November 8, 2025 • 38 mins
Folks, we are phenomenally excited about this week's Classic episode. It sounds like something straight out of the cave beneath Bruce Wayne's Manor, but thanks to the passion of a part-time inventor named Lytle Adams, the United States military really did spend millions attempting to arm bats with incendiary devices and launch them -- real-life bat bombs -- across Japanese cities. Here's the weird thing: It could have actually worked.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow ridiculous historians, We're back with a classic. I'm Ben Bullin.
Our colleague Noel Brown is Our Adventures will be returning
soon and look I got to show you out, super producer,
mister Max Williams. You and I were talking off air,
as we do pretty often, about just how bizarre World
(00:23):
War two was.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, I mean, it's honestly become kind of a pet
interest of mine, and it's fun from working on the
show about you know, and well in you know, the
European theater, there was actual fighting and land on each
other's country and stuff like that. But when it became
of the United States and Japan, there was never really
fighting on either continental land between these countries. So there
(00:47):
was a lot of really weird ideas they had throughout
the years of how to either attack the other one
or defend from an attack. So like, you know, we
have the episode, most recent one I'm pretty sure about,
like them building fake towns on bomber factories, like them
fighting like battles on Worthless, like frozen hundred Islands in
(01:11):
the North Pacific, or obviously the balloon bomb episode, which yeah,
before this, and so then like reading this, it's like
World war two bat bombs, Okay, they kept trying.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Look, war is a huge driver of horror and also
scientific and medical innovation. So if you go to your
average doctor's office or to your average space launch center,
as I'm sure we all do, then a lot of
the amazing technology you see is directly descended from the
(01:44):
atrocities of warfare. Really, most modern war is a war
of tiny edges, right, It's a war of seeking any
possible advantage. Everything can go on the drawdrawing board, even
if we understand that most of the stuff will never
leave that drawing board because they're frankly desperate and stupid ideas.
(02:10):
So this involves, of course, a long running obsession of
our sister shows stuff. They don't want you to know
the idea of weaponizing animals, right. Ever, since Empires of
old just ran over enemy forces with elephants, people were
trying to figure out how to leverage the natural world
(02:31):
to military advantage. And it is true, Uncle Sam, once
upon a time spent millions of dollars trying to take
bats like little bats, not baseball bats, the animals, the
mammals bats, and strapping explosive devices on them and then
(02:52):
launching them en mass across Japanese cities. Now again, this
is a drawing board idea, but as we'll learn in
this classic episode from twenty nineteen, it might have actually worked.
So how close do we get? We'll tell you in
this classic episode. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
(03:40):
No no, no no no no no no no no no,
no no, no bat bombs. Welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians.
What the heck are we talking about? Well, we're about
to tell you hello, my name is Ben.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
My name is done Ben. You know we did that
before with knife Man.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yes, it's just a great it's a great musical device.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
It really is.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Goes into anything with two syllables.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
I'm into it.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Oh and I'm also into our super producer, Casey Pegram.
We were off air today, just about to jump into
the studio and Casey, I don't know. Have you ever
heard of batbombs?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I have not. No, I have no idea what this
episode is about. Unless it's guano. That's the only bat
bomb I can think of. Hey, that was good, Yeah, no,
and funny enough. I think guano is actually quite flammable
and could be potentially used in explosives.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And guano is also quite valuable. Right, We did an
episode for a different show on a cannibal cave. You
can find a ce teca. We did an episode on
cannibal cave that was discovered because of some unscrupulous guano miners.
Bats have actually played a surprisingly influential role in US
(04:51):
history at various times. And also, bats are one of
those creatures that are up close. A lot of bats
that I've run in two are pretty gross, but they're
still just from a biological perspective, amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
They are amazing. And there is a YouTube video or
an Instagram video or one of those videos where someone's
like handling a bat and it's a particularly cute bat.
So they have the potential to be both terrifying and adorable.
Is it a fruit bat? It must have been.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So there's so many different types of bat. And today
we are talking about a type of plan that the
US made with bats. This is okay, So we have
to go in two different directions here, right, and maybe
tie them together as we continue. First, it's no secret
(05:42):
to any fan of history or to anyone who's perused
the Adventures of the US military that the US military
like many other militaries has kind of a spaghetti at
the wall approach to developing new stuff, and most of
the time it doesn't work out.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
You know, this reminds me of been It's sort of
like the Hollywood studio system, where you might just have
some intern in an office just pitch some crazy idea
that an executive happens to year and he's like, you
know what, that's just crazy enough to work.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
That's a good point. This reminds me of a clip
that we cannot for legal reasons play in full for you,
but we can tell you what it is and go
check it out on YouTube. After this show, John mullaney
has a great bit about how Back to the Future
became a film.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Did you ever see that?
Speaker 1 (06:30):
No?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I don't think I did. Know.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Oh man, Okay, well, we can't stop the show. I
wish I could just play this for you. Now google it,
I'll send you the link. Is it is exactly what
you were talking about, and that is a very good
comparison to the approach that the military has taken at times. Today.
Our story starts well, it really gets running toward the
(06:56):
end of World War Two, thanks to a guy named
doctor Little Adams or Litel Adams.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
I'm gonna go with little gotta be Little. You got
Little Adams l Y T l E.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, I think if that's why, I'm giving him space
to be Litel Adams too, just in case, because I
don't know, Like, would you want to be walked around
called Lil Brown? Yeah, you would be into.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
That, absolutely. I support that wholeheartedly.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So doctor Adams doesn't begin life as a mad scientist
for Uncle Sam. He starts life in Irwin, Pennsylvania, and
for a long time he works as a dentist.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Before that, presumably as a baby.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yes, yeah, no, he began life as a middle aged dentist.
That's crazy common medical condition. That is that like Benjamin
Button sort of Yeah, Benjamin Button is is loosely based
on the Adventures of the dentist Doctor Adams.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Now the Adventures of Little Adams. That sounds like a fun,
rollicking good time. It sounds like a real rom doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
So here's what happened in real life, Doctor Adams. And
you might not see this unless you watch the director's
cut of Benjamin Button. Doctor Adams is driving home from
a vacation at Carl's Bad Caverns, in New Mexico, and
while he's driving home, he is haunted by this vision
(08:21):
that he saw this amazing spectacle. He watched bats leaving
the caves of Carlsbad caverns. And we've seen those clips
of bats leaving mass right right right, a little round
twilight or so, like a.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Hive mind operating on some kind of crazy psychic connection.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
And he watched millions of these bats fly out, And
as he was driving, he was thinking, Wow, that was
such an amazing thing. There were so many bats. I
had no idea the sheer magnitude of nature and all
its glory. And he probably we're speculating a little here,
but he probably goes, all right, well, it's long drive
(09:00):
from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. I'm going to turn on
my car radio. I'm going to get the news. Here's
some tunes. And that's when he hears the terrible news.
He's listening on December seventh, nineteen forty one, that's when
he hears the terrible news that Japan has just attacked
Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, and much like you and I remember likely where
we were when the attacks on September eleventh took place.
Everyone in this country likely does very similar experience to
Pearl Harbor. When people first heard that news, it was
a like a slap in the face. It was a
real emotional response that people had to this event. And
(09:36):
that was the case for doctor Adams, and he kind
of oddly combined that emotional response with the vision of
swarming bats that he had just seen.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Kind of you a Bruce Wayne esque way when he
discovers the cave right below Wayne manor that's a little
bit of a spoiler for anybody who has ever heard
words or seeing comics.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
So we have to imagine how insane this drive must
have been. It's not a short drive home, So is
it any wonder that who was left alone with his
thoughts and just kept combining and recombining his recent experiences.
