September 25, 2019 • 58 mins
Whether as beasts of burden, scouts, sentries or attack dogs, animals have been conscripted into human conflict since the dawn of recorded history. This practice hasn't changed in the modern day -- it's only evolved. Join the guys as they delve deep into some of modern history's strangest rumored (and confirmed) tales of animals in warfare, from would-be weaponized bats to tales of cyborg sharks, surveillance birds and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt Party on Mam.
My name is Nol. They call me Ben. We are
joined with our super guest producer today, Seth Johnson. So
will help us find a nickname or a moniker for
him if you feel so inclined. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know now, it's it's a fairly well
(00:48):
known fact here in the studio, around the office, and
so that we are animal lovers ourselves. Uh. Seth has
three dogs as he as he described them to full
owned mutts and one pug. And then Matt, you have
you have a pooch as well, right, Yes, I do
have a pooch, a full blown mutt. She's got the mutts. Yeah.
(01:11):
And you've got several feline companions. Yeah, you know. Oddly enough,
my and and Nolan I both have have cats. You know.
I think you have a cat named Robert. Have a
single cat goes by the name Robert interchangeably with Fernando. Um.
We named him Fernando before we found out that he
actually already had a name, which was Robert, because he
has a bob tail. Get it. So we're you know,
(01:34):
we're not alone by any means. Our species has a
long story history with animals. They're lovable, they're dangerous. If
you're listening to this in twenty nineteen, a ton of
them are endangered. So they're dangerous and endangered. Uh. And
today we're exploring the secret stories of animals beyond well, technically,
(01:59):
the secrets sory of non human animals, beyond the typical, uh,
fetch Fido, you know, pet your cat kind of things.
Beyond the world of pets. We're talking about animals in
the military. And there are a lot of those that
you probably think of immediately as we're saying that, right,
and we're going to talk briefly about some of those,
(02:20):
but we're getting into the deeper waters where animals are
used in such unconventional ways. It gets weird very quickly.
But but first, let's let's set the stage. Here are
the facts. Animals have been used in combat roles since
time immemorial ancient times. Occasionally they would be in support roles,
(02:41):
other times actually weaponized. UM. While dogs and horses were
some of the first critters used in war um horses,
of course, being one of the most historical representations of
the popular images you see of war horses decked out
in armor and the like. They're only two examples of
a much wider field than you might expect. That's right,
(03:03):
you know, horse is a horse. Of course, they're some
of the most popular. But over the past thousands of years,
humans have used camels, donkeys, monkeys, elephants, dolphins, rats, cats, pigeons, pigs, oxen, moose,
and more. I I don't know, thank you, thank you
for saving us. There. It felt like it was about
(03:24):
the beat was about to drop. But we have. We
have used these two some sort of either logistical or
tactical advantage for a long, long, long long time, and honestly,
we never really stopped. Nowadays, with the with the rise
of mechanized transportation. Nowadays we see horses still around, but
(03:48):
not as crucial as they were to say, uh, nomadic
parties on the steps right or Napoleonic warfare. Yeah, So
that means that statistically speaking, humanity's favorite non human animal
gets the gets the spotlight now, and those are dogs.
(04:09):
So when you think of I mean, when most people
think of a pet, statistics prove they think of dogs.
And who hasn't seen those adorable pictures of dogs of
military vests, you know, or who hasn't been at the
airport and had a tough time. Uh, try not to
pet the drug dog exactly or the I've seen several
(04:32):
memes of shibus with a K S some of those.
Oh no, sorry, I got one that trumps all of that. Okay.
So I saw a picture of a guy with his
dog inside. His head was inside a watermelon and it
was cut, and then he opens up the watermelon and
there's a dog inside. Yeah, just the head. There was
like a whole cut and the bottom of the watermelon,
the watermelon is surrounding the dog's head. He's very happy.
(04:55):
It wasn't you know? There was no no animalishment, not
not at all. But the thing is, when you look
at it, you know forever. Secondly, what am I looking at?
And then the watermelon parts and there's that it looks
like there's a dog like living inside the watermelons. The
keytes thing i've ever seen in my life. You can
weaponize that. Yeah, well that image alone, you know, the
United States military can certainly weaponize things of that nature.
(05:16):
But they have other ways of doing this too. There's
this thing called the the US War Dogs Association, and
they've kind of given us some some basic categories in
which or types in which dogs have been used for
military purposes right over the years. Maybe not necessarily today,
but yeah, they have seven broad categories, and we can
(05:38):
list through these pretty quickly. So first century, it's what
it says on the tin. These dogs worked on a
short leash and they were taught to give a series
of escalating warnings. They could growl, they could run around
like they were irritated, or of course they could bark.
And they were most useful during during the evening, when
(06:01):
attack from cover or from the rear was most likely. Yeah,
and that feels like the most traditional use of a
dog for almost guarding purposes in a way, you know wolves. Yeah,
if you're around a campfire or something, having a dog
that is tame and near your campsite it would be
very very beneficial. But then you've also got dogs that
(06:24):
are actually going to go out on patrol or scout
with with humans, and a lot of these are trained
to work in silence. These would, um, these guys would
try and detect or at least attempt to detect snipers,
any kind of other ambushes from you know, an enemy force,
but especially if you're dealing with something that you've got
not a quarantined area but an area of operation. Right, Um,
(06:47):
these could kind of patrol the area as well. But um,
a type of dog needs to be trained for this.
You can't just get any breed essentially, or any dog
with any disposition for this. They have to be some
of the most highly intelligent breeds, German shepherds a lot
of the time, right, or at least those are those
are attack dogs. They are definitely used as they seem
pretty versatile because they're very highly intelligent and trainable. I
(07:09):
imagine you just don't want a Golden Retriever for this one. No, yeah, no,
because they would make friends. Yeah, well, it's crazy too.
They've got a statistic here, and again we're getting this
from the U. S. War Dogs Association. Quote, Scout dogs
could detect the presence of enemies of two distances of
one thousand yards and that's way before any of the
(07:30):
human operators would notice these enemy forces and just f y.
I this is an interesting statistic that I found from
how stuff works. Actually, the cost of training a military
dog per animal is around between twenty thousand to forty
thou dollars. So this is very specialized training that goes
into being able to do these tasks and and doesn't
come cheap. So the third category there would be the messenger.
(07:54):
The most desired quality for a messenger dog was loyalty,
and they had to be able to work with two handlers,
like one on each side. Yeah yeah, And so that
can be a problem with some animals. When the militaries
of the world attempted to train cetaceans, they found that
they had difficulty passing like getting the dolphin or what
(08:17):
have you, to also be cool with the field agent
instead of just being cool with the trainer. But then
we have mind detection. Those dogs have a cool nickname.
They're called M dogs. I feel like I've met an
M dog somewhere, but it was probably at a dive bar.
For some reason, all of this is reminding me of
metal Gear Solid and the Diamond Dogs. I don't know
if you guys are aware of that. Nope, Okay, it's
(08:39):
been a while since I played the Metal Gears the
Diamond Dogs. Yeah, that's a David Bowie reference right there,
it is. That's correct. Oh, you should never mind. There
are lots of there's a lot of games that you
guys need to play, all right, keep going. So then
there are casualty dogs. This is a more somber duty,
but this is enormously important. They're like search and rescue dogs,
(09:03):
but they're meant to find the bodies. You know, if
the rescue is not the rescue is not possible while
the persons alive. They are meant to pinpoint the casualties. Right.
Can we jump back to the mind dogs really fast?
I'm always open to talk about m dogs because I
feel like I glossed over some of the end party there,
(09:25):
because there's something you found in the research bend that
was just about how difficult that job is. Because remember,
these animals are essentially performing a job, the job of
detecting minds and other metallic and non metallic explosive devices,
while there's let's say, a gun battle occurring or explosions
(09:46):
happening around. Just how difficult that job is to perform
in actual combat. Oh yeah, yeah, very stressful, right, yeah, yeah,
so they m dogs, despite having one of the list names,
did not in fact do the best job just because
the circumstances were so fraught with peril. You know, the
(10:08):
ones I admire immensely where the tunnel dogs Vietnam, because
you know, they used to have humans as well be
tunnel rats who would drop into uh the secret Viet
Cong uh tunnels hideouts and um headquarters and that just
I don't know why that one was the one that's
terrified me. Like, if you've ever been buried alive, it's
(10:31):
not a pleasant experience that like you wouldn't I'm not
normally claustrophobic, but it just takes like one night in
the dirt to not want to ever do that again.
Have you seen that whole movie where I think it's Ryan,
the guy that plays Deadpool. It's like the whole movie
is him in a gonna buried alive situation. Ryan Reynolds said,
his name is that Deadpool's name? Yeah, yes it is.
(10:52):
But I do not recall this film. It's called bing
there you go, Yeah, it's called burying. It sounds like
a very unpleasant film. I don't know that that Ben
would enjoy it very much. I always think of that
scene in kill Bill when she's buried in the coffin
and clung her way out, and that was to me
the most visceral depiction of like what it might feel
like to be buried alive, and it is it is
not good, Yeah, to totally. I I agree with you there,
(11:16):
but I'm sorry. All this stuff makes me think about
docks sins and I don't know, honestly, I don't know
if they were yeah, but I I know that, Uh,
I don't know if they were used in for the
purposes specifically of being a tunnel dog. But dang, that's
like you couldn't create a better version, a better chassis. Yeah,
(11:37):
you could have put their legs a little closer together,
probably get a little more traction. They're bread to hunt
all burrowing animals that were native to that position. That's why,
despite their diminutive frame, they have a warlike belligerent demeanor. Yeah,
I said it's true. It's true. Ben. Back back to
casualty dogs. Uh, it makes me think of rescue dogs.
(11:58):
Not not that what we think of when we think
of like getting a rescue shelter dog, but like dogs
that would rescue people from avalanches. You might have seen
cartoons where you have these St. Bernard's in like Switzerland
and like the Swiss Alpse, with these little barrels around
their neck that I think had some sort of brandy
in them that would revive like uh, passed out snow
blind traveler and poor sap that got stuck in an
(12:19):
avalanche as well. I always wondered if if they really
did wear those The St. Bernard neck barrel not a
real thing. It was an invention of a painter and
then it just sort of caught the public's imagination. So
apparently not a real thing. But St. Bernard's were bred
in that area of the Swiss Alps where people were.
They were used as rescue dogs in that way, but
(12:40):
did not have the barrel. Well, now we know St.
Bernard's no barrel tunnel dogs. I think incredibly brave explosive
detection dogs, right, that is the that is the seventh
category will see on war dogs and those are just
what they sound like. They are trained to use the
astonishing K nine scent of smell to detect explosives before
(13:04):
human beings could. So these these dogs are in Rock,
Afghanistan a lot of other war torn areas, and that
only factors in these seven categories, only factor and official
working dogs. So these are not those heartwarming, buzzfeedy stories
of you know, like uh, Sergeant Peppercorns or whatever, who
(13:25):
is a little you know, uh cocker spaniel that the
French ran into one day and now he has his
own uniform and people have to salute him and stuff.
Sergeant Peppercorns. It just I don't know, it's it's trying
to get something besides Sergeant Pepper. You know, it's beautiful
all those different you know, Peter Ning Kompoop or something
(13:45):
for all the always sunny fans there. But those pooches
are in arguably crucial in their own very endearing, very
sweet way. But that is not why we are here today,
is it? The reason? The other things we are talking
about today are the way animals have been used right um,
for wartime and other things. And we've got a couple
(14:06):
examples that will laundry list here a little bit, but
some are a little more strange than others. Did you
guys do an episode of ridiculous history on the bats?
