During the World War II, the celebrated behaviorist psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner worked on a system of pigeon-guided missiles. Because electronics was still a budding science, the United States government launched Project Pigeon, a project aimed at creating missiles with a compartment occupied by pigeons. These pigeons were conditioned to recognize the target to be destroyed and pilot the device.
War is an activity that, despite its nefarious objectives, brings out human creativity. Far from accepting the limitations of available technology, those responsible for finding more effective ways to obliterate the occasional enemy can pull the strangest ideas out of a hat. One such idea is, without doubt, the so-called Project Pigeon (Proyecto Paloma), whose final goal was to train a group of pigeons to be able to pilot missiles during World War II.
How Project Pigeon Worked
When the world entered World War II, computers were still on the drawing board. Although many engineers knew that it was possible to build machines capable of executing a program, the available technology was utterly inadequate. Take, for example, the 'bombes'—primitive electromechanical computers used by Alan Turing in England to decode the messages sent by the Germans via their Enigma machines. They were enormous, heavy, slow, limited, and highly prone to failure. It was impossible to put something like that inside a missile and expect it to guide the weapon to its target. Nevertheless, some believed it was possible to train animals to carry out that task.
The idea, although it might seem like a delusional madness today, was actually very simple. Basically, it consisted of modifying the warheads of available missiles to equip them with a compartment capable of housing a pigeon that would act as a pilot. Information from the outside reached the pigeon's eyes through a series of lenses, and the animal's movements served to steer the missile. An American psychologist and author, a specialist in animal behavior and conditioning, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, was in charge of the most delicate part of the project. Skinner was convinced—and the tests proved he was right—that it was possible to condition the behavior of pigeons so that they would throw themselves at a preselected target.
The use of animals on the battlefield was nothing new. The Soviets, for example, used the so-called 'anti-tank dogs' to blow up German armored vehicles during the same war. It has been said that in war everything is fair, and nobody was going to stop to think about the fate of dogs or pigeons trained to kill themselves against the enemy. Project Pigeon was no exception.
During the tests, the pigeons proved that they were capable of using their beaks to peck at different areas of a 'control screen'. Those pecks would be the signals responsible for guiding the missile directly to the target. Several U.S. military agencies participated in the project, and it is assumed that a good amount of money was spent on testing. However, in 1944 the Project Pigeon was canceled, arguing that valuable resources that could be used in other areas with higher chances of success could no longer be allocated. The pigeons breathed a sigh of relief.
Despite the cancellation of the project, several studies on this type of 'living flight control system' were carried out well into the early 1950s. At that time, inertial guidance systems based on electronics made the idea of entrusting a missile's control to a bird less attractive. However, the idea of using suicidal animals in war never stopped being an alternative. For example, it is known that monkeys or dolphins have been trained to place bombs. It seems that human stupidity not only makes us kill each other, but also drags innocent animals into the 'party'.
More information: Project Orcon on Wikipedia.