Either way, it doesn't take him long to take action.
He combines this vision, as you said, of these bats
(10:23):
and this desire for revenge into a coherent plan, and
less than a month later, mid January January twelfth, nineteen
forty two, he sends his plan to the White House.
What does he say? What's the pitch?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Yeah, he thinks it'd be a swell idea to strap
tiny bombs to bats release them and in the hopes
that they will roost in the eaves and in various
locations of Japanese cities, at which point they would be detonated,
causing chaos across the land. But real quick. This was
not the first such idea that doctor Adams hat. He
(11:01):
actually came up with in nineteen thirty nine, an idea
for a plane that could do male pickups mid air.
And so he was kind of had a history of
being something of a tinkerer, even though his trade was
in the dental profession.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yes, that's a really good point. This is not a
once in a lifetime innovation or bright idea for him.
He has several ideas that would seem at the very
least unorthodox right to mainstream humanity.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Yeah big. Bringing it back to Batman, this mid air
pickup idea was very similar to Operations Skyhook in the
I Believe Batman Begins movie. Is that right? It is
in the Dark Night, Dark Knight, that's right when they
sort of extract Bruce Wayne from a Japanese high rise
with this hook and they pull him out with this wire.
(11:56):
And he came up with this idea while serving in
the Navy during World War One consisted of these two
kind of vertical walls that made a V shape at
the narrow end of which a weighted cable was trailing.
And this is underneath the airplane and as it passed
it would engage in an object to be picked up
and then lifted and extracted, So very similar to skyhook.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Actually, he also, I believe, depleted a lot of his
own fortune and personal savings pursuing this until he met
Richard DuPont of the DuPont DuPonts, the DuPont DuPonts. Yes,
and it wasn't that it wasn't it designed to never land?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, exactly because he figured there was. This wasn't like
a completely unique idea, But the notion was that a
lot of time and effort was wasted when the planes
were landing and they had to refuel. So this system,
in theory, would allow it to refuel in the air,
pick up fuel reserves from the ground or even from
a passing train. They could coordinate and specifically for long
(12:55):
distance mail pickups and freight and things like that. I
don't know, I know it was patented, but it certainly
never hit in the way that he hoped it would.
But fast forward to World War Two. Let's go back
to the pitch. How was he able to get an
audience with the White House in the first place. He
was not exactly like he didn't work for them. He
was just kind of a regular joe who was a
tinkerer on the side. And this whole you know, mid
(13:18):
flight refueling mail pickup scheme never really gained too much momentum,
so he didn't really have a reputation as being someone
the government should like turn to during times of war.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Would you say it never got off the ground?
Speaker 4 (13:30):
I would say that, man, Oh, but you said it first.
Oh sorry, sorry, no joke left untold. He did manage
to shout above the din the cacophony of people with
unsolicited suggestions, plans, and schemes. We have to imagine, of course,
(13:54):
how many people would be writing directly to the White
House saying, here's what we do, and it may be
worth our time in another episode to look at some
of the most unorthodox World War two revenge schemes. But
Adams had an edge. He had a very important friend.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
That's right. This is somewhat a story about nepotism. You
see Adams happen to know a woman by the name
of Eleanor Roosevelt. He had flown her to check out
his airmail scheme previously, right, and because they had this
previous relationship, historians speculate that's the way he was able
(14:34):
to get his voice heard and his idea, his pitch, right,
the one that you established earlier, and all about dropping
these bats in Japanese cities. It made more sense than
it might sound at first, blush, because of Japanese architecture.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Right, Yeah, tell us more about that, Ben. It's not
something I'd quite considered, because I was wondering how were
to get into all of these little nooks and crannies,
if you know, it seems like it would take time
for them to work their way into the eaves of
homes as we know it. But I believe the architecture
in Japan was a little more open and possibly more
accessible to these small creatures. And they were quite small.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
They were quite small. Yes, So this pitch hinged on
some stereotypes about Japan at the time. One of those
concerned in the architecture. In the mind of many Americans,
policymakers and civilians alike, Japan was a country composed of
crowded cities filled with houses and factories made of paper
(15:39):
and wood, and that's their vision of traditional Japanese architectures.
So the argument there might be that flying bats with
small andcendiary devices into a city where most things are
built of stone or concrete, that won't do much, right,
It takes an enormous amount of heat today image that
(16:00):
stuff but paper and wood could catch fire with a
relatively small amount of flame.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
But also wouldn't it have something to do with how
easy and quickly it might have been for the bats
to work their way into these structures. They weren't like
sealed air tight quite in the way we would think
of a traditional American home.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Right, Well, they thought that would fly into those like
picture of traditional Japanese tile roof right, they thought they
would fly into the eaves of those roofs, and that
this would this would get them close enough to the
paper walls, and wouldn't make sense. So we have a
quote from him, Think of thousands of fires breaking out
(16:41):
simultaneously over a circle of forty miles in diameter. For
every bomb dropped, Japan could have been devastated, yet with
small loss of life which doesn't really make sense because
when cities catch on fire, a lot of people die.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
So I guess he was maybe he was talking about
America in lives.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, that's probably, that's that's unfortunately, it sounds very accurate.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Because I mean, obviously the bats were on suicide missions here,
so that's you know, I don't imagine Peter would approve
this plan today.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, yeah, let's take a second maybe and talk about
the bats.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
What do you say? Let's do it all right.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So once the project gets the green light, and again
please listen to that John Mullaney, back to the future bit,
it's worth it won't ruin it for you. Once the
project gets the green light, somehow, doctor Adams gathers a
team of naturalists from the Hancock Foundation University California, and
(17:39):
they start investigating likely sites where they could gather large
quantities of bats. As we know, bats are mostly found
in caves, but a ton of them roost in attics, barnes, houses, bridges,
anywhere they can get it infitted, right.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
That's right, it's funny. Casey and I actually at ten
did to capture a mass exodus of bats like this
on video in Austin, there's this bridge that's referred to
as the bat Bridge, where every night, at a certain time,
all of these bats that nest under this bridge or
they kind of just hang out there during the day
go out to feed at night because they're nocturnal animals.
(18:17):
But we waited there for an awful long time and
they never emerged. So I cannot offer a first hand
account of this, but I have been told that it
does happen.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yes, it's true. I don't know if I have revealed
this to you guys, but years and years ago, one
of my childhood homes actually did have a bat infestation
in the attic, and I happened to live in a
room that adjoined the attic, and I was surprised to
find that, at least here in Georgia, you cannot kill
the bats. You have to essentially wait for them to
(18:48):
leave or compel them to leave whatever area they're roostine legally.
Yeah really yeah, And you then find whatever heidi holes
or ingress egress points they're using, block those, with the
hope being that vampire rules they'll find a new place
to sleep before dawn.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
That's terrifying. I didn't know that, so that you can't
treat them like you would like any other household infestation.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
No, no, no, no no, because they're so good for
the ecosystem.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
It's well interesting. I had no idea about that.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
So they go atoms, not the bats that I used
to live with. They go around scouring these areas to
find the best possible large quantity of bats suitable for
this project. According to Adams, they visit a thousand caves
and three thousand mines, and Adams says speed was so
(19:38):
imperative that we generally drove all day and night. When
we weren't exploring caves, we slept in cars, taking turns
of driving one car. And our search team covered three
hundred and fifty thousand miles. And then they started cataloging
the types of bats they found, and they were looking
for the ideal combination of bat size which would dictate
(20:00):
the amount of explosive the bat could carry versus back quantity.
