John Lisle

So the OSDS did a few experiments with this.

Before the incendiaries were strapped, they put like fake incendiaries on them.

The idea was to cool down these bats.

We're going to fly them in a plane over the desert, like out in Utah or somewhere.

And we're going to drop these bats and see if they actually kind of disperse.

It turns out that they were using Mexican free-tailed bats, which I don't think actually hibernate, but they travel south for the winter.

And so they cooled down these bats in this like artificial refrigerator, but apparently they had cooled them down too much.

So when they dropped them from the plane, they just like fell straight down to the ground and never woke up.

And so they just splattered across the desert.

So that was one of the tests.

Another of the tests, they wanted to do a live experiment where they had an actual bat with an actual napalm bomb attached to it to see if it could fly off or to see if it would actually carry this weight.

But they had it in somewhat of a controlled environment.

They cooled this bat down and put it in artificial hibernation.

And then they were taking pictures of it, you know, to see how everything operated.

But then the bat started kind of waking up and it flew off before they could grab it.

And it actually flew into a control tower and it burst into flame and the whole thing caught on fire and burned down.

So it turned out this thing actually worked.

But again, it was never deployed against Japan.

This is right at the end of World War II.

And, you know, they're already, the Manhattan Project was kind of successful at that point.