The explosive bat idea We've done an episode on a
few of these. Actually, um, there was another one involving dolphins.
But let's start with the bats for sure, because they
were incendiary, right, that was the whole point. Yeah, So
(14:28):
the US almost used bats loaded with napalm and something
they call Project X ray. The idea here was that
it would create a wave of fires throughout Japan conflagration
that would destroy the primary cities. However, the plan was
scrapped because not because the bats were bad at their jobs,
(14:50):
but because they were very good and they escaped. They
burned down a hangar in New Mexico, a military officials car,
and everyone was against it. If I'm remembering correctly. They
were just on timers as well, so it wasn't like
they could be triggered individually in some remote way. They
were released, and the ideas that they would they would
kind of roost in the eaves of these very flammable
(15:11):
homes as you know, like a lot of Japanese homes
paper doors and you know, all wooden frames, and the
idea was smart, Uh, they would be undetectable. People wouldn't
think anything of it, and it just didn't didn't go
as planned. But it was a pretty smart idea, and
so so they had just like like a bomb essentially
attached to it would just unsteerable. Uh yeah, untrainable. Wow,
(15:37):
it's grenade rules. You pull the pen and you throw,
you know. But but in this case a million bats
because it was a ton, right, it wasn't just a couple.
It was like, wow, that's insane. And then on the
flip side, the Japanese did a weird similar thing, not
involving animals, but involving balloons that they would just like
release and hopefully the winds would take them into North America.
(15:59):
And a few of them made it, but mainly they
did not. But this idea of just like blindly releasing
weaponry into the world is very strange to me and dangerous.
I mean, this is so back to animals. They're camels
have been used as mounts and beasts of burden since
time immemorial, but they were actually used as quote unquote
(16:20):
suicide bombers during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. And the
problem with that terminology, of course, is that the camels
could not consent. It's still the very you know, medieval
or ancient practice of like lighting pigs on fire and
then sending them to run at the enemy. And just
remember that Soviet war in Afghanistan. It's not the whole
(16:40):
two thousand one and beyond war that's back in the day. Yes,
that is correct and very good point there. Dolphins super intelligent,
of course, it's no wonder militaries all around the world
would love to work with dolphins. They're great at locating minds,
they're trainable. Um, they have some behavioral issues. Real dolphin
(17:02):
behavior does not match maybe what you think of when
you think of Flipper or echo the dolphin I think
was the Saga Genesis game. That game was hard. Yeah,
but ben, I have also seen that episode of Drunk
History nod to Dunk Controst. So you're talking about that,
you're talking about the we're adults who you're talking about
the dolphin hand. Yeah, yeah, that's a true story. So
(17:25):
with with with Lily, with like the researcher, Yeah yeah,
the language language instruction, there was some freaky dolphin actually
going on in like a flooded laboratory like dormitory kind
of situation. Right. Yeah, that's for another day. So along
with dolphins, the US Marine Mammal Program also trains sea
lions to detect enemy divers sea lionel spotted diver, and
(17:49):
they're supposed to attach a tracking device shaped like a
handcuff to one of the enemy's limbs. They're also trained
to locate and recover military hardware and crash victims at sea.
The US is very careful to state that these cetaceans,
you know the doll, well, these cetaceans and the sea
lions and so on are not taught to attack people.
(18:13):
That's what they say. They just want to put a
little handcuff like thing on your leg. That's a little inklet,
just a little tag, just want to access arise. So again,
there's there's some murkiness around there, and it's not just
due to the depth of the ocean. Will will figure
out exactly what's going on there or from some disturbing
things in that regard. But going back to the idea
(18:35):
of blindly releasing something, one of the most dangerous uses
of animals in warfare would be the use of insects
because that ties directly with germ warfare and the spread
of weaponized disease. Yes, there's there's an historical use of
this in Japan when that country attempted to use insects
(18:56):
as weapons during World War Two, and the whole idea
there was too infect the you know, military members and
people in front lines and people in all places, a
lot of places with cholera and plague that would be
carried by these insects. Essentially, like you said, ben as
germ warfare, they're just carriers for these things. Oh and
little known fact um or counter fact to this is
(19:20):
the US tested very similar methods on its own people
like in Florida, very poor black neighborhoods. In Savannah, Georgia,
it dropped these flea bombs, um, and it was like,
you know, that's very swampy kind of area with a
lot of potential for disease and it was really bad.
What do we what do we find then that people
(19:40):
actually did were confirmed killed because of some of those tests.
I believe that's correct. Yeah. Wow. In Japan also did
this as well, Like we were talking about the same thing,
dropping fleas of like inside bombs essentially. Uh, that's that
is very very intense to me. Um, It's ingenious, but
(20:03):
I mean is what do you call? Is it biological warfare?
And it's a real scorched earth approach to I mean,
it's it's really just yeah, because there's not a when
those things are deployed there there wasn't any technology inform
of like a topical treatment or something applied to friendly forces,
(20:24):
or in terms of course you can't steer the bugs
wants to loose. So yeah, this is brutal, it's insidious.
Let's go to something that's a bit of a lighter
note before we plunge full on into the darkness. But
let's do that after a word from our sponsor. Alright,
(20:45):
we're back. No, you'll love this one. Birds have also
been used in warfare. Trained parents were positioned on the
Eiffel Tower during World War One. This is kind of hilarious.
There is low key hilarious. The parrots were trained to
alert people to incoming enemy aircraft. However, the parents could
not differentiate between enemy aircraft and Allied planes, so they
(21:10):
were just losing their freaking minds repeatedly. This is very
stressful to the humans working with them, so the birds
had to get mixed. In the Second World War, in
the American behaviorists, the famous BF Skinner devised a plan
to train pigeons to ride in missiles and guide them
to enemy ships. The plan was scrapped for a while,
(21:31):
but then resurrected from fifty three as project or con
Isn't that an amazing image that gets conjuring your brain?
A pigeon piloting a missile Nope, or a bomb? Don't
don't care for it. It's like doctors Strangelove. But now
it's a pigeon with the hat. Yeah, and the bombs
are coming down. The parents are like German aircraft. Don't
(21:55):
like it one bit. So uh so, Nolan, the in
the interest of of your sanity, will move on there too.
We are just scratching the surface here. While the initial
idea may seem unorthodox, the logic does bear up, bears up.
Oh ah man, all right, you got me on that one,
(22:15):
fair and square. Uh. First, some animals do naturally have
ability superior to those of humans. Technology has done a
lot to mitigate this gap in recent years, but in
some cases animals still remain the superior, most cost effective solution.
The nose of a dog is amazing, right, It's tough
(22:36):
to replace that. Second, Now, this is cold blooded, a
lot more so than than we like to be here,
but it's true. If something goes wrong with an operative
if it is an animal and not a human being. Um,
it's a lot less expensive to train another one of
(22:57):
those animals than it is to train a soldier. Now,
that is that is pretty rough to look at it
just from a war cost perspective in that way. Um,
but it's also the the pr effect of having a
lost soldier versus a you know, perhaps a lost dog. Um,
it's it's different. Let's just do lost bird. Okay, we
(23:20):
can all stomach that. I'm not a A lost dog
makes me sad. Lost bird, I'm like better off without him.
The birds, I like, don't get lost. They're too smart.
The corvette, that's I don't know. I think every every
living creature could get lost. But yeah, that's a that's
a good point. Right. So it's no wonder that animals
continue and will continue to fill various rules and multiple militaries.
(23:43):
But just how far does this go? And what if
there is more to the story. Here's where it gets crazy. Yeah,
depending on who you ask, intelligence agencies and militaries all
across the globe are using animals in a much more
various and secretive, clandestine ways. So let's talk a little
(24:04):
bit ben about the Middle East and it's strange preoccupation
with animal conspiracies. So this is crazy. Yeah, this, let's
spend some time on this, and we have to be
pretty careful going into this. We and all our fellow
listeners need to realize that this bizarre, distinct sub genre
of a different, larger conspiracy theory does occur, as you said, Noel,
(24:28):
in the Middle East, and it is wrapped up in
I would say, more than its fair share of anti Semitism,
because we have numerous sources in the Middle East claiming
that animals are being used in top secret programs to
surveil local populations, terrorize them, and attack them. However, the
(24:49):
vast majority, by which I mean close to a of
these accusations are coming of from other countries in the
Middle East, directly leveled at a sing other country, which
is Israel, and occasionally the West quote unquote the West.
Can we talk about the eagle that got detained? Yeah, yeah,
there HESBLA or HASBLA affiliated TV stations is According to
(25:14):
a report by slate Um, they were saying that an
eagle was detained north of Beirut because it was suspected
of being an Israeli spy. Yep, there are multiple things.
We can even trace it back to. The One of
the beginning reports that made international news, let's call it
the Great Shark Wave of twenty ten ten ten, is
(25:36):
that like a shark Nado. It's like a shark nado
plus a like a shark nado plus one of those
monster truck rallies, uh plus jaws. Yeah, that's pretty accurate.
Disens cool, I know, right, unless you're one of the
people who gets uh wrapped up in the shark wave.
In December, there were several shark attacks off the coast
(25:58):
of Egypt, near near some resort towns, and people appeared
on the Egyptian media, notably one guy named Captain Mustaf Ismail,
and this captain claimed that a GPS tracking device found
in one of the sharks was not your garden variety GPS.
These GPS trackers are not uncommon in the world of
(26:18):
terrestrial biology or marine biology. But the captain said that
this was instead of a GPS device, this was a
steering device. It was a guiding device planted by what
he described as agents of Israeli intelligence. Egyptian officials attributed
the attacks to more mundane factors like the actual politicians
(26:42):
and the intelligence community of Egypt said, well, you know,
sharks normally aren't super into eating people, so we're looking
at over fishing. We're looking at maybe teaching them to
associate people with food dumping, sheep carcasses overboard, even unusually
high water temperatures. Through their credit, Egyptian scientists also weren't
(27:04):
buying it, because you see, GPS is not a remote control.
But here the conspiracy match was lit, and it once that.
Once that match was lit, the story itself became what
people nowadays call lit a f Because we have several
more stories of these strange accusations, they just get weirder. Okay,
(27:28):
so let's go to the Iranian military advisor Hassan Ferusa
body Um in two thousand eighteen. When asked about some
environmentalists who are under arrest at the time, this military
advisor said that they weren't your average environment lovers, your
average tree huggers. Instead, they were representatives of Western powers
(27:49):
hiding spy lizards in uranium minds that I remember this
story very very distinctly. This is fantastic. He claimed that
the environmentalists had lizards in chameleons on their persons at
the time, and that for Rusibaldi told the Iranian Labor
News Agency quote, we found out that their skin attracts
atomic waves and that they were nuclear spies who wanted
(28:12):
to find out where inside the Islamic Republic of Iran
we have uranium minds and where we are engaged in
atomic activities. And there's some issues with this. Yeah, yeah, First,
atomic waves are not a real thing. It is true
that in many cases it can be illegal to be
caught with living creatures in your possession, especially if you
(28:34):
are smuggling them in or out of a country, But
unless it's an endangered species, it's not. It's a it's
a weird thing to charge someone with. Next, the scales
that cover lizards are called scots sat right s c
U t e S, and these scoots are made up
of two types of keratin proteins, carratin A and, in
(28:56):
a stunning plot twist, keratin B. Neither of these types
of protein have any special ability to detect uranium or
other radioactive materials. Furthermore, reptiles are cold blooded, so they
want to be where it is warmer. Right. Often, it's
it's a tough cell to say that there are cold
(29:17):
blood reptiles who have some sort of motivation to burrow
deep into a cold uranium mine. So overwhelmingly people outside
of Iran and outside of hero Zibaldi say this is
hot wash. See, the lizards were meant to seek out
the warmth of the neutrons coming off of the radioactive materials. Guys,
(29:40):
that's the whole point, right, that's the whole point. You
you release a chameleon in a very cold cave, it's
going to go directly to the uranium. It's not rocket
science being facetious, of course, but what an interesting concept.