How many bats of that type could they find, because
you know, if you found like twelve bats that were
large enough to carry eight pounds of dynamite, you know,
good for those bats, but that's not really going to
do anything to a Japanese city on a large scale
(20:20):
the way they were hoping.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
That's very true. And just a little detail here. These
were Mexican free tailed bats. They decided on because of
their size and their availability. And so in March of
nineteen forty three, this is backtracking just a little bit,
the US Air Force decided they wanted to investigate this.
There was a letter that was drafted to formally, you know,
(20:42):
announce the pursuing of this, like a memo, and it
was called Test of Method to Scatter Incendiaries. It was
also referred to as Project X ray.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Way cool name uses Mexican free tailed bats. The other
bats they tried were things like the mastiff. The massive
bat is huge as a twenty inch wingspan. It can
carry one pound of dynamite. But the problem was they
couldn't find enough of these bats. And then they found
another bat, the mullard or common palid bat, that could
(21:13):
carry three ounces. But naturalists said, there's no way these
guys will survive the strange process we're going to subject
them to. And when they found the free tailed bat,
the main reason they went with it is because it
could travel with a one ounce bomb over a relatively
short distance, even though it only weighed a third of
(21:33):
an ounce, and they found twenty to thirty million of
them in a cave in Nay Cave near Bandera, Texas.
And it was so large. This kind of ties into
the adventure that Noel, you and Casey had in Austin.
It was so large that when these bats left the cave,
it took five hours for them to all leave out
(21:54):
of the cave, flying in a dense stream fifteen feet
in diameter and so closely packed that they could barely
lap their wings.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, obviously, these must be
very powerful creatures in terms of their ability to like
like ants. They always say they can carry ten times
their body weight or whatever. This must be a similar case.
Although they had to take the weight into consideration when
they figured out which bats to use and what amount
of incendiaries would pack the most punch. And I'm guessing
(22:21):
that it was all considered. Like you said, it wouldn't
take a whole lot. They weren't. They weren't going to
level a building with these bats. They were going to
start a little flame that was then going to catch
on fire, and they were going to do them all
at once. But Ben, did you catch anywhere in your research.
How they were planning to detonate these bat bombs, like
all at once or was it on a timer or timer?
(22:41):
It was on a timer. Yeah, that makes the most sense.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
That's probably that's the best way to do it, you know,
that is the best way to do it.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
So they finally settled on these Mexican free tail bats,
and there was a lot of consideration for various stages
of this process, right like the questions we were just asking,
how to transport them, how to deploy them, etc. What
were some of the things that they sort of figured
out during this process?
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Man, sure, sure, So this project when it gets a
cool name, the Army says, wait, we want projects with
cool names. So the project is transferred to the army
and they start capturing these thousands and thousands of Mexican
freetail bats the caverns all around the southwest United States.
They wanted to figure out how to get these things
(23:27):
from the location where they are attached to these bombs,
these incendiary devices, and then transport them without blowing anything up,
and then deploying them so that they don't blow up
until they're supposed to. The first thing they had to
figure out was how to keep the bats calm, and
that is when they decided to induce hibernation in the bats.
(23:50):
This is interesting, this is this is something that might
surprise some people. Bats actually do hibernate, which makes it
a little bit less inhumane, you know what I mean.
Bats hibernate from late fall until spring, so October, November
to March and April. And I'm just realizing this now.
(24:13):
No bats are listening to this podcast, Yeah right now.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
It's probably better that way. Yeah, this could be triggering.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Until summer spring. Yes, so we know that they will
hibernate typically in the same environments in which they roost,
but they roost in caves and mines and attics and
stuff like that. So how do you strap an explosive
device to them or in scendiary device and then convince
them to hibernate on a plane. What they ultimately decided
(24:39):
to do was to stick the bats in ice cube trays. Again,
these are very small, the only way about the way
less announced.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
But surely not the kind of ice cube trays you
and I are used to. I mean that's way too small.
One little compartment in an ice cube tray that would
go in our freezer.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
All my ice cube trays are specifically designed to fit bats.
That's fair, It's pretty unfair to the bats.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
But would would the explosives be strapped to them already
at this point or would they have to like put
them on after they woke them up. This whole thing
seems like a logistical nightmare, and that seems like stuff
that they didn't consider up front when they said, hey,
this guy's onto something.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Well, it seems like a lot of bats probably died
in the process of figuring out the best way to
do this.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Well, ultimately, these were suicide bats anyway, so they were
all destined for death. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
They also had to figure out how to release these
bats in mid air. So they thought, we'll have a
cardboard container that automatically opens and releases the bats. And
they were trying to figure out how to do this.
They spent a lot of time working out the perfect
order of operations, and then they took it to real testing.
(25:54):
They took it off the drawing board into the world,
and they found out that there was a lot of
stuff they needed to work on.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Oh yeah, a lot of kinks. There's an article in
the Atlantic called Old Weird Tech The Bat Bombs of
World War Two by Alexis C. Madrigal, and in this
article she talks about some of the unfortunate mishaps that
occurred when they really started doing real world testing, one
of which involved a general's car that was exploded, basically burned,
(26:26):
and also an airplane hangar that sustained some pretty serious damage.
They did pass this off to the Marine Corps and
the testing continued.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, so when they passed it to the Marine Corps
in December of nineteen forty three, the operation was moved
to the Marine Corps air Station El Centro, California. The
definitive test was carried out after several experiments on what
they called a Japanese village. It was a mock up
(26:58):
of a Japanese city built by the Chemical Warfare Service
at their Dougway Proving Grounds test site in Utah, and
this test produced not terrible results. So the chief of
incendiary testing at Dougway wrote, a reasonable number of destructive
fires can be started in spite of the extremely small
(27:20):
size of the units. Those are the bats. The main
advantage of the units would seem to be their placement
within the enemy structures without the knowledge of the householder
or fire watchers, thus allowing the fire to establish itself
before being discovered. So what they're saying is when they
get into these attics and these eves, it is highly
unlikely that somebody will notice this very very tiny, tiny,
(27:42):
tiny furry creature, and they probably won't notice the fire
until it's too late.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
My question, though, is, we know the way bats behave,
wouldn't they all go to one place like what was
causing what was leading them to.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Go to disperse?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
To disperse, because it doesn't seem that's what bats typically do.
It seems like they kind of like have that hive
mind quality to it. I was joking when I said
they have, you know, psychic connections or whatever. But sometimes
when you see flocks of birds or bats or any
kind of creatures like that migrating or moving in these
tight patterns together, I just don't know, it seems very random.
