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.