Uh yeah, because what do you do with them? What
(30:01):
do you do with the lizards after they've found the uranium?
Give them some crickets? You know what I mean? What's
the intelligence part? What's the actionable thing? I guess it
could pinpoint the location of the mind would be the idea.
So it would have to be a numbers game. Then
you would either drop them into suspected minds, right, or
you would drop them into everything in a region and
(30:24):
just hope that one of them seemed to exist, seem
to prove the supposition. Okay, all right, well what about
this if lizards feel a little too beyond the pale.
How about something more reasonable like squirrels. Also in Iran
in two thousand seven, right, oh yeah, oh yeah, Iran,
and and people working for Iran captured fourteen squirrels, and
(30:48):
the local news agencies there uh said that these little
guys were equipped with some kind of equipment that was
meant for spying. And allegedly the squirrels had some kind
of you know, like a small device attached to them
essentially that was used for eavesdropping. So you would just
put them in a park somewhere or maybe near a
government building, and you could just wait for the squirrels
(31:09):
to capture whatever conversations occurring at a park bench. And honestly,
that's become sort of a trope, a cliche of this
idea of the squirrels are listening, you know what I mean,
Like you see it in uh in sketch cry. That's
exactly right. It was Rick and Morty, Yes, it was
Rick and Morty. They traveled to an alternate universe where
(31:30):
uh Morty is able to hear squirrels and they have
to burned out. They basically burned out the universe to escape,
right yeah, yeah, But the conversations the squirrels have are
so clandestine and beautiful. It's so good. Yeah, it is
really good. I missed that episode. Have we talked about
the fact that we're gonna be on Harmontown? You guys? Uh,
we talked about it on social media and we talked
(31:51):
about I'm just really excited about it. Um, it's really
cool because we're big fans of Dan and we're gonna
be on Harmontown and Dan's gonna be on this show.
To assume mean we don't just irreparably burn our bridges
that we're all Dan's still friends with us, We're all
still friends with him. Who knows, Maybe we'll get rode
out on a rail, hard and feathered, hopefully not hopefully
(32:13):
not hopefully not so Okay, maybe the idea of squirrel
spies seems a little too far into the realm of
science fiction. That's fine. I got a different pitch for you.
How about dolphins. They're super intelligent and Hamas claimed that
they arrested a dolphin that was spying for Israeli forces.
What I love about this is when you just hear
(32:36):
that headline, I have this picture of a grizzled dolphin
that can somehow walk and it's got its flippers and
it's it's got sunglasses on for some reason, and it's
being walked out past the cameras. They got me, what
did the dolphins sounds sound like? I don't know that.
(32:59):
That's it. That's it. That's okay. It's hard to get
high enough the dolphins. It's not. I thought it was
pretty I appreciate you. So the Times of Israel reported
allegations that this dolphin was outfitted with spying equipment, including
but not limited to cameras. Which interesting about that is
(33:22):
that we know stuff like that has happened before, right
in real life. Uh. Now, this next one is something
that I think is safe to say none of us
saw coming. There's there's a very specific, uh sort of
narrative thread with animals spy allegations concerning vultures. Massive, massive, disgusting, creepy,
(33:44):
gangly dangly, red face weirdo creepy vultures. Yes, yeah, from Lebanon.
In Lebanon, security officials detained a huge vulture as described
previously by myself, with the six point five foot wingspan.
This is making me cringe inside, uh, and claim that
(34:05):
it was a surveillance vulture, an animal working for Israel,
because there was apparently a tracking device attached to one
of its creepy vulture feet, which means, I mean, come on,
that's the thing. Okay, So I had this tracking device
attached to its foot. Yet again, GPS transmitter is not
some sort of magic remote control gizmo. Tel Aviv University
(34:28):
was tracking this bird, and in addition, this is the
weird part. In addition to having a GPS transmitter on
the bird, the bird also had tags on its wings,
along with an engraved metal ring on its leg that
read Tel Aviv University Israel not super secret. That's not
good spycraft. It's not as crappy a job as James Bond,
(34:52):
who always like is eternally day drunk and tells people
his name does and what he does? Uh is That
guy's a mess. But this bird wasn't much better if
it was supposed to be a spy. This is not
the first time Griffin vulture, specifically because these are massive, right,
it's it's not the first time one of them has
been accused to be an agent of Mossade of the
(35:15):
Israeli intelligence agency in Saudi Arabia in two thousand and
eleven one was captured, and of course local news and
scuttle but began to orbit intensely around this concept of
a quote unquote Zionist plot, and then pretty much the
same thing occurred in Sudan in twenty twelve. Around this
(35:36):
part of the world, many people were certain that there
was a new type of superspy and it was not
a human, It was not a robot. It was a buzzard,
which is strange because again, from everything we can tell,
these birds were likely being tracked as part of some
biodiversity conservation project. Yes, it was for beneficial means for
(35:57):
both the birds and for our research at least that's
that's on the face of it, right. Maybe, Look, we
can't fully discount that some of these animals weren't spying
for somebody, right, sure, because we'll never know. We never
got to interrogate these birds. That vulture, You never got
to put it down in a room with a polygraph knoll.
And as far as I know, we have no Doctor
(36:18):
Doolittle esque figure on our in our governments. You know,
that's all we need, you guys, that'd be pretty cool
for counterintelligence. A doctor Doolittle. I mean, surely there there's
I don't know, is there No, there's no kind of
like there isn't there a way to communicate with dolphins
that I make that up. I made that up. We
talked about it. It was the whole hand thing. Yeah,
(36:39):
But I mean, like, you know, with your mind, man,
come on some kind of helmet, you know. I don't know.
I feel like that's also a rick and Morty thing.
But I'm just seeing image. There's the intelligence. There's the
lawnmower man for Aldernn esque thing, yeah, with the dogs
classic so and I thought that was a good one too.
U So we also see other birds in Turkish officials
(37:03):
claimed they captured a kestral falcon spying for you guessed it,
the state of Israel. There's a great illustration of this
alleged culprit over at tablet mag dot com. Like the
other birds, this kestral has a bunch of markers identifying
as a research subject, and people are thought to be
(37:23):
researching migratory patterns. Right. The problem is that the very
signs that should have made it plain these birds were
part of various studies were instead taken as evidence of spycraft,
and then the very next year, fisherman in Egypt suspected
a stork of being the next James Bond. So far,
(37:46):
so far. Astute listeners will notice the trends here that
we mentioned at the top, the country's claiming conspiracies of
foot in the Middle East almost universally accused one country
of creating these animal spies. So it is doubtlessly true
that anti Semitism is informing some of these claims. If
it is possible to bracket that that racism and that discrimination,
(38:11):
and just look at the facts. Could any of these
claims about animals as spycraft and animals and war, could
any of them be true? We'll tackle that after a
word from our sponsor. All right, we're back. So if
(38:35):
we just look at the trends, the claims of birds
being used for spying often seem to be cases of
birds that were being tracked for science rather than some
sort of intelligence agency. Allegations of squirrels to date remain unproven.
And if you know anything about what the squirrels are
doing or talking about, please write to us right now
(38:56):
or run be safe. You can only save yourself. It's
too late, it's too late. If you're nodded, they heard you. Uh.
It's true that there's no solid proof for against the
squirrel thing. Yet, however, there are a couple of former
CIA agents and wildlife experts who are very skeptical about
this because they think it would be very difficult to
(39:18):
train a squirrel or yeah, and if you could, you
would have a trained squirrel, and not a squirrel that
appears to be just you're running the mill guy out there, uh,
collecting food. And this all leads mainstream writers to dismiss
a lot of the wilder conspiratorial accusations. Writing for the
Toronto Star, journalist Gil Yarran says many animals undoubtedly serve
(39:42):
in Israel's army and security services. Dogs sniff out bombs,
alpaca help mountaineers carry their loads, which I did not
know and is true and is cool. But tails about
the use of sharks, birds, rodents, or, as it has
also been claimed, insects in the service of the military
are were the fruit of imagination than hard facts. So
(40:03):
with that in mind, let's go to the facts, the crazy,
strange facts. The United States is continuing to work with
underwater creatures, evaluating their usefulness as spies. Remember we talked
about that two thousand ten shark wave accusation right off
the coast of Egypt. It turns out the back in
two thousand six, the Pentagon looked into using cybernetic sharks
(40:24):
as spies, and in the BBC reported on it. It
sounds not real. I've just gott a couch that none
of this sounds real until you see it on the
BBC website based off of a declassified document. So I'm
gonna read part of this. The latest project from the
U S Defense Advanced Research Projects DARPA. As you know,
(40:47):
we we were big fans of DARKA over need to
sound cue at this point. Really uh So they aim
to improve military intelligence by using a range of aquatic
creatures from large fish to humble single celled organisms, and
their sing them all as underwater warning systems. And here's
a quote. We're trying to understand what these organisms can
tell us about the presence and movements of all kinds
(41:09):
of underwater vehicles in the ocean. That's from Dr Lori
oh Door NATO, who's the program manager of the Persistent
Aquatic Living Sensors or PALS project. I love my underwater
pals yeah, Well, of course the Navy comes through and
they're saying, look, look, guys, we've said this before in
the past, We're going to say it again. We are
(41:31):
not trying to use any creatures of the sea to
do any kind of aquaman stuff. We're not trying to
have them harm the watercraft, the uh, the ships and stuff,
or to hurt the humans that are out there. We're
just using them as sensors that I was gonna say,
why would you not train it? I guess it would
(41:52):
be much more difficult to train a citation to attack
a specific person or scific faces like an assassin, So
targeting a single person rather than a a I mean
a generic type of soldier or military person. Maybe there's
some signal that you have to give to prove your friendly.
(42:14):
But also, I'm very taken an annual video games amount
of very taken with the idea of a dolphin centric
assassin's Creed franchise. You know what I want is a
cephalopod centric assassin organization. Really, I mean think about it.
They're like super smart, they can like open doors and stuff.
Didn't you see how finding Nemo too? They only live
two years though, that's part of what And they're the
(42:37):
closest thing we have to approve an alien intelligence. So okay,
so fix the aging problem, right, have them walk on
the lands. I really just put them in a mex situation.
I wrote a great sci fi story about that. I
ever sent you that. Oh man, it's it's a trip.