They would not. Obviously, they wouldn't have been able to
control where they went. They would just hope that they
(28:21):
went enough different places that this had actually caused them
significant damage over a large area.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah, it's it's a good question. Maybe there's an argument
that the bats would be so disoriented, just waking up
from hibernation, that they're just seeking a shelter. Yeah, you know,
for now, it looks like the answer to that is
still unclear in the modern day. Oh, we do have
to mention also, people called this the Atoms Plan in
(28:52):
common conversation when you know, when they weren't referring to
it officially's Project X ray. But one of the things
that they thought would be another great advantage was that
the use of bats would be demoralizing, so there was
some psyop here as well. All in all, there's a
total of thirty demonstrations of this technology, of this plan
and two million dollars spent over the period of development,
(29:17):
with full scale bomber bat test planned for August nineteen
forty four. However, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, who at
the time was Chief of Naval Operations, learned that the
bats would not be ready for combat until mid nineteen
forty five. Well that's not going to five, right, He
abruptly canceled the operation, and needless to say, doctor Adams
(29:42):
was disappointed. There's also a little bit of interesting historical
speculation here too, because there was another even more secret
perhaps even more ambitious and insane project that Uncle Sam
was pouring a ton of resources into.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Yeah, unlikely needed every last penny. And that was the
atomic bomb, which ultimately and tragically was used to end
that conflict and then never again.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
The most powerful explosive device ever created at that time,
which different from several thousand pets.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
So doctor Adams, obviously this was a real bummer for
a Pennsylvanian dentist.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yeah, and he was understandably disappointed because this would have
been his second big idea that seemed to be going
somewhere and then ultimately didn't quite hit in the way
that he wanted it to write, Ben Oh, yeah, because
of air pickup.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
But this was these two ideas were not his only
two ideas. Yeah, some other stuff, right.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
And then progressively I would say, you know, the bat bomb,
between the bat bomb and the air pickup bat bomb
was way more on the surface crackpot, even though it
did have some function to it. But these these last
ones that we're going to talk about are a little
bit more on the kooky side. But you have clearly
a forward thinking.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
And clearly has a thing about aviation and the power
of flight. So he had this he later has this
plan to use bombers to distribute seeds across the prairie
land in hopes of revolutionizing agriculture. Right, that's that's pretty ambitious.
It's also way less destructive. It's kind of the same
(31:23):
thing as bombing places with bats, that's true.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
And then he had another idea, non aviation related.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
This is my favorite one.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
Yeah, where he thought it would be a good idea
and people would flock to a fried chicken vending machine.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
I absolutely would, But how would you keep it fresh?
It has to be like fried on demand. You would
have to hit the button to make your request, and
then it would have to be able to automatically fry.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
So it would be sort of like those coke machines
where it picks up the bottle with like a little thing,
Oh yeah, it up and then drops it, only it
would be like a hole. You get to watch your
chicken being fried, and you have to are at one
piece at a time. I want to know more about
the logistics of this.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Well, I want to tell you that someone has made
this dream a reality. What yes, doctor Adams, If you
are listening from the Eternal Hibernation of Death, this is
something that hopefully will warm your heart. There is a
vending machine that serves fried chicken in Japan. I don't
know how it would feel about it, but it is
(32:25):
in Japan. I mean obviously, of course all cool vending
machines in Japan, and we know they love fried chicken too, yes,
especially around Christmas. A Japanese convenience chain name Looston Incorporated
is testing this machine out, or they were as of
December of twenty eighteen. So this is breaking news. This
comes to us through technobob and this is in Shinagawa
(32:49):
Ward in Tokyo. The machine has technology that allows it
to fry chicken in a little bit over a minute.
But somehow they prepare the chicken and keep it warm
until someone orders it to me. That's where it breaks down,
because fried chicken, it's like French fries. It's like most
fried food. You got to eat it when it's fresh.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Yeah, that's true. That's why nobody wants gas station fried
chicken sitting under that like hot lamp for god knows
how long. No, No, it's got to be fresh and
crispy and juicy and delicious.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
So we want to hear from you, fellow ridiculous historians
out there in Japan, especially if you're in this area
of Tokyo, because this trial only operated from I guess
mid December to December twenty eighth, twenty eighteen. So right now,
the good folks at Lass and Incorporated, we can only imagine,
(33:41):
are studying the results of their fried chicken experiment, and
you know what, I hope it works out. I am
a big fan of venue machines and I would give
it a shot. Even though if you look at the photo,
there is one photo of this fried chicken from a
vending machine, they look more like chicken nuggets then, you know,
like a two piece or three piece. I don't know
(34:02):
about you, ma'am, but I like my chicken bone in
really yeaheah.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
I'm a fan of boneless fried chicken, but you know,
you can't quite beat a freshly fried bone in bird.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
That's true. I wonder if we should do the history
of vending machines as an episode. Wouldn't that be cool?
Speaker 3 (34:19):
I would love to hear about that. I have a
feeling it started like on the boardwalks and the Carnie Times,
you know, things like that. This is just speculation on
my part, but I think that's a great idea, Ben.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
I don't wonder where I would start, because there were
some places in We may have talked about this in
previous episode Noo, but I know there were some places
in England centuries and centuries ago where it was like
a manual vending machine. You would walk up to a
wall and then you would knock or slide a penny
or something across, and then someone would just hand you
I think a small cup of gin.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Nice. According to Doctor Internet, the first vending machine came
out in the eighteen eighties in London and it was
for purchasing post guards and it was invented by Percival Everett.
But you know, there's a long and story history of
vending machines as they evolved over time. How we came
from back bombs to vending machines. I guess we're talking
about forward thinking, innovative types, you know. Yes, yes, let's
(35:15):
let's definitely do history of any machine episodes.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Let's definitely do it. Let us know about your favorite
vending machine, let us know about your favorite seemingly crackpot
military scheme, because oh buddy, this is only scratching the surface.
The US military and other militaries have attempted to use
dolphins for wartime efforts, cats for spying. I think rats
(35:38):
as well for something.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
We did an episode on this.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
We did an.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Episode here on this, oh about the skinner boxes and
a sideshow kind of carnival TV show. Yeah, there was
like a whole farm where they took these animals that
they had trained for military purposes and like made money
with the chicken that would peck the.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
Yeah or whatever.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
How time flies really does?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
We've been doing for like over a year now, have we?
I don't think we ever acknowledged the year anniversary, but
it is coming gone.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Making a show like this is sort of like in
all those classic cartoons where Elmer Fudd or Wiley Coyote
or you know, Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny when they
walk off the cliff and they just keep walking until
they look down. Just don't look down.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
I call it critical mass. Critical mass. You know, you
do something you just kind of like have this trajectory
and you just never look back, And as long as
you don't look back, you kind of forget what's going
on or how time passes.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Now we're going into philosophy as well, but well said
and we hope that you enjoy this episode. We do
want to hear these answers. I will look at pictures
of your favorite vending machines or the most unusual vending
machines until the stars collapse and the universe meets its end.
(36:54):
In the meantime, Thank you so much for tuning in.
Thanks to our super producer Pegram.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Yeah, thanks to Alex Williams who composed our theme. Thanks
to our research associate Gabe, and we're gonna try a
new thing. Hey, if you want to check out me
and Ben's individual exploit. Since our show Instagram account is
not the most fascinating in the world, you can check
me out at Embryonic Insider on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And you can find me at Ben Bullen on Instagram. Yes,
in a burst of creativity, folks, The newest thing that
I have up is maybe the Saturn five wago replica
that I built this weekend, which is huge, very impressive.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
It's weird.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
You can find us on our respect to Instagram. You
can find us on Twitter. You can also find us
on Facebook. Perhaps most importantly, you can find your fellow
Ridiculous historians on our Facebook community page, Ridiculous historians.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
And please tune into our next episode where we talk
about the ridiculous origins of state name, specifically Idaho. We'll
see it m
Fellow ridiculous historians, We're back with a classic. I'm Ben Bullin.
