Wired has a roundup of eleven of the strangest military programs you can imagine. Man made northern lights? Psychics? Nuclear weapons launched from a backpack? They're all here, including the plan to use bats in warfare.
The bats eventually had a successful test, although the bats themselves wouldn't consider it so. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Furryscaly)
Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.
According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The bats eventually had a successful test, although the bats themselves wouldn't consider it so. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Furryscaly)
The sharks with head mounted lasers are missing from the list.
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