But let's not lose that piece of the story. Maybe
(42:57):
there were not any remote controlled cybern edic shark drones,
which against sounds insane, off the coast of Egypt, but
the United States certainly wanted or wants to make them,
or did, and it's just not it's still classified. The
project was discussed that the two thousand six Ocean Sciences
Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Honolulu, Hawaii. There
(43:19):
wasn't a lot of news about the proposal after that,
And you know, if it was just in the proposal
stage at that time, it doesn't feel like a few
months would be enough time to get something like that
in the field, right, certainly, if that was their starting position,
and we can't forget that people in Norway did find
(43:40):
a runaway whale spy who is very friendly, very acclimated
to humans. Yes, and you can you can read about
that on the BBC. There are several Again, the BBC
has some amazing reporting on spy animals. Yeah, there must
be someone in there. It's like their thing, because it
(44:02):
really was a beluga whale, right, that's this is the
one we're reference referencing that had a harness on it
that specifically was uh, let me see if I can
find exactly what it said. Yes, it had a harness
on it that was supposedly Russian or of Russian origin,
and it also had a go pro holder like one
of those little you know, the mounts for go pro.
(44:24):
But but there was no go Pro attached on this
beluga whale that was found. Um, it's certainly odd. But
but again when people spoke about it, or of the officials,
the Russian officials when they chimed in, they were basically saying,
come on, guys, you think we would put one of
our specially trained spy beluga's out there with a harness
(44:46):
that clearly is Russian by beluga, Which goes back to
the birth thing, like, yeah, if it's a spy, why
does it say tel Aviv University. Yeah. Yeah, but it's
also like one of those tropes you see in like
sci Fi movies or one of like a satellite falls
and people like it's clearly a and satellite, it's got
Russian text on it, Like would they really do that?
Maybe they would, I don't know, yeah, you know, Especially
(45:06):
the question is did they intend to get caught? Who
did they want to identify this? Well, here's the crazy
thing it is. At least according to this reporting, there
was a colleague of the Russian official who had comment
and saying, you know, this is crazy. Come on. Of
course it wasn't this, but they were saying they don't
do such experiments with Belugas, specifically to have them spy,
but they have. The Russian military has been capturing and
(45:29):
training Belugas for quite some time. So again it's like
the shark thing, like if you go back four years,
then you go, oh wait, there are some programs that
seem pretty similar to this. Right, So maybe the maybe
the accusations are sort of urban legends, right, maybe they're
they're growing from these legitimate concerns. But at this point,
(45:53):
it is no secret that militaries and intelligence agencies do
very very creepy things, and further more, tail as old
as time when people are prejudiced against a giving group.
It's not hard for them to accept even the most
ridiculous accusation. If you, for some reason hate a person
or a people or a group of any sort, then
(46:16):
your BS detection, your BS meter is all out of whack.
You'll believe anything. If you hate everyone who watches Night Court.
Then you see a study that says people who watch
Night Court are you know, necrophiliacs or something, You'll just
sort of nod to yourself and go that makes sense
checks out. Yeah, you know that whoever that person is
(46:37):
that hates people who like who watch Night Court, there's
something very wrong with them. And that is the only
kind of person that I hate is people who hate
people who watch night The guy from night Coort just
pass away. Harry Anderson. Yeah, he passed away last year
at the age of sixty five. I read a studying
mat that people who hate people who hate Night Court
actually tend to perform higher on spatial aptitude tests. Do
(47:01):
you believe that I did? You just find that somewhere?
Found it somewhere? Sure, so you used your your aptitude
to find it a good work. So again, however, despite
the fact that we cannot, uh, we we cannot like
extract the socio political uh soil in which this occurs.
(47:25):
We cannot extract that racism. It is true despite that
that there are clear improving cases of animals being used
in ways that are, like you said, Matt, similar to
the more conspiratorial claims we see floating around. We cannot
confirm whether the specifics of a certain narrative are true.
You know, like two thousand ten off the coast of
(47:45):
Egypt there were cyber sharks. But we can point out
a couple of things in the news just a few
days ago that yeah, just happened. They really fast. Before
you even get into this, but there's some weird serendipity
occurring with this show right now, and we won't go
into all of it. But Ben and I were going
(48:05):
to record this episode last week. Noel wasn't gonna be
able to be here, and something came up in my
personal life where we weren't We were not able to
record this thing. Then over the weekend there was reporting
specifically about this thing, which blew my mind. Right. Yes,
according to the BBC in an article release just a
(48:28):
few days before we recorded this, the CIA finally admitted
it used pigeons to spy on Soviet forces in an
operation nicknamed or code named rather to KNA and Operation
to KNA, fit these pigeons with these incredibly endearing tiny
cameras right right on the breast area, facing down a
(48:49):
little bit right, so as the pigeon is flying, the
camera would automatically take photos of whatever was within line
of sight. They didn't stop there. To KNA also trained
ravens to deliver and retrieve objects up to forty grahams
from window sills of otherwise inaccessible buildings. And let's just
go really fast into the Takana pigeons with those cameras.
(49:10):
It's something so fascinating. So let's imagine that. I mean,
it's the way. It's the way carrier pigeons would work.
Back in the day. Pigeons would be taken from place
A with wherever you're going. Right, if you're going to
be in a caravan going somewhere, you're going to another
encampment somewhere, you'd carry a pigeon that had the home
(49:32):
of A. You go to place B. You release that
pigeon at B with a message. It carries it back
to its home in a right So they would do
something very similar where they would train the pigeon to
have a home in place A. Then essentially, if imagine
drawing a straight line to place B, and in between
those two places would be let's say a Russian facility
(49:55):
or Soviet facility back in the during the Cold War,
in between directly in betwe mean those two places, and
they would release them from Place B. It would fly
over this facility, take a ton of pictures, and again
you'd release probably multiple or several of them, take a
ton of pictures as it's going back to its home,
capture the stuff. It was a brilliant plan and they
(50:16):
were actually doing it. What's the mechanism for taking the pictures?
It's that little camera we were talking about. It's remotely
like they're actually timing automatic sort of like the BA bombs. Yeah,
it's kind of old school exactly. So if they fly
over something that is not worth photographing, they're still going
to get a bunch of shots. Right. They also had
(50:38):
and those ravens that you were talking about. Yeah, man,
so okay, they used a flashing red laser beam to
mark a target, and a special lamp was used to
sort of train the bird to come back. According to
the BBC article. On at least one occasion in Europe,
the CIA delivered an eavesdropping device by bird via this
(50:59):
raven mechanism to a window, although there was no audio
picked up from the target, so they got the burn
to do it. It's just no one talked about anything
important in the room where it happened. So the CIA
also looked at whether migratory birds could be used to
detect chemical weapons. There were some sort there's they like
(51:20):
allude to trials where there was some kind of electric
brain stimulation to guide dogs remotely, and there was a
project to put listening devices into a cat. Uh. This
stuff got ugly real quick. But I did want to
end on a lighter note. And I hope this is
this lighter Are you gonna talk about? This is lighter
(51:41):
the no tricks, no tricks. There is an incredibly adorable
thing that will call the Otter dossier or the Otter
doss Here it is. It reads like a book report.
It's called dossier on Lutra the Otter and it Uh
(52:01):
this came out of a Freedom of Information Act request. Uh,
this reads kind of like a book report by someone
working in the intelligence agencies for Uncle Sam, who just
really loves otters and is trying to find a reason
for people to use them in experiments. Lutra the otter
is a compact, powerful, intelligent animal capable of negotiating land, water,
(52:23):
and obstacles with great facility. And it should goes on
to talk about how much this person, this anonymous author
loves otters. Ah, you can read it on you can
read it online for free too. It's one of the
more pleasant things in fault Yeah, Geo cities dot FBI.
It's like otter fan fiction. It's like fan fiction that's
(52:43):
very well put. Yeah, I've really thought you were going
to jump straight to Acoustic Kitty. Acoustic Kitty is the
harrowing tale. That's the one where they installed an implant
into the kitty's brain basically right, yes, very in humane,
bad times, and it didn't They were listening devices inside
the cat or that was the that was at least
(53:03):
the plan to release a bunch of these cats with
listening devices physically inside them. But then they tested it
one time the and the kitty cat that they put
it in immediately jumped out into the road and got
smashed by a car. Unfortunately, the Lutra usually sleeps on
it's bad with its arms folded, and it likes to
(53:25):
sleep with humans. We paid someone and it has a
it's all but that man seriously. Uh And then they
say never, if possible, confine or leaving a zoo or
kennel an hotter which has enjoyed any human companionship or freedom. Well,
there we go. This person just was an otter, buddy.
(53:45):
Uh wow, Uh the basic you know what, I'm gonna
stop reading sections of this report. If you ever feel down,
go check out Dacia on Lutra and do please let
us know what you think about these allegations of animal spies.
What we're finding is that while the timeline for a
(54:07):
lot of this stuff may not match up, the pure
potential of the technology is there in some cases. Right. Well, yeah,
and there's now an historical declassified trail of the CIA
using animals for these means pretty pretty closely to what's
being you know, suspected in a lot of places. It
(54:28):
doesn't mean it's true, especially the later ones. And like
you said, Ben, you can't divorce some of those feelings
that occur in regions with the reality. It's it's tough
to do that. Yeah, absolutely, and that's why we want
to hear from you. Let us know what you think
about this. Do you think there is any sand to
these claims? Further More, if you had to pick an
(54:51):
animal that would cooperate with you in aspy ring, what
kind of animal would you pick? And why? Do you
can let us know? Yeah? I mean, I'm pretty sure
or at least a few of us took Honey Badger's right.
I'm absolutely going to be an honor at this point.
All right, what about you? Met? I mean I would say,
Honey Badger. If I could have a friend Honey Badger
(55:13):
that would be on my team and do stuff. I
wouldn't be on your team because he doesn't give all.
That's the whole point. Though he wouldn't. He wouldn't g
a f for anything. But me, I don't think he
would g af about you know, he would he would
be my boy. Okay, So we would have to do
(55:33):
this podcast with an animal that may well attack and
eviscerate us, and the only thing keeping it in line
is that it adores you. Yeah, I'd be like, yo,
stop man, it goes for the giblets first, right right,
I mean it until it's got him. So, so uh, yeah,
(55:54):
we want to know what you think. You can find
us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter, you
can find us on Instagram. Meet our favorite part of
the show, your fellow listeners on our Facebook page. Here's
where it gets crazy. If you don't want any of that,
you can hit us up on the social needs, uh,
the Instagram or we are conspiracy stuff show. I am
personally at how Now Noel Brown. You can find me
(56:14):
at ben Bullin. You can also find me fpn Bullen
h s W on Twitter. Matt, where can they find you?
All right, I'm actually going to do it this time.
You guys got an Instagram account that I'm going to
share and you can follow it if you want. Um,
I'm officially following one person, my wife right now, so
I've I'm not I haven't started it yet, but it's
(56:36):
a big moment. Yes, it is official. My Instagram account
is Matt Frederick m A T T F R E
D E R I c K Underscore, I Heart I
H E A R T. That's gonna be my account,
and uh, you can follow me there and I'll post
stuff like you know, I'm putting this on Instagram? Is that? Okay?
(56:57):
Oh wow? Okay? Sure? All right with that, I'm gonna
understand people are going to be thrilled. Okay, yeah, they
We're gonna post it and it's real and I'm not
gonna check it ever, but we'll see, we'll see what happened.
I'll check it for you, Matt, Okay, but that's it.
That's for me. So if you don't want to do
any of that stuff, give us a call. We are
(57:18):
one eight three three std w y t K. Leave
a message, tell us what you think, give us suggestions
for another episode. Anything you want to do. Just use
your mouth voice put it into our phone system. And
if you don't want to do that, but you still
want to talk with us, please send us an email.