Our colleague Noel Brown is Our Adventures will be returning
soon and look I got to show you out, super producer,
mister Max Williams. You and I were talking off air,
as we do pretty often, about just how bizarre World
(00:23):
War two was.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, I mean, it's honestly become kind of a pet
interest of mine, and it's fun from working on the
show about you know, and well in you know, the
European theater, there was actual fighting and land on each
other's country and stuff like that. But when it became
of the United States and Japan, there was never really
fighting on either continental land between these countries. So there
(00:47):
was a lot of really weird ideas they had throughout
the years of how to either attack the other one
or defend from an attack. So like, you know, we
have the episode, most recent one I'm pretty sure about,
like them building fake towns on bomber factories, like them
fighting like battles on Worthless, like frozen hundred Islands in
(01:11):
the North Pacific, or obviously the balloon bomb episode, which yeah,
before this, and so then like reading this, it's like
World war two bat bombs, Okay, they kept trying.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Look, war is a huge driver of horror and also
scientific and medical innovation. So if you go to your
average doctor's office or to your average space launch center,
as I'm sure we all do, then a lot of
the amazing technology you see is directly descended from the
(01:44):
atrocities of warfare. Really, most modern war is a war
of tiny edges, right, It's a war of seeking any
possible advantage. Everything can go on the drawdrawing board, even
if we understand that most of the stuff will never
leave that drawing board because they're frankly desperate and stupid ideas.
(02:10):
So this involves, of course, a long running obsession of
our sister shows stuff. They don't want you to know
the idea of weaponizing animals, right. Ever, since Empires of
old just ran over enemy forces with elephants, people were
trying to figure out how to leverage the natural world
(02:31):
to military advantage. And it is true, Uncle Sam, once
upon a time spent millions of dollars trying to take
bats like little bats, not baseball bats, the animals, the
mammals bats, and strapping explosive devices on them and then
(02:52):
launching them en mass across Japanese cities. Now again, this
is a drawing board idea, but as we'll learn in
this classic episode from twenty nineteen, it might have actually worked.
So how close do we get? We'll tell you in
this classic episode. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
(03:40):
No no, no no no no no no no no no,
no no, no bat bombs. Welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians.
What the heck are we talking about? Well, we're about
to tell you hello, my name is Ben.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
My name is done Ben. You know we did that
before with knife Man.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yes, it's just a great it's a great musical device.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
It really is.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Goes into anything with two syllables.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
I'm into it.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Oh and I'm also into our super producer, Casey Pegram.
We were off air today, just about to jump into
the studio and Casey, I don't know. Have you ever
heard of batbombs?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I have not. No, I have no idea what this
episode is about. Unless it's guano. That's the only bat
bomb I can think of. Hey, that was good, Yeah, no,
and funny enough. I think guano is actually quite flammable
and could be potentially used in explosives.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And guano is also quite valuable. Right, We did an
episode for a different show on a cannibal cave. You
can find a ce teca. We did an episode on
cannibal cave that was discovered because of some unscrupulous guano miners.
Bats have actually played a surprisingly influential role in US
(04:51):
history at various times. And also, bats are one of
those creatures that are up close. A lot of bats
that I've run in two are pretty gross, but they're
still just from a biological perspective, amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
They are amazing. And there is a YouTube video or
an Instagram video or one of those videos where someone's
like handling a bat and it's a particularly cute bat.
So they have the potential to be both terrifying and adorable.
Is it a fruit bat? It must have been.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So there's so many different types of bat. And today
we are talking about a type of plan that the
US made with bats. This is okay, So we have
to go in two different directions here, right, and maybe
tie them together as we continue. First, it's no secret
(05:42):
to any fan of history or to anyone who's perused
the Adventures of the US military that the US military
like many other militaries has kind of a spaghetti at
the wall approach to developing new stuff, and most of
the time it doesn't work out.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
You know, this reminds me of been It's sort of
like the Hollywood studio system, where you might just have
some intern in an office just pitch some crazy idea
that an executive happens to year and he's like, you
know what, that's just crazy enough to work.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
That's a good point. This reminds me of a clip
that we cannot for legal reasons play in full for you,
but we can tell you what it is and go
check it out on YouTube. After this show, John mullaney
has a great bit about how Back to the Future
became a film.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Did you ever see that?
Speaker 1 (06:30):
No?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I don't think I did. Know.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Oh man, Okay, well, we can't stop the show. I
wish I could just play this for you. Now google it,
I'll send you the link. Is it is exactly what
you were talking about, and that is a very good
comparison to the approach that the military has taken at times. Today.
Our story starts well, it really gets running toward the
(06:56):
end of World War Two, thanks to a guy named
doctor Little Adams or Litel Adams.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
I'm gonna go with little gotta be Little. You got
Little Adams l Y T l E.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, I think if that's why, I'm giving him space
to be Litel Adams too, just in case, because I
don't know, Like, would you want to be walked around
called Lil Brown? Yeah, you would be into.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
That, absolutely. I support that wholeheartedly.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So doctor Adams doesn't begin life as a mad scientist
for Uncle Sam. He starts life in Irwin, Pennsylvania, and
for a long time he works as a dentist.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Before that, presumably as a baby.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yes, yeah, no, he began life as a middle aged dentist.
That's crazy common medical condition. That is that like Benjamin
Button sort of Yeah, Benjamin Button is is loosely based
on the Adventures of the dentist Doctor Adams.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Now the Adventures of Little Adams. That sounds like a fun,
rollicking good time. It sounds like a real rom doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
So here's what happened in real life, Doctor Adams. And
you might not see this unless you watch the director's
cut of Benjamin Button. Doctor Adams is driving home from
a vacation at Carl's Bad Caverns, in New Mexico, and
while he's driving home, he is haunted by this vision
(08:21):
that he saw this amazing spectacle. He watched bats leaving
the caves of Carlsbad caverns. And we've seen those clips
of bats leaving mass right right right, a little round
twilight or so, like a.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Hive mind operating on some kind of crazy psychic connection.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
And he watched millions of these bats fly out, And
as he was driving, he was thinking, Wow, that was
such an amazing thing. There were so many bats. I
had no idea the sheer magnitude of nature and all
its glory. And he probably we're speculating a little here,
but he probably goes, all right, well, it's long drive
(09:00):
from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. I'm going to turn on
my car radio. I'm going to get the news. Here's
some tunes. And that's when he hears the terrible news.
He's listening on December seventh, nineteen forty one, that's when
he hears the terrible news that Japan has just attacked
Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, and much like you and I remember likely where
we were when the attacks on September eleventh took place.
Everyone in this country likely does very similar experience to
Pearl Harbor. When people first heard that news, it was
a like a slap in the face. It was a
real emotional response that people had to this event. And
(09:36):
that was the case for doctor Adams, and he kind
of oddly combined that emotional response with the vision of
swarming bats that he had just seen.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Kind of you a Bruce Wayne esque way when he
discovers the cave right below Wayne manor that's a little
bit of a spoiler for anybody who has ever heard
words or seeing comics.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
So we have to imagine how insane this drive must
have been. It's not a short drive home, So is
it any wonder that who was left alone with his
thoughts and just kept combining and recombining his recent experiences.
