your weird New Age aunt and the CIA have in common other than a shared love of old Kate Bush albums is a fascination with psychic phenomena, in particular "remote viewing." Remote viewing is where psychics claim to be able to see events and objects far distant in time and space, allowing the CIA to replace its expensive spy satellite system with a handful of weird dudes.
The primary force behind the CIA project (featuring the appropriately goofy code name "Operation Star Gate") was Major General Albert Stubblebine, an influential and renowned intelligence officer who required all of his battalion commanders to learn the Uri Geller spoon-bending trick and on at least one occasion attempted to psychically walk through a wall.
Star Gate ended up being about as successful as Stubblebine's wall experiment, but just to be on the safe side the CIA kept the program going for over twenty years.
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Designation Systems5 of 10
BETTER FIGHTING THROUGH CHEMICALS
One of the reasons we know so much about illegal drugs is that at some point the military has attempted to weaponize every one of them. LSD in particular was extensively tested in the hopes that it could be sprayed on enemy troops and cause them to listen-really seriously listen, man-to all their favorite records again, allowing American troops to march right past them. LSD ended up being too unreliable for military use, but it did spawn research into something much crazier and nastier: 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate or BZ, the hallucinogenic hydrogen bomb to LSD's M-80.
Rumor has it that test subjects never fully recovered from BZ exposure (one officer was discovered a week after his dose in full dress uniform trying to light a cigar in a running shower) and the American military produced a certain quantity for their chemical bombs but supposedly destroyed their stocks in 1989.
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College Archives6 of 10
GAY, SMELLY, AND COVERED IN BEES
Dangerously powerful hallucinogens weren't the only things the Air Force was interested in spraying on the enemy. A 1994 report from the Wright Laboratory introduced the fascinating and soon famous concept of the "gay bomb," a hypothetical combination pheromone and aphrodisiac which, when the enemy was hosed down with it, would lead to unstoppable homosexual lust.
A novel and sexy nonlethal weapons system to be sure, the gay bomb had one fatal flaw: nobody had any idea how to make it work. Somewhat more feasible ideas pitched in the same paper were chemicals to make enemy troops smell bad (as if someone living in a trench without access to regular baths didn't smell bad in the first place) and spraying enemies with bee pheromones and planting hives throughout the battlefield, a concept possibly borrowed from the Wu-Tang Clan.
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Polizeros7 of 10
A BUG IN A BUG
UAVs may seem like a fairly recent development, but the groundwork for the idea was laid as early as the mid sixties. At the time, the CIA was really really interested in whatever the USSR was building on the edge of the Caspian Sea, but had no good way of getting a picture of it.
The proposed solution was Operation Aquiline, an eagle-shaped camera-equipped remote-controlled airplane that could hopefully swoop down by the hangar and figure out what the hell was going on.
The "bird" kept crashing and eventually the Soviets had the good manners to move their project outdoors (spoiler alert: it was an ekranoplan, but I'm sure you'd already guessed that) but the CIA continued developing the idea with the "insectothopter," a model dragonfly that is just now becoming feasible.
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UC Santa Barbara Department of Geography8 of 10
BATS OFF TO YA
The story of the "bat bomb" project is a fairly common example of weird military projects, but what isn't typically discussed is how close the idea came to fruition. Sleeping bats with tiny incendiary time bombs would be dropped from high altitude in special parachute canisters, waking up above Japanese cities and hopefully finding roosting spots in the nooks and crannies of the typically highly-flammable Japanese home.
While the idea originally had traction because its inventor was a close personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, it picked up steam after proving its effectiveness by accidentally burning down most of Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base.
Further tests showed that the bat bombs (now codenamed Project X-Ray and run by the Navy) were up to ten times more effective at starting and spreading fires than an equivalent load of conventional incendiaries, but when Navy brass learned the system wouldn't be combat-ready until the middle of '45, they scrapped the project in favor of the atomic bomb.
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Bachrach/Getty Images9 of 10
A BIRD IN THE BOMB IS WORTH TWO IN THE-WAIT, BOMB?
WWII saw the first use of guided missiles and bombs in actual combat, but at the time the only way to guide these weapons onto the target were by simple radio control (which was easily jammed and required the launching plane to stay in sight of the target) and early radar and contrast scanners (which weren't guaranteed to work and took up a lot of space that could be used for explosives).
Legendary behavioral scientist B.F. Skinner had an idea that, in light of all the bats being set on fire, seemed like it had a decent chance of getting funding: train pigeons to peck at the center of an image of a warship in order to release food, place trained pigeons in a special nosecone rigged with screens that transmit images of the target to the pigeon, and the pigeon will unwittingly steer itself and its armor-piercing warhead into the center of a dam, factory, battleship, or whatever.
The National Defense Research Committee released the equivalent of $500,000 in modern dollars to the imaginatively-named Project Pigeon, but after Skinner suggested that they combine the guidance system with Project X-Ray the NDRC killed the project, possibly feeling like someone was making fun of them.
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Getty Images10 of 10Next: Items We Can Thank The Military For Inventing
BLUE PEACOCK: WHEN THE CHICKEN MICROWAVES YOU
A British tactical nuclear landmine program pursued under a number of oddly cute names (Brown Bunny and Blue Bunny being the prototype programs), Blue Peacock in its final form was designed to set off ten-kiloton nuclear explosives buried under West German territory a week after Soviet troops had occupied that territory (which was considered basically inevitable).
The problem with this plan, other than the part where nuclear land mines are set off underneath a completely unsuspecting civilian population and thousands of tons of radioactive soil are blown into the air, was that the soil of North Germany was so cold that the bomb's electronics and fuzing mechanism would fail in a few days-too soon to make sure that Allied troops and refugees had successfully evacuated. All sorts of warming and insulating techniques were tried before one scientist and would-be poultry farmer proposed a novel/insane source of warmth: the body heat of a brooding chicken.
Chickens would be provided with a week's worth of food and drink, deposited in the bomb, and left to spend a week in quiet contemplation of the folly of war before being reduced to wisp of chicken atoms. Political and fallout considerations eventually killed the project, and existence of the chicken bomb plan was revealed to the public on April 1, 2004. News sources understandably considered it a hoax, until British National Archives officials stated that "the Civil Service does not do jokes."
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