We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they
(57:57):
Don't Want You to Know is a production of I
Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt Party on Mam.
My name is Nol. They call me Ben. We are
joined with our super guest producer today, Seth Johnson. So
will help us find a nickname or a moniker for
him if you feel so inclined. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know now, it's it's a fairly well
(00:48):
known fact here in the studio, around the office, and
so that we are animal lovers ourselves. Uh. Seth has
three dogs as he as he described them to full
owned mutts and one pug. And then Matt, you have
you have a pooch as well, right, Yes, I do
have a pooch, a full blown mutt. She's got the mutts. Yeah.
(01:11):
And you've got several feline companions. Yeah, you know. Oddly enough,
my and and Nolan I both have have cats. You know.
I think you have a cat named Robert. Have a
single cat goes by the name Robert interchangeably with Fernando. Um.
We named him Fernando before we found out that he
actually already had a name, which was Robert, because he
has a bob tail. Get it. So we're you know,
(01:34):
we're not alone by any means. Our species has a
long story history with animals. They're lovable, they're dangerous. If
you're listening to this in twenty nineteen, a ton of
them are endangered. So they're dangerous and endangered. Uh. And
today we're exploring the secret stories of animals beyond well, technically,
(01:59):
the secrets sory of non human animals, beyond the typical, uh,
fetch Fido, you know, pet your cat kind of things.
Beyond the world of pets. We're talking about animals in
the military. And there are a lot of those that
you probably think of immediately as we're saying that, right,
and we're going to talk briefly about some of those,
(02:20):
but we're getting into the deeper waters where animals are
used in such unconventional ways. It gets weird very quickly.
But but first, let's let's set the stage. Here are
the facts. Animals have been used in combat roles since
time immemorial ancient times. Occasionally they would be in support roles,
(02:41):
other times actually weaponized. UM. While dogs and horses were
some of the first critters used in war um horses,
of course, being one of the most historical representations of
the popular images you see of war horses decked out
in armor and the like. They're only two examples of
a much wider field than you might expect. That's right,
(03:03):
you know, horse is a horse. Of course, they're some
of the most popular. But over the past thousands of years,
humans have used camels, donkeys, monkeys, elephants, dolphins, rats, cats, pigeons, pigs, oxen, moose,
and more. I I don't know, thank you, thank you
for saving us. There. It felt like it was about
(03:24):
the beat was about to drop. But we have. We
have used these two some sort of either logistical or
tactical advantage for a long, long, long long time, and honestly,
we never really stopped. Nowadays, with the with the rise
of mechanized transportation. Nowadays we see horses still around, but
(03:48):
not as crucial as they were to say, uh, nomadic
parties on the steps right or Napoleonic warfare. Yeah, So
that means that statistically speaking, humanity's favorite non human animal
gets the gets the spotlight now, and those are dogs.
(04:09):
So when you think of I mean, when most people
think of a pet, statistics prove they think of dogs.
And who hasn't seen those adorable pictures of dogs of
military vests, you know, or who hasn't been at the
airport and had a tough time. Uh, try not to
pet the drug dog exactly or the I've seen several
(04:32):
memes of shibus with a K S some of those.
Oh no, sorry, I got one that trumps all of that. Okay.
So I saw a picture of a guy with his
dog inside. His head was inside a watermelon and it
was cut, and then he opens up the watermelon and
there's a dog inside. Yeah, just the head. There was
like a whole cut and the bottom of the watermelon,
the watermelon is surrounding the dog's head. He's very happy.
(04:55):
It wasn't you know? There was no no animalishment, not
not at all. But the thing is, when you look
at it, you know forever. Secondly, what am I looking at?
And then the watermelon parts and there's that it looks
like there's a dog like living inside the watermelons. The
keytes thing i've ever seen in my life. You can
weaponize that. Yeah, well that image alone, you know, the
United States military can certainly weaponize things of that nature.
(05:16):
But they have other ways of doing this too. There's
this thing called the the US War Dogs Association, and
they've kind of given us some some basic categories in
which or types in which dogs have been used for
military purposes right over the years. Maybe not necessarily today,
but yeah, they have seven broad categories, and we can
(05:38):
list through these pretty quickly. So first century, it's what
it says on the tin. These dogs worked on a
short leash and they were taught to give a series
of escalating warnings. They could growl, they could run around
like they were irritated, or of course they could bark.
And they were most useful during during the evening, when
(06:01):
attack from cover or from the rear was most likely. Yeah,
and that feels like the most traditional use of a
dog for almost guarding purposes in a way, you know wolves. Yeah,
if you're around a campfire or something, having a dog
that is tame and near your campsite it would be
very very beneficial. But then you've also got dogs that
(06:24):
are actually going to go out on patrol or scout
with with humans, and a lot of these are trained
to work in silence. These would, um, these guys would
try and detect or at least attempt to detect snipers,
any kind of other ambushes from you know, an enemy force,
but especially if you're dealing with something that you've got
not a quarantined area but an area of operation. Right, Um,
(06:47):
these could kind of patrol the area as well. But um,
a type of dog needs to be trained for this.
You can't just get any breed essentially, or any dog
with any disposition for this. They have to be some
of the most highly intelligent breeds, German shepherds a lot
of the time, right, or at least those are those
are attack dogs. They are definitely used as they seem
pretty versatile because they're very highly intelligent and trainable. I
(07:09):
imagine you just don't want a Golden Retriever for this one. No, yeah, no,
because they would make friends. Yeah, well, it's crazy too.
They've got a statistic here, and again we're getting this
from the U. S. War Dogs Association. Quote, Scout dogs
could detect the presence of enemies of two distances of
one thousand yards and that's way before any of the
(07:30):
human operators would notice these enemy forces and just f y.
I this is an interesting statistic that I found from
how stuff works. Actually, the cost of training a military
dog per animal is around between twenty thousand to forty
thou dollars. So this is very specialized training that goes
into being able to do these tasks and and doesn't
come cheap. So the third category there would be the messenger.
(07:54):
The most desired quality for a messenger dog was loyalty,
and they had to be able to work with two handlers,
like one on each side. Yeah yeah, And so that
can be a problem with some animals. When the militaries
of the world attempted to train cetaceans, they found that
they had difficulty passing like getting the dolphin or what
(08:17):
have you, to also be cool with the field agent
instead of just being cool with the trainer. But then
we have mind detection. Those dogs have a cool nickname.
They're called M dogs. I feel like I've met an
M dog somewhere, but it was probably at a dive bar.
For some reason, all of this is reminding me of
metal Gear Solid and the Diamond Dogs. I don't know
if you guys are aware of that. Nope, Okay, it's
(08:39):
been a while since I played the Metal Gears the
Diamond Dogs. Yeah, that's a David Bowie reference right there,
it is. That's correct. Oh, you should never mind. There
are lots of there's a lot of games that you
guys need to play, all right, keep going. So then
there are casualty dogs. This is a more somber duty,
but this is enormously important. They're like search and rescue dogs,
(09:03):
but they're meant to find the bodies. You know, if
the rescue is not the rescue is not possible while
the persons alive. They are meant to pinpoint the casualties. Right.
Can we jump back to the mind dogs really fast?
I'm always open to talk about m dogs because I
feel like I glossed over some of the end party there,
(09:25):
because there's something you found in the research bend that
was just about how difficult that job is. Because remember,
these animals are essentially performing a job, the job of
detecting minds and other metallic and non metallic explosive devices,
while there's let's say, a gun battle occurring or explosions
(09:46):
happening around. Just how difficult that job is to perform
in actual combat. Oh yeah, yeah, very stressful, right, yeah, yeah,
so they m dogs, despite having one of the list names,
did not in fact do the best job just because
the circumstances were so fraught with peril. You know, the
(10:08):
ones I admire immensely where the tunnel dogs Vietnam, because
you know, they used to have humans as well be
tunnel rats who would drop into uh the secret Viet
Cong uh tunnels hideouts and um headquarters and that just
I don't know why that one was the one that's
terrified me. Like, if you've ever been buried alive, it's
(10:31):
not a pleasant experience that like you wouldn't I'm not
normally claustrophobic, but it just takes like one night in
the dirt to not want to ever do that again.
Have you seen that whole movie where I think it's Ryan,
the guy that plays Deadpool. It's like the whole movie
is him in a gonna buried alive situation. Ryan Reynolds said,
his name is that Deadpool's name? Yeah, yes it is.
(10:52):
But I do not recall this film. It's called bing
there you go, Yeah, it's called burying. It sounds like
a very unpleasant film. I don't know that that Ben
would enjoy it very much. I always think of that
scene in kill Bill when she's buried in the coffin
and clung her way out, and that was to me
the most visceral depiction of like what it might feel
like to be buried alive, and it is it is
not good, Yeah, to totally. I I agree with you there,
(11:16):
but I'm sorry. All this stuff makes me think about
docks sins and I don't know, honestly, I don't know
if they were yeah, but I I know that, Uh,
I don't know if they were used in for the
purposes specifically of being a tunnel dog. But dang, that's
like you couldn't create a better version, a better chassis. Yeah,
(11:37):
you could have put their legs a little closer together,
probably get a little more traction. They're bread to hunt
all burrowing animals that were native to that position. That's why,
despite their diminutive frame, they have a warlike belligerent demeanor. Yeah,
I said it's true. It's true. Ben. Back back to
casualty dogs. Uh, it makes me think of rescue dogs.
(11:58):
Not not that what we think of when we think
of like getting a rescue shelter dog, but like dogs
that would rescue people from avalanches. You might have seen
cartoons where you have these St. Bernard's in like Switzerland
and like the Swiss Alpse, with these little barrels around
their neck that I think had some sort of brandy
in them that would revive like uh, passed out snow
blind traveler and poor sap that got stuck in an
(12:19):
avalanche as well. I always wondered if if they really
did wear those The St. Bernard neck barrel not a
real thing. It was an invention of a painter and
then it just sort of caught the public's imagination. So
apparently not a real thing. But St. Bernard's were bred
in that area of the Swiss Alps where people were.
They were used as rescue dogs in that way, but
(12:40):
did not have the barrel. Well, now we know St.
Bernard's no barrel tunnel dogs. I think incredibly brave explosive
detection dogs, right, that is the that is the seventh
category will see on war dogs and those are just
what they sound like. They are trained to use the
astonishing K nine scent of smell to detect explosives before
(13:04):
human beings could. So these these dogs are in Rock,
Afghanistan a lot of other war torn areas, and that
only factors in these seven categories, only factor and official
working dogs. So these are not those heartwarming, buzzfeedy stories
of you know, like uh, Sergeant Peppercorns or whatever, who
(13:25):
is a little you know, uh cocker spaniel that the
French ran into one day and now he has his
own uniform and people have to salute him and stuff.
Sergeant Peppercorns. It just I don't know, it's it's trying
to get something besides Sergeant Pepper. You know, it's beautiful
all those different you know, Peter Ning Kompoop or something
(13:45):
for all the always sunny fans there. But those pooches
are in arguably crucial in their own very endearing, very
sweet way. But that is not why we are here today,
is it? The reason? The other things we are talking
about today are the way animals have been used right um,
for wartime and other things. And we've got a couple
(14:06):
examples that will laundry list here a little bit, but
some are a little more strange than others. Did you
guys do an episode of ridiculous history on the bats?