Either way, it doesn't take him long to take action.
He combines this vision, as you said, of these bats
(10:23):
and this desire for revenge into a coherent plan, and
less than a month later, mid January January twelfth, nineteen
forty two, he sends his plan to the White House.
What does he say? What's the pitch?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Yeah, he thinks it'd be a swell idea to strap
tiny bombs to bats release them and in the hopes
that they will roost in the eaves and in various
locations of Japanese cities, at which point they would be detonated,
causing chaos across the land. But real quick. This was
not the first such idea that doctor Adams hat. He
(11:01):
actually came up with in nineteen thirty nine, an idea
for a plane that could do male pickups mid air.
And so he was kind of had a history of
being something of a tinkerer, even though his trade was
in the dental profession.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yes, that's a really good point. This is not a
once in a lifetime innovation or bright idea for him.
He has several ideas that would seem at the very
least unorthodox right to mainstream humanity.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Yeah big. Bringing it back to Batman, this mid air
pickup idea was very similar to Operations Skyhook in the
I Believe Batman Begins movie. Is that right? It is
in the Dark Night, Dark Knight, that's right when they
sort of extract Bruce Wayne from a Japanese high rise
with this hook and they pull him out with this wire.
(11:56):
And he came up with this idea while serving in
the Navy during World War One consisted of these two
kind of vertical walls that made a V shape at
the narrow end of which a weighted cable was trailing.
And this is underneath the airplane and as it passed
it would engage in an object to be picked up
and then lifted and extracted, So very similar to skyhook.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Actually, he also, I believe, depleted a lot of his
own fortune and personal savings pursuing this until he met
Richard DuPont of the DuPont DuPonts, the DuPont DuPonts. Yes,
and it wasn't that it wasn't it designed to never land?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, exactly because he figured there was. This wasn't like
a completely unique idea, But the notion was that a
lot of time and effort was wasted when the planes
were landing and they had to refuel. So this system,
in theory, would allow it to refuel in the air,
pick up fuel reserves from the ground or even from
a passing train. They could coordinate and specifically for long
(12:55):
distance mail pickups and freight and things like that. I
don't know, I know it was patented, but it certainly
never hit in the way that he hoped it would.
But fast forward to World War Two. Let's go back
to the pitch. How was he able to get an
audience with the White House in the first place. He
was not exactly like he didn't work for them. He
was just kind of a regular joe who was a
tinkerer on the side. And this whole you know, mid
(13:18):
flight refueling mail pickup scheme never really gained too much momentum,
so he didn't really have a reputation as being someone
the government should like turn to during times of war.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Would you say it never got off the ground?
Speaker 4 (13:30):
I would say that, man, Oh, but you said it first.
Oh sorry, sorry, no joke left untold. He did manage
to shout above the din the cacophony of people with
unsolicited suggestions, plans, and schemes. We have to imagine, of course,
(13:54):
how many people would be writing directly to the White
House saying, here's what we do, and it may be
worth our time in another episode to look at some
of the most unorthodox World War two revenge schemes. But
Adams had an edge. He had a very important friend.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
That's right. This is somewhat a story about nepotism. You
see Adams happen to know a woman by the name
of Eleanor Roosevelt. He had flown her to check out
his airmail scheme previously, right, and because they had this
previous relationship, historians speculate that's the way he was able
(14:34):
to get his voice heard and his idea, his pitch, right,
the one that you established earlier, and all about dropping
these bats in Japanese cities. It made more sense than
it might sound at first, blush, because of Japanese architecture.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Right, Yeah, tell us more about that, Ben. It's not
something I'd quite considered, because I was wondering how were
to get into all of these little nooks and crannies,
if you know, it seems like it would take time
for them to work their way into the eaves of
homes as we know it. But I believe the architecture
in Japan was a little more open and possibly more
accessible to these small creatures. And they were quite small.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
They were quite small. Yes, So this pitch hinged on
some stereotypes about Japan at the time. One of those
concerned in the architecture. In the mind of many Americans,
policymakers and civilians alike, Japan was a country composed of
crowded cities filled with houses and factories made of paper
(15:39):
and wood, and that's their vision of traditional Japanese architectures.
So the argument there might be that flying bats with
small andcendiary devices into a city where most things are
built of stone or concrete, that won't do much, right,
It takes an enormous amount of heat today image that
(16:00):
stuff but paper and wood could catch fire with a
relatively small amount of flame.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
But also wouldn't it have something to do with how
easy and quickly it might have been for the bats
to work their way into these structures. They weren't like
sealed air tight quite in the way we would think
of a traditional American home.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Right, Well, they thought that would fly into those like
picture of traditional Japanese tile roof right, they thought they
would fly into the eaves of those roofs, and that
this would this would get them close enough to the
paper walls, and wouldn't make sense. So we have a
quote from him, Think of thousands of fires breaking out
(16:41):
simultaneously over a circle of forty miles in diameter. For
every bomb dropped, Japan could have been devastated, yet with
small loss of life which doesn't really make sense because
when cities catch on fire, a lot of people die.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
So I guess he was maybe he was talking about
America in lives.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, that's probably, that's that's unfortunately, it sounds very accurate.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Because I mean, obviously the bats were on suicide missions here,
so that's you know, I don't imagine Peter would approve
this plan today.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, yeah, let's take a second maybe and talk about
the bats.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
What do you say? Let's do it all right.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So once the project gets the green light, and again
please listen to that John Mullaney, back to the future bit,
it's worth it won't ruin it for you. Once the
project gets the green light, somehow, doctor Adams gathers a
team of naturalists from the Hancock Foundation University California, and
(17:39):
they start investigating likely sites where they could gather large
quantities of bats. As we know, bats are mostly found
in caves, but a ton of them roost in attics, barnes, houses, bridges,
anywhere they can get it infitted, right.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
That's right, it's funny. Casey and I actually at ten
did to capture a mass exodus of bats like this
on video in Austin, there's this bridge that's referred to
as the bat Bridge, where every night, at a certain time,
all of these bats that nest under this bridge or
they kind of just hang out there during the day
go out to feed at night because they're nocturnal animals.
(18:17):
But we waited there for an awful long time and
they never emerged. So I cannot offer a first hand
account of this, but I have been told that it
does happen.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yes, it's true. I don't know if I have revealed
this to you guys, but years and years ago, one
of my childhood homes actually did have a bat infestation
in the attic, and I happened to live in a
room that adjoined the attic, and I was surprised to
find that, at least here in Georgia, you cannot kill
the bats. You have to essentially wait for them to
(18:48):
leave or compel them to leave whatever area they're roostine legally.
Yeah really yeah, And you then find whatever heidi holes
or ingress egress points they're using, block those, with the
hope being that vampire rules they'll find a new place
to sleep before dawn.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
That's terrifying. I didn't know that, so that you can't
treat them like you would like any other household infestation.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
No, no, no, no no, because they're so good for
the ecosystem.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
It's well interesting. I had no idea about that.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
So they go atoms, not the bats that I used
to live with. They go around scouring these areas to
find the best possible large quantity of bats suitable for
this project. According to Adams, they visit a thousand caves
and three thousand mines, and Adams says speed was so
(19:38):
imperative that we generally drove all day and night. When
we weren't exploring caves, we slept in cars, taking turns
of driving one car. And our search team covered three
hundred and fifty thousand miles. And then they started cataloging
the types of bats they found, and they were looking
for the ideal combination of bat size which would dictate
(20:00):
the amount of explosive the bat could carry versus back quantity.
How many bats of that type could they find, because
you know, if you found like twelve bats that were
large enough to carry eight pounds of dynamite, you know,
good for those bats, but that's not really going to
do anything to a Japanese city on a large scale
(20:20):
the way they were hoping.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
That's very true. And just a little detail here. These
were Mexican free tailed bats. They decided on because of
their size and their availability. And so in March of
nineteen forty three, this is backtracking just a little bit,
the US Air Force decided they wanted to investigate this.
There was a letter that was drafted to formally, you know,
(20:42):
announce the pursuing of this, like a memo, and it
was called Test of Method to Scatter Incendiaries. It was
also referred to as Project X ray.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Way cool name uses Mexican free tailed bats. The other
bats they tried were things like the mastiff. The massive
bat is huge as a twenty inch wingspan. It can
carry one pound of dynamite. But the problem was they
couldn't find enough of these bats. And then they found
another bat, the mullard or common palid bat, that could
(21:13):
carry three ounces. But naturalists said, there's no way these
guys will survive the strange process we're going to subject
them to. And when they found the free tailed bat,
the main reason they went with it is because it
could travel with a one ounce bomb over a relatively
short distance, even though it only weighed a third of
(21:33):
an ounce, and they found twenty to thirty million of
them in a cave in Nay Cave near Bandera, Texas.
And it was so large. This kind of ties into
the adventure that Noel, you and Casey had in Austin.
It was so large that when these bats left the cave,
it took five hours for them to all leave out
(21:54):
of the cave, flying in a dense stream fifteen feet
in diameter and so closely packed that they could barely
lap their wings.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, obviously, these must be
very powerful creatures in terms of their ability to like
like ants. They always say they can carry ten times
their body weight or whatever. This must be a similar case.
Although they had to take the weight into consideration when
they figured out which bats to use and what amount
of incendiaries would pack the most punch. And I'm guessing
(22:21):
that it was all considered. Like you said, it wouldn't
take a whole lot. They weren't. They weren't going to
level a building with these bats. They were going to
start a little flame that was then going to catch
on fire, and they were going to do them all
at once. But Ben, did you catch anywhere in your research.
How they were planning to detonate these bat bombs, like
all at once or was it on a timer or timer?
(22:41):
It was on a timer. Yeah, that makes the most sense.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
That's probably that's the best way to do it, you know,
that is the best way to do it.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
So they finally settled on these Mexican free tail bats,
and there was a lot of consideration for various stages
of this process, right like the questions we were just asking,
how to transport them, how to deploy them, etc. What
were some of the things that they sort of figured
out during this process?
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Man, sure, sure, So this project when it gets a
cool name, the Army says, wait, we want projects with
cool names. So the project is transferred to the army
and they start capturing these thousands and thousands of Mexican
freetail bats the caverns all around the southwest United States.
They wanted to figure out how to get these things
(23:27):
from the location where they are attached to these bombs,
these incendiary devices, and then transport them without blowing anything up,
and then deploying them so that they don't blow up
until they're supposed to. The first thing they had to
figure out was how to keep the bats calm, and
that is when they decided to induce hibernation in the bats.
(23:50):
This is interesting, this is this is something that might
surprise some people. Bats actually do hibernate, which makes it
a little bit less inhumane, you know what I mean.
Bats hibernate from late fall until spring, so October, November
to March and April. And I'm just realizing this now.
(24:13):
No bats are listening to this podcast, Yeah right now.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
It's probably better that way. Yeah, this could be triggering.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Until summer spring. Yes, so we know that they will
hibernate typically in the same environments in which they roost,
but they roost in caves and mines and attics and
stuff like that. So how do you strap an explosive
device to them or in scendiary device and then convince
them to hibernate on a plane. What they ultimately decided
(24:39):
to do was to stick the bats in ice cube trays. Again,
these are very small, the only way about the way
less announced.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
But surely not the kind of ice cube trays you
and I are used to. I mean that's way too small.
One little compartment in an ice cube tray that would
go in our freezer.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
All my ice cube trays are specifically designed to fit bats.
That's fair, It's pretty unfair to the bats.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
But would would the explosives be strapped to them already
at this point or would they have to like put
them on after they woke them up. This whole thing
seems like a logistical nightmare, and that seems like stuff
that they didn't consider up front when they said, hey,
this guy's onto something.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Well, it seems like a lot of bats probably died
in the process of figuring out the best way to
do this.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Well, ultimately, these were suicide bats anyway, so they were
all destined for death. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
They also had to figure out how to release these
bats in mid air. So they thought, we'll have a
cardboard container that automatically opens and releases the bats. And
they were trying to figure out how to do this.
They spent a lot of time working out the perfect
order of operations, and then they took it to real testing.
(25:54):
They took it off the drawing board into the world,
and they found out that there was a lot of
stuff they needed to work on.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Oh yeah, a lot of kinks. There's an article in
the Atlantic called Old Weird Tech The Bat Bombs of
World War Two by Alexis C. Madrigal, and in this
article she talks about some of the unfortunate mishaps that
occurred when they really started doing real world testing, one
of which involved a general's car that was exploded, basically burned,
(26:26):
and also an airplane hangar that sustained some pretty serious damage.
They did pass this off to the Marine Corps and
the testing continued.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Yeah, so when they passed it to the Marine Corps
in December of nineteen forty three, the operation was moved
to the Marine Corps air Station El Centro, California. The
definitive test was carried out after several experiments on what
they called a Japanese village. It was a mock up
(26:58):
of a Japanese city built by the Chemical Warfare Service
at their Dougway Proving Grounds test site in Utah, and
this test produced not terrible results. So the chief of
incendiary testing at Dougway wrote, a reasonable number of destructive
fires can be started in spite of the extremely small
(27:20):
size of the units. Those are the bats. The main
advantage of the units would seem to be their placement
within the enemy structures without the knowledge of the householder
or fire watchers, thus allowing the fire to establish itself
before being discovered. So what they're saying is when they
get into these attics and these eves, it is highly
unlikely that somebody will notice this very very tiny, tiny,
(27:42):
tiny furry creature, and they probably won't notice the fire
until it's too late.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
My question, though, is, we know the way bats behave,
wouldn't they all go to one place like what was
causing what was leading them to.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Go to disperse?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
To disperse, because it doesn't seem that's what bats typically do.
It seems like they kind of like have that hive
mind quality to it. I was joking when I said
they have, you know, psychic connections or whatever. But sometimes
when you see flocks of birds or bats or any
kind of creatures like that migrating or moving in these
tight patterns together, I just don't know, it seems very random.