The explosive bat idea We've done an episode on a
few of these. Actually, um, there was another one involving dolphins.
But let's start with the bats for sure, because they
were incendiary, right, that was the whole point. Yeah, So
(14:28):
the US almost used bats loaded with napalm and something
they call Project X ray. The idea here was that
it would create a wave of fires throughout Japan conflagration
that would destroy the primary cities. However, the plan was
scrapped because not because the bats were bad at their jobs,
(14:50):
but because they were very good and they escaped. They
burned down a hangar in New Mexico, a military officials car,
and everyone was against it. If I'm remembering correctly. They
were just on timers as well, so it wasn't like
they could be triggered individually in some remote way. They
were released, and the ideas that they would they would
kind of roost in the eaves of these very flammable
(15:11):
homes as you know, like a lot of Japanese homes
paper doors and you know, all wooden frames, and the
idea was smart, Uh, they would be undetectable. People wouldn't
think anything of it, and it just didn't didn't go
as planned. But it was a pretty smart idea, and
so so they had just like like a bomb essentially
attached to it would just unsteerable. Uh yeah, untrainable. Wow,
(15:37):
it's grenade rules. You pull the pen and you throw,
you know. But but in this case a million bats
because it was a ton, right, it wasn't just a couple.
It was like, wow, that's insane. And then on the
flip side, the Japanese did a weird similar thing, not
involving animals, but involving balloons that they would just like
release and hopefully the winds would take them into North America.
(15:59):
And a few of them made it, but mainly they
did not. But this idea of just like blindly releasing
weaponry into the world is very strange to me and dangerous.
I mean, this is so back to animals. They're camels
have been used as mounts and beasts of burden since
time immemorial, but they were actually used as quote unquote
(16:20):
suicide bombers during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. And the
problem with that terminology, of course, is that the camels
could not consent. It's still the very you know, medieval
or ancient practice of like lighting pigs on fire and
then sending them to run at the enemy. And just
remember that Soviet war in Afghanistan. It's not the whole
(16:40):
two thousand one and beyond war that's back in the day. Yes,
that is correct and very good point there. Dolphins super intelligent,
of course, it's no wonder militaries all around the world
would love to work with dolphins. They're great at locating minds,
they're trainable. Um, they have some behavioral issues. Real dolphin
(17:02):
behavior does not match maybe what you think of when
you think of Flipper or echo the dolphin I think
was the Saga Genesis game. That game was hard. Yeah,
but ben, I have also seen that episode of Drunk
History nod to Dunk Controst. So you're talking about that,
you're talking about the we're adults who you're talking about
the dolphin hand. Yeah, yeah, that's a true story. So
(17:25):
with with with Lily, with like the researcher, Yeah yeah,
the language language instruction, there was some freaky dolphin actually
going on in like a flooded laboratory like dormitory kind
of situation. Right. Yeah, that's for another day. So along
with dolphins, the US Marine Mammal Program also trains sea
lions to detect enemy divers sea lionel spotted diver, and
(17:49):
they're supposed to attach a tracking device shaped like a
handcuff to one of the enemy's limbs. They're also trained
to locate and recover military hardware and crash victims at sea.
The US is very careful to state that these cetaceans,
you know the doll, well, these cetaceans and the sea
lions and so on are not taught to attack people.
(18:13):
That's what they say. They just want to put a
little handcuff like thing on your leg. That's a little inklet,
just a little tag, just want to access arise. So again,
there's there's some murkiness around there, and it's not just
due to the depth of the ocean. Will will figure
out exactly what's going on there or from some disturbing
things in that regard. But going back to the idea
(18:35):
of blindly releasing something, one of the most dangerous uses
of animals in warfare would be the use of insects
because that ties directly with germ warfare and the spread
of weaponized disease. Yes, there's there's an historical use of
this in Japan when that country attempted to use insects
(18:56):
as weapons during World War Two, and the whole idea
there was too infect the you know, military members and
people in front lines and people in all places, a
lot of places with cholera and plague that would be
carried by these insects. Essentially, like you said, ben as
germ warfare, they're just carriers for these things. Oh and
little known fact um or counter fact to this is
(19:20):
the US tested very similar methods on its own people
like in Florida, very poor black neighborhoods. In Savannah, Georgia,
it dropped these flea bombs, um, and it was like,
you know, that's very swampy kind of area with a
lot of potential for disease and it was really bad.
What do we what do we find then that people
(19:40):
actually did were confirmed killed because of some of those tests.
I believe that's correct. Yeah. Wow. In Japan also did
this as well, Like we were talking about the same thing,
dropping fleas of like inside bombs essentially. Uh, that's that
is very very intense to me. Um, It's ingenious, but
(20:03):
I mean is what do you call? Is it biological warfare?
And it's a real scorched earth approach to I mean,
it's it's really just yeah, because there's not a when
those things are deployed there there wasn't any technology inform
of like a topical treatment or something applied to friendly forces,
(20:24):
or in terms of course you can't steer the bugs
wants to loose. So yeah, this is brutal, it's insidious.
Let's go to something that's a bit of a lighter
note before we plunge full on into the darkness. But
let's do that after a word from our sponsor. Alright,
(20:45):
we're back. No, you'll love this one. Birds have also
been used in warfare. Trained parents were positioned on the
Eiffel Tower during World War One. This is kind of hilarious.
There is low key hilarious. The parrots were trained to
alert people to incoming enemy aircraft. However, the parents could
not differentiate between enemy aircraft and Allied planes, so they
(21:10):
were just losing their freaking minds repeatedly. This is very
stressful to the humans working with them, so the birds
had to get mixed. In the Second World War, in
the American behaviorists, the famous BF Skinner devised a plan
to train pigeons to ride in missiles and guide them
to enemy ships. The plan was scrapped for a while,
(21:31):
but then resurrected from fifty three as project or con
Isn't that an amazing image that gets conjuring your brain?
A pigeon piloting a missile Nope, or a bomb? Don't
don't care for it. It's like doctors Strangelove. But now
it's a pigeon with the hat. Yeah, and the bombs
are coming down. The parents are like German aircraft. Don't
(21:55):
like it one bit. So uh so, Nolan, the in
the interest of of your sanity, will move on there too.
We are just scratching the surface here. While the initial
idea may seem unorthodox, the logic does bear up, bears up.
Oh ah man, all right, you got me on that one,
(22:15):
fair and square. Uh. First, some animals do naturally have
ability superior to those of humans. Technology has done a
lot to mitigate this gap in recent years, but in
some cases animals still remain the superior, most cost effective solution.
The nose of a dog is amazing, right, It's tough
(22:36):
to replace that. Second, Now, this is cold blooded, a
lot more so than than we like to be here,
but it's true. If something goes wrong with an operative
if it is an animal and not a human being. Um,
it's a lot less expensive to train another one of
(22:57):
those animals than it is to train a soldier. Now,
that is that is pretty rough to look at it
just from a war cost perspective in that way. Um,
but it's also the the pr effect of having a
lost soldier versus a you know, perhaps a lost dog. Um,
it's it's different. Let's just do lost bird. Okay, we
(23:20):
can all stomach that. I'm not a A lost dog
makes me sad. Lost bird, I'm like better off without him.
The birds, I like, don't get lost. They're too smart.
The corvette, that's I don't know. I think every every
living creature could get lost. But yeah, that's a that's
a good point. Right. So it's no wonder that animals
continue and will continue to fill various rules and multiple militaries.
(23:43):
But just how far does this go? And what if
there is more to the story. Here's where it gets crazy. Yeah,
depending on who you ask, intelligence agencies and militaries all
across the globe are using animals in a much more
various and secretive, clandestine ways. So let's talk a little
(24:04):
bit ben about the Middle East and it's strange preoccupation
with animal conspiracies. So this is crazy. Yeah, this, let's
spend some time on this, and we have to be
pretty careful going into this. We and all our fellow
listeners need to realize that this bizarre, distinct sub genre
of a different, larger conspiracy theory does occur, as you said, Noel,
(24:28):
in the Middle East, and it is wrapped up in
I would say, more than its fair share of anti Semitism,
because we have numerous sources in the Middle East claiming
that animals are being used in top secret programs to
surveil local populations, terrorize them, and attack them. However, the
(24:49):
vast majority, by which I mean close to a of
these accusations are coming of from other countries in the
Middle East, directly leveled at a sing other country, which
is Israel, and occasionally the West quote unquote the West.
Can we talk about the eagle that got detained? Yeah, yeah,
there HESBLA or HASBLA affiliated TV stations is According to
(25:14):
a report by slate Um, they were saying that an
eagle was detained north of Beirut because it was suspected
of being an Israeli spy. Yep, there are multiple things.
We can even trace it back to. The One of
the beginning reports that made international news, let's call it
the Great Shark Wave of twenty ten ten ten, is
(25:36):
that like a shark Nado. It's like a shark nado
plus a like a shark nado plus one of those
monster truck rallies, uh plus jaws. Yeah, that's pretty accurate.
Disens cool, I know, right, unless you're one of the
people who gets uh wrapped up in the shark wave.
In December, there were several shark attacks off the coast
(25:58):
of Egypt, near near some resort towns, and people appeared
on the Egyptian media, notably one guy named Captain Mustaf Ismail,
and this captain claimed that a GPS tracking device found
in one of the sharks was not your garden variety GPS.
These GPS trackers are not uncommon in the world of
(26:18):
terrestrial biology or marine biology. But the captain said that
this was instead of a GPS device, this was a
steering device. It was a guiding device planted by what
he described as agents of Israeli intelligence. Egyptian officials attributed
the attacks to more mundane factors like the actual politicians
(26:42):
and the intelligence community of Egypt said, well, you know,
sharks normally aren't super into eating people, so we're looking
at over fishing. We're looking at maybe teaching them to
associate people with food dumping, sheep carcasses overboard, even unusually
high water temperatures. Through their credit, Egyptian scientists also weren't
(27:04):
buying it, because you see, GPS is not a remote control.
But here the conspiracy match was lit, and it once that.
Once that match was lit, the story itself became what
people nowadays call lit a f Because we have several
more stories of these strange accusations, they just get weirder. Okay,
(27:28):
so let's go to the Iranian military advisor Hassan Ferusa
body Um in two thousand eighteen. When asked about some
environmentalists who are under arrest at the time, this military
advisor said that they weren't your average environment lovers, your
average tree huggers. Instead, they were representatives of Western powers
(27:49):
hiding spy lizards in uranium minds that I remember this
story very very distinctly. This is fantastic. He claimed that
the environmentalists had lizards in chameleons on their persons at
the time, and that for Rusibaldi told the Iranian Labor
News Agency quote, we found out that their skin attracts
atomic waves and that they were nuclear spies who wanted
(28:12):
to find out where inside the Islamic Republic of Iran
we have uranium minds and where we are engaged in
atomic activities. And there's some issues with this. Yeah, yeah, First,
atomic waves are not a real thing. It is true
that in many cases it can be illegal to be
caught with living creatures in your possession, especially if you
(28:34):
are smuggling them in or out of a country, But
unless it's an endangered species, it's not. It's a it's
a weird thing to charge someone with. Next, the scales
that cover lizards are called scots sat right s c
U t e S, and these scoots are made up
of two types of keratin proteins, carratin A and, in
(28:56):
a stunning plot twist, keratin B. Neither of these types
of protein have any special ability to detect uranium or
other radioactive materials. Furthermore, reptiles are cold blooded, so they
want to be where it is warmer. Right. Often, it's
it's a tough cell to say that there are cold
(29:17):
blood reptiles who have some sort of motivation to burrow
deep into a cold uranium mine. So overwhelmingly people outside
of Iran and outside of hero Zibaldi say this is
hot wash. See, the lizards were meant to seek out
the warmth of the neutrons coming off of the radioactive materials. Guys,
(29:40):
that's the whole point, right, that's the whole point. You
you release a chameleon in a very cold cave, it's
going to go directly to the uranium. It's not rocket
science being facetious, of course, but what an interesting concept.