They would not. Obviously, they wouldn't have been able to
control where they went. They would just hope that they
(28:21):
went enough different places that this had actually caused them
significant damage over a large area.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah, it's it's a good question. Maybe there's an argument
that the bats would be so disoriented, just waking up
from hibernation, that they're just seeking a shelter. Yeah, you know,
for now, it looks like the answer to that is
still unclear in the modern day. Oh, we do have
to mention also, people called this the Atoms Plan in
(28:52):
common conversation when you know, when they weren't referring to
it officially's Project X ray. But one of the things
that they thought would be another great advantage was that
the use of bats would be demoralizing, so there was
some psyop here as well. All in all, there's a
total of thirty demonstrations of this technology, of this plan
and two million dollars spent over the period of development,
(29:17):
with full scale bomber bat test planned for August nineteen
forty four. However, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, who at
the time was Chief of Naval Operations, learned that the
bats would not be ready for combat until mid nineteen
forty five. Well that's not going to five, right, He
abruptly canceled the operation, and needless to say, doctor Adams
(29:42):
was disappointed. There's also a little bit of interesting historical
speculation here too, because there was another even more secret
perhaps even more ambitious and insane project that Uncle Sam
was pouring a ton of resources into.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Yeah, unlikely needed every last penny. And that was the
atomic bomb, which ultimately and tragically was used to end
that conflict and then never again.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
The most powerful explosive device ever created at that time,
which different from several thousand pets.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
So doctor Adams, obviously this was a real bummer for
a Pennsylvanian dentist.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yeah, and he was understandably disappointed because this would have
been his second big idea that seemed to be going
somewhere and then ultimately didn't quite hit in the way
that he wanted it to write, Ben Oh, yeah, because
of air pickup.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
But this was these two ideas were not his only
two ideas. Yeah, some other stuff, right.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
And then progressively I would say, you know, the bat bomb,
between the bat bomb and the air pickup bat bomb
was way more on the surface crackpot, even though it
did have some function to it. But these these last
ones that we're going to talk about are a little
bit more on the kooky side. But you have clearly
a forward thinking.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
And clearly has a thing about aviation and the power
of flight. So he had this he later has this
plan to use bombers to distribute seeds across the prairie
land in hopes of revolutionizing agriculture. Right, that's that's pretty ambitious.
It's also way less destructive. It's kind of the same
(31:23):
thing as bombing places with bats, that's true.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
And then he had another idea, non aviation related.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
This is my favorite one.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
Yeah, where he thought it would be a good idea
and people would flock to a fried chicken vending machine.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
I absolutely would, But how would you keep it fresh?
It has to be like fried on demand. You would
have to hit the button to make your request, and
then it would have to be able to automatically fry.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
So it would be sort of like those coke machines
where it picks up the bottle with like a little thing,
Oh yeah, it up and then drops it, only it
would be like a hole. You get to watch your
chicken being fried, and you have to are at one
piece at a time. I want to know more about
the logistics of this.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Well, I want to tell you that someone has made
this dream a reality. What yes, doctor Adams, If you
are listening from the Eternal Hibernation of Death, this is
something that hopefully will warm your heart. There is a
vending machine that serves fried chicken in Japan. I don't
know how it would feel about it, but it is
(32:25):
in Japan. I mean obviously, of course all cool vending
machines in Japan, and we know they love fried chicken too, yes,
especially around Christmas. A Japanese convenience chain name Looston Incorporated
is testing this machine out, or they were as of
December of twenty eighteen. So this is breaking news. This
comes to us through technobob and this is in Shinagawa
(32:49):
Ward in Tokyo. The machine has technology that allows it
to fry chicken in a little bit over a minute.
But somehow they prepare the chicken and keep it warm
until someone orders it to me. That's where it breaks down,
because fried chicken, it's like French fries. It's like most
fried food. You got to eat it when it's fresh.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Yeah, that's true. That's why nobody wants gas station fried
chicken sitting under that like hot lamp for god knows
how long. No, No, it's got to be fresh and
crispy and juicy and delicious.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
So we want to hear from you, fellow ridiculous historians
out there in Japan, especially if you're in this area
of Tokyo, because this trial only operated from I guess
mid December to December twenty eighth, twenty eighteen. So right now,
the good folks at Lass and Incorporated, we can only imagine,
(33:41):
are studying the results of their fried chicken experiment, and
you know what, I hope it works out. I am
a big fan of venue machines and I would give
it a shot. Even though if you look at the photo,
there is one photo of this fried chicken from a
vending machine, they look more like chicken nuggets then, you know,
like a two piece or three piece. I don't know
(34:02):
about you, ma'am, but I like my chicken bone in
really yeaheah.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
I'm a fan of boneless fried chicken, but you know,
you can't quite beat a freshly fried bone in bird.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
That's true. I wonder if we should do the history
of vending machines as an episode. Wouldn't that be cool?
Speaker 3 (34:19):
I would love to hear about that. I have a
feeling it started like on the boardwalks and the Carnie Times,
you know, things like that. This is just speculation on
my part, but I think that's a great idea, Ben.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
I don't wonder where I would start, because there were
some places in We may have talked about this in
previous episode Noo, but I know there were some places
in England centuries and centuries ago where it was like
a manual vending machine. You would walk up to a
wall and then you would knock or slide a penny
or something across, and then someone would just hand you
I think a small cup of gin.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Nice. According to Doctor Internet, the first vending machine came
out in the eighteen eighties in London and it was
for purchasing post guards and it was invented by Percival Everett.
But you know, there's a long and story history of
vending machines as they evolved over time. How we came
from back bombs to vending machines. I guess we're talking
about forward thinking, innovative types, you know. Yes, yes, let's
(35:15):
let's definitely do history of any machine episodes.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Let's definitely do it. Let us know about your favorite
vending machine, let us know about your favorite seemingly crackpot
military scheme, because oh buddy, this is only scratching the surface.
The US military and other militaries have attempted to use
dolphins for wartime efforts, cats for spying. I think rats
(35:38):
as well for something.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
We did an episode on this.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
We did an.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Episode here on this, oh about the skinner boxes and
a sideshow kind of carnival TV show. Yeah, there was
like a whole farm where they took these animals that
they had trained for military purposes and like made money
with the chicken that would peck the.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
Yeah or whatever.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
How time flies really does?
Speaker 3 (35:59):
We've been doing for like over a year now, have we?
I don't think we ever acknowledged the year anniversary, but
it is coming gone.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Making a show like this is sort of like in
all those classic cartoons where Elmer Fudd or Wiley Coyote
or you know, Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny when they
walk off the cliff and they just keep walking until
they look down. Just don't look down.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
I call it critical mass. Critical mass. You know, you
do something you just kind of like have this trajectory
and you just never look back, And as long as
you don't look back, you kind of forget what's going
on or how time passes.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Now we're going into philosophy as well, but well said
and we hope that you enjoy this episode. We do
want to hear these answers. I will look at pictures
of your favorite vending machines or the most unusual vending
machines until the stars collapse and the universe meets its end.
(36:54):
In the meantime, Thank you so much for tuning in.
Thanks to our super producer Pegram.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Yeah, thanks to Alex Williams who composed our theme. Thanks
to our research associate Gabe, and we're gonna try a
new thing. Hey, if you want to check out me
and Ben's individual exploit. Since our show Instagram account is
not the most fascinating in the world, you can check
me out at Embryonic Insider on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And you can find me at Ben Bullen on Instagram. Yes,
in a burst of creativity, folks, The newest thing that
I have up is maybe the Saturn five wago replica
that I built this weekend, which is huge, very impressive.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
It's weird.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
You can find us on our respect to Instagram. You
can find us on Twitter. You can also find us
on Facebook. Perhaps most importantly, you can find your fellow
Ridiculous historians on our Facebook community page, Ridiculous historians.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
And please tune into our next episode where we talk
about the ridiculous origins of state name, specifically Idaho. We'll
see it m
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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