Uh yeah, because what do you do with them? What
(30:01):
do you do with the lizards after they've found the uranium?
Give them some crickets? You know what I mean? What's
the intelligence part? What's the actionable thing? I guess it
could pinpoint the location of the mind would be the idea.
So it would have to be a numbers game. Then
you would either drop them into suspected minds, right, or
you would drop them into everything in a region and
(30:24):
just hope that one of them seemed to exist, seem
to prove the supposition. Okay, all right, well what about
this if lizards feel a little too beyond the pale.
How about something more reasonable like squirrels. Also in Iran
in two thousand seven, right, oh yeah, oh yeah, Iran,
and and people working for Iran captured fourteen squirrels, and
(30:48):
the local news agencies there uh said that these little
guys were equipped with some kind of equipment that was
meant for spying. And allegedly the squirrels had some kind
of you know, like a small device attached to them
essentially that was used for eavesdropping. So you would just
put them in a park somewhere or maybe near a
government building, and you could just wait for the squirrels
(31:09):
to capture whatever conversations occurring at a park bench. And honestly,
that's become sort of a trope, a cliche of this
idea of the squirrels are listening, you know what I mean,
Like you see it in uh in sketch cry. That's
exactly right. It was Rick and Morty, Yes, it was
Rick and Morty. They traveled to an alternate universe where
(31:30):
uh Morty is able to hear squirrels and they have
to burned out. They basically burned out the universe to escape,
right yeah, yeah, But the conversations the squirrels have are
so clandestine and beautiful. It's so good. Yeah, it is
really good. I missed that episode. Have we talked about
the fact that we're gonna be on Harmontown? You guys? Uh,
we talked about it on social media and we talked
(31:51):
about I'm just really excited about it. Um, it's really
cool because we're big fans of Dan and we're gonna
be on Harmontown and Dan's gonna be on this show.
To assume mean we don't just irreparably burn our bridges
that we're all Dan's still friends with us, We're all
still friends with him. Who knows, Maybe we'll get rode
out on a rail, hard and feathered, hopefully not hopefully
(32:13):
not hopefully not so Okay, maybe the idea of squirrel
spies seems a little too far into the realm of
science fiction. That's fine. I got a different pitch for you.
How about dolphins. They're super intelligent and Hamas claimed that
they arrested a dolphin that was spying for Israeli forces.
What I love about this is when you just hear
(32:36):
that headline, I have this picture of a grizzled dolphin
that can somehow walk and it's got its flippers and
it's it's got sunglasses on for some reason, and it's
being walked out past the cameras. They got me, what
did the dolphins sounds sound like? I don't know that.
(32:59):
That's it. That's it. That's okay. It's hard to get
high enough the dolphins. It's not. I thought it was
pretty I appreciate you. So the Times of Israel reported
allegations that this dolphin was outfitted with spying equipment, including
but not limited to cameras. Which interesting about that is
(33:22):
that we know stuff like that has happened before, right
in real life. Uh. Now, this next one is something
that I think is safe to say none of us
saw coming. There's there's a very specific, uh sort of
narrative thread with animals spy allegations concerning vultures. Massive, massive, disgusting, creepy,
(33:44):
gangly dangly, red face weirdo creepy vultures. Yes, yeah, from Lebanon.
In Lebanon, security officials detained a huge vulture as described
previously by myself, with the six point five foot wingspan.
This is making me cringe inside, uh, and claim that
(34:05):
it was a surveillance vulture, an animal working for Israel,
because there was apparently a tracking device attached to one
of its creepy vulture feet, which means, I mean, come on,
that's the thing. Okay, So I had this tracking device
attached to its foot. Yet again, GPS transmitter is not
some sort of magic remote control gizmo. Tel Aviv University
(34:28):
was tracking this bird, and in addition, this is the
weird part. In addition to having a GPS transmitter on
the bird, the bird also had tags on its wings,
along with an engraved metal ring on its leg that
read Tel Aviv University Israel not super secret. That's not
good spycraft. It's not as crappy a job as James Bond,
(34:52):
who always like is eternally day drunk and tells people
his name does and what he does? Uh is That
guy's a mess. But this bird wasn't much better if
it was supposed to be a spy. This is not
the first time Griffin vulture, specifically because these are massive, right,
it's it's not the first time one of them has
been accused to be an agent of Mossade of the
(35:15):
Israeli intelligence agency in Saudi Arabia in two thousand and
eleven one was captured, and of course local news and
scuttle but began to orbit intensely around this concept of
a quote unquote Zionist plot, and then pretty much the
same thing occurred in Sudan in twenty twelve. Around this
(35:36):
part of the world, many people were certain that there
was a new type of superspy and it was not
a human, It was not a robot. It was a buzzard,
which is strange because again, from everything we can tell,
these birds were likely being tracked as part of some
biodiversity conservation project. Yes, it was for beneficial means for
(35:57):
both the birds and for our research at least that's
that's on the face of it, right. Maybe, Look, we
can't fully discount that some of these animals weren't spying
for somebody, right, sure, because we'll never know. We never
got to interrogate these birds. That vulture, You never got
to put it down in a room with a polygraph knoll.
And as far as I know, we have no Doctor
(36:18):
Doolittle esque figure on our in our governments. You know,
that's all we need, you guys, that'd be pretty cool
for counterintelligence. A doctor Doolittle. I mean, surely there there's
I don't know, is there No, there's no kind of
like there isn't there a way to communicate with dolphins
that I make that up. I made that up. We
talked about it. It was the whole hand thing. Yeah,
(36:39):
But I mean, like, you know, with your mind, man,
come on some kind of helmet, you know. I don't know.
I feel like that's also a rick and Morty thing.
But I'm just seeing image. There's the intelligence. There's the
lawnmower man for Aldernn esque thing, yeah, with the dogs
classic so and I thought that was a good one too.
U So we also see other birds in Turkish officials
(37:03):
claimed they captured a kestral falcon spying for you guessed it,
the state of Israel. There's a great illustration of this
alleged culprit over at tablet mag dot com. Like the
other birds, this kestral has a bunch of markers identifying
as a research subject, and people are thought to be
(37:23):
researching migratory patterns. Right. The problem is that the very
signs that should have made it plain these birds were
part of various studies were instead taken as evidence of spycraft,
and then the very next year, fisherman in Egypt suspected
a stork of being the next James Bond. So far,
(37:46):
so far. Astute listeners will notice the trends here that
we mentioned at the top, the country's claiming conspiracies of
foot in the Middle East almost universally accused one country
of creating these animal spies. So it is doubtlessly true
that anti Semitism is informing some of these claims. If
it is possible to bracket that that racism and that discrimination,
(38:11):
and just look at the facts. Could any of these
claims about animals as spycraft and animals and war, could
any of them be true? We'll tackle that after a
word from our sponsor. All right, we're back. So if
(38:35):
we just look at the trends, the claims of birds
being used for spying often seem to be cases of
birds that were being tracked for science rather than some
sort of intelligence agency. Allegations of squirrels to date remain unproven.
And if you know anything about what the squirrels are
doing or talking about, please write to us right now
(38:56):
or run be safe. You can only save yourself. It's
too late, it's too late. If you're nodded, they heard you. Uh.
It's true that there's no solid proof for against the
squirrel thing. Yet, however, there are a couple of former
CIA agents and wildlife experts who are very skeptical about
this because they think it would be very difficult to
(39:18):
train a squirrel or yeah, and if you could, you
would have a trained squirrel, and not a squirrel that
appears to be just you're running the mill guy out there, uh,
collecting food. And this all leads mainstream writers to dismiss
a lot of the wilder conspiratorial accusations. Writing for the
Toronto Star, journalist Gil Yarran says many animals undoubtedly serve
(39:42):
in Israel's army and security services. Dogs sniff out bombs,
alpaca help mountaineers carry their loads, which I did not
know and is true and is cool. But tails about
the use of sharks, birds, rodents, or, as it has
also been claimed, insects in the service of the military
are were the fruit of imagination than hard facts. So
(40:03):
with that in mind, let's go to the facts, the crazy,
strange facts. The United States is continuing to work with
underwater creatures, evaluating their usefulness as spies. Remember we talked
about that two thousand ten shark wave accusation right off
the coast of Egypt. It turns out the back in
two thousand six, the Pentagon looked into using cybernetic sharks
(40:24):
as spies, and in the BBC reported on it. It
sounds not real. I've just gott a couch that none
of this sounds real until you see it on the
BBC website based off of a declassified document. So I'm
gonna read part of this. The latest project from the
U S Defense Advanced Research Projects DARPA. As you know,
(40:47):
we we were big fans of DARKA over need to
sound cue at this point. Really uh So they aim
to improve military intelligence by using a range of aquatic
creatures from large fish to humble single celled organisms, and
their sing them all as underwater warning systems. And here's
a quote. We're trying to understand what these organisms can
tell us about the presence and movements of all kinds
(41:09):
of underwater vehicles in the ocean. That's from Dr Lori
oh Door NATO, who's the program manager of the Persistent
Aquatic Living Sensors or PALS project. I love my underwater
pals yeah, Well, of course the Navy comes through and
they're saying, look, look, guys, we've said this before in
the past, We're going to say it again. We are
(41:31):
not trying to use any creatures of the sea to
do any kind of aquaman stuff. We're not trying to
have them harm the watercraft, the uh, the ships and stuff,
or to hurt the humans that are out there. We're
just using them as sensors that I was gonna say,
why would you not train it? I guess it would
(41:52):
be much more difficult to train a citation to attack
a specific person or scific faces like an assassin, So
targeting a single person rather than a a I mean
a generic type of soldier or military person. Maybe there's
some signal that you have to give to prove your friendly.
(42:14):
But also, I'm very taken an annual video games amount
of very taken with the idea of a dolphin centric
assassin's Creed franchise. You know what I want is a
cephalopod centric assassin organization. Really, I mean think about it.
They're like super smart, they can like open doors and stuff.
Didn't you see how finding Nemo too? They only live
two years though, that's part of what And they're the
(42:37):
closest thing we have to approve an alien intelligence. So okay,
so fix the aging problem, right, have them walk on
the lands. I really just put them in a mex situation.
I wrote a great sci fi story about that. I
ever sent you that. Oh man, it's it's a trip.
But let's not lose that piece of the story. Maybe
(42:57):
there were not any remote controlled cybern edic shark drones,
which against sounds insane, off the coast of Egypt, but
the United States certainly wanted or wants to make them,
or did, and it's just not it's still classified. The
project was discussed that the two thousand six Ocean Sciences
Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Honolulu, Hawaii. There
(43:19):
wasn't a lot of news about the proposal after that,
And you know, if it was just in the proposal
stage at that time, it doesn't feel like a few
months would be enough time to get something like that
in the field, right, certainly, if that was their starting position,
and we can't forget that people in Norway did find
(43:40):
a runaway whale spy who is very friendly, very acclimated
to humans. Yes, and you can you can read about
that on the BBC. There are several Again, the BBC
has some amazing reporting on spy animals. Yeah, there must
be someone in there. It's like their thing, because it
(44:02):
really was a beluga whale, right, that's this is the
one we're reference referencing that had a harness on it
that specifically was uh, let me see if I can
find exactly what it said. Yes, it had a harness
on it that was supposedly Russian or of Russian origin,
and it also had a go pro holder like one
of those little you know, the mounts for go pro.
(44:24):
But but there was no go Pro attached on this
beluga whale that was found. Um, it's certainly odd. But
but again when people spoke about it, or of the officials,
the Russian officials when they chimed in, they were basically saying,
come on, guys, you think we would put one of
our specially trained spy beluga's out there with a harness
(44:46):
that clearly is Russian by beluga, Which goes back to
the birth thing, like, yeah, if it's a spy, why
does it say tel Aviv University. Yeah. Yeah, but it's
also like one of those tropes you see in like
sci Fi movies or one of like a satellite falls
and people like it's clearly a and satellite, it's got
Russian text on it, Like would they really do that?
Maybe they would, I don't know, yeah, you know, Especially
(45:06):
the question is did they intend to get caught? Who
did they want to identify this? Well, here's the crazy
thing it is. At least according to this reporting, there
was a colleague of the Russian official who had comment
and saying, you know, this is crazy. Come on. Of
course it wasn't this, but they were saying they don't
do such experiments with Belugas, specifically to have them spy,
but they have. The Russian military has been capturing and
(45:29):
training Belugas for quite some time. So again it's like
the shark thing, like if you go back four years,
then you go, oh wait, there are some programs that
seem pretty similar to this. Right, So maybe the maybe
the accusations are sort of urban legends, right, maybe they're
they're growing from these legitimate concerns. But at this point,
(45:53):
it is no secret that militaries and intelligence agencies do
very very creepy things, and further more, tail as old
as time when people are prejudiced against a giving group.
It's not hard for them to accept even the most
ridiculous accusation. If you, for some reason hate a person
or a people or a group of any sort, then
(46:16):
your BS detection, your BS meter is all out of whack.
You'll believe anything. If you hate everyone who watches Night Court.
Then you see a study that says people who watch
Night Court are you know, necrophiliacs or something, You'll just
sort of nod to yourself and go that makes sense
checks out. Yeah, you know that whoever that person is
(46:37):
that hates people who like who watch Night Court, there's
something very wrong with them. And that is the only
kind of person that I hate is people who hate
people who watch night The guy from night Coort just
pass away. Harry Anderson. Yeah, he passed away last year
at the age of sixty five. I read a studying
mat that people who hate people who hate Night Court
actually tend to perform higher on spatial aptitude tests. Do
(47:01):
you believe that I did? You just find that somewhere?
Found it somewhere? Sure, so you used your your aptitude
to find it a good work. So again, however, despite
the fact that we cannot, uh, we we cannot like
extract the socio political uh soil in which this occurs.
(47:25):
We cannot extract that racism. It is true despite that
that there are clear improving cases of animals being used
in ways that are, like you said, Matt, similar to
the more conspiratorial claims we see floating around. We cannot
confirm whether the specifics of a certain narrative are true.
You know, like two thousand ten off the coast of
(47:45):
Egypt there were cyber sharks. But we can point out
a couple of things in the news just a few
days ago that yeah, just happened. They really fast. Before
you even get into this, but there's some weird serendipity
occurring with this show right now, and we won't go
into all of it. But Ben and I were going
(48:05):
to record this episode last week. Noel wasn't gonna be
able to be here, and something came up in my
personal life where we weren't We were not able to
record this thing. Then over the weekend there was reporting
specifically about this thing, which blew my mind. Right. Yes,
according to the BBC in an article release just a
(48:28):
few days before we recorded this, the CIA finally admitted
it used pigeons to spy on Soviet forces in an
operation nicknamed or code named rather to KNA and Operation
to KNA, fit these pigeons with these incredibly endearing tiny
cameras right right on the breast area, facing down a
(48:49):
little bit right, so as the pigeon is flying, the
camera would automatically take photos of whatever was within line
of sight. They didn't stop there. To KNA also trained
ravens to deliver and retrieve objects up to forty grahams
from window sills of otherwise inaccessible buildings. And let's just
go really fast into the Takana pigeons with those cameras.
(49:10):
It's something so fascinating. So let's imagine that. I mean,
it's the way. It's the way carrier pigeons would work.
Back in the day. Pigeons would be taken from place
A with wherever you're going. Right, if you're going to
be in a caravan going somewhere, you're going to another
encampment somewhere, you'd carry a pigeon that had the home
(49:32):
of A. You go to place B. You release that
pigeon at B with a message. It carries it back
to its home in a right So they would do
something very similar where they would train the pigeon to
have a home in place A. Then essentially, if imagine
drawing a straight line to place B, and in between
those two places would be let's say a Russian facility
(49:55):
or Soviet facility back in the during the Cold War,
in between directly in betwe mean those two places, and
they would release them from Place B. It would fly
over this facility, take a ton of pictures, and again
you'd release probably multiple or several of them, take a
ton of pictures as it's going back to its home,
capture the stuff. It was a brilliant plan and they
(50:16):
were actually doing it. What's the mechanism for taking the pictures?
It's that little camera we were talking about. It's remotely
like they're actually timing automatic sort of like the BA bombs. Yeah,
it's kind of old school exactly. So if they fly
over something that is not worth photographing, they're still going
to get a bunch of shots. Right. They also had
(50:38):
and those ravens that you were talking about. Yeah, man,
so okay, they used a flashing red laser beam to
mark a target, and a special lamp was used to
sort of train the bird to come back. According to
the BBC article. On at least one occasion in Europe,
the CIA delivered an eavesdropping device by bird via this
(50:59):
raven mechanism to a window, although there was no audio
picked up from the target, so they got the burn
to do it. It's just no one talked about anything
important in the room where it happened. So the CIA
also looked at whether migratory birds could be used to
detect chemical weapons. There were some sort there's they like
(51:20):
allude to trials where there was some kind of electric
brain stimulation to guide dogs remotely, and there was a
project to put listening devices into a cat. Uh. This
stuff got ugly real quick. But I did want to
end on a lighter note. And I hope this is
this lighter Are you gonna talk about? This is lighter
(51:41):
the no tricks, no tricks. There is an incredibly adorable
thing that will call the Otter dossier or the Otter
doss Here it is. It reads like a book report.
It's called dossier on Lutra the Otter and it Uh
(52:01):
this came out of a Freedom of Information Act request. Uh,
this reads kind of like a book report by someone
working in the intelligence agencies for Uncle Sam, who just
really loves otters and is trying to find a reason
for people to use them in experiments. Lutra the otter
is a compact, powerful, intelligent animal capable of negotiating land, water,
(52:23):
and obstacles with great facility. And it should goes on
to talk about how much this person, this anonymous author
loves otters. Ah, you can read it on you can
read it online for free too. It's one of the
more pleasant things in fault Yeah, Geo cities dot FBI.
It's like otter fan fiction. It's like fan fiction that's
(52:43):
very well put. Yeah, I've really thought you were going
to jump straight to Acoustic Kitty. Acoustic Kitty is the
harrowing tale. That's the one where they installed an implant
into the kitty's brain basically right, yes, very in humane,
bad times, and it didn't They were listening devices inside
the cat or that was the that was at least
(53:03):
the plan to release a bunch of these cats with
listening devices physically inside them. But then they tested it
one time the and the kitty cat that they put
it in immediately jumped out into the road and got
smashed by a car. Unfortunately, the Lutra usually sleeps on
it's bad with its arms folded, and it likes to
(53:25):
sleep with humans. We paid someone and it has a
it's all but that man seriously. Uh And then they
say never, if possible, confine or leaving a zoo or
kennel an hotter which has enjoyed any human companionship or freedom. Well,
there we go. This person just was an otter, buddy.
(53:45):
Uh wow, Uh the basic you know what, I'm gonna
stop reading sections of this report. If you ever feel down,
go check out Dacia on Lutra and do please let
us know what you think about these allegations of animal spies.
What we're finding is that while the timeline for a
(54:07):
lot of this stuff may not match up, the pure
potential of the technology is there in some cases. Right. Well, yeah,
and there's now an historical declassified trail of the CIA
using animals for these means pretty pretty closely to what's
being you know, suspected in a lot of places. It
(54:28):
doesn't mean it's true, especially the later ones. And like
you said, Ben, you can't divorce some of those feelings
that occur in regions with the reality. It's it's tough
to do that. Yeah, absolutely, and that's why we want
to hear from you. Let us know what you think
about this. Do you think there is any sand to
these claims? Further More, if you had to pick an
(54:51):
animal that would cooperate with you in aspy ring, what
kind of animal would you pick? And why? Do you
can let us know? Yeah? I mean, I'm pretty sure
or at least a few of us took Honey Badger's right.
I'm absolutely going to be an honor at this point.
All right, what about you? Met? I mean I would say,
Honey Badger. If I could have a friend Honey Badger
(55:13):
that would be on my team and do stuff. I
wouldn't be on your team because he doesn't give all.
That's the whole point. Though he wouldn't. He wouldn't g
a f for anything. But me, I don't think he
would g af about you know, he would he would
be my boy. Okay, So we would have to do
(55:33):
this podcast with an animal that may well attack and
eviscerate us, and the only thing keeping it in line
is that it adores you. Yeah, I'd be like, yo,
stop man, it goes for the giblets first, right right,
I mean it until it's got him. So, so uh, yeah,
(55:54):
we want to know what you think. You can find
us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter, you
can find us on Instagram. Meet our favorite part of
the show, your fellow listeners on our Facebook page. Here's
where it gets crazy. If you don't want any of that,
you can hit us up on the social needs, uh,
the Instagram or we are conspiracy stuff show. I am
personally at how Now Noel Brown. You can find me
(56:14):
at ben Bullin. You can also find me fpn Bullen
h s W on Twitter. Matt, where can they find you?
All right, I'm actually going to do it this time.
You guys got an Instagram account that I'm going to
share and you can follow it if you want. Um,
I'm officially following one person, my wife right now, so
I've I'm not I haven't started it yet, but it's
(56:36):
a big moment. Yes, it is official. My Instagram account
is Matt Frederick m A T T F R E
D E R I c K Underscore, I Heart I
H E A R T. That's gonna be my account,
and uh, you can follow me there and I'll post
stuff like you know, I'm putting this on Instagram? Is that? Okay?
(56:57):
Oh wow? Okay? Sure? All right with that, I'm gonna
understand people are going to be thrilled. Okay, yeah, they
We're gonna post it and it's real and I'm not
gonna check it ever, but we'll see, we'll see what happened.
I'll check it for you, Matt, Okay, but that's it.
That's for me. So if you don't want to do
any of that stuff, give us a call. We are
(57:18):
one eight three three std w y t K. Leave
a message, tell us what you think, give us suggestions
for another episode. Anything you want to do. Just use
your mouth voice put it into our phone system. And
if you don't want to do that, but you still
want to talk with us, please send us an email.
We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they
(57:57):
Don't Want You to Know is a production of I
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