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Craziest Military Experiments · Be Amazed

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in 1942, the U.S. Navy conducted a potentially groundbreaking experiment in an effort to turn one of its ships invisible, and it went wrong with disastrous consequences.
0:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Or at least, that's how the story goes.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, throughout history, militaries around the world have secretly conducted all kinds of crazy experiments, some real, some shrouded in conspiracy.
0:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So, from Psychic Soldiers to Flying Bears, let's investigate some of the craziest military experiments ever, and get to the bottom of them.
0:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The year was 1942.
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The second World War was reaching its height, but the Allies had just suffered a catastrophic loss of ships at the hands of German U-boat submarines.
1:01
[SPEAKER_00]: To combat this, the U.S. Navy allegedly enlisted World Famous Physicist Albert Einstein.
1:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
1:08
[SPEAKER_00]: To develop super advanced weapons and defense systems for them, of course?
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The craziest of these by far was an invisibility cloak designed to hide U.S. ships from the enemy.
1:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Now it wouldn't have been anything like the one Harry Potter owned, Einstein theorized that by surrounding a ship with powerful electromagnetic fields, it was possible to bend light around it, effectively making it invisible.
1:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In summer 1943, it was finally time to test the theory.
1:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Scientists installed huge electrical generators around the anti-submarine destroyer escort, USS Eldridge, while it was docked at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.
1:51
[SPEAKER_00]: then they turn them on.
1:54
[SPEAKER_00]: According to Witnesses, a strange green fog suddenly materialized around the ship and the eldritch flickered into a surreal invisibility, along with all the sailors on board.
2:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Incredibly, it was actually working.
2:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Then in a burst of crackling blue light, it completely vanished.
2:13
[SPEAKER_00]: However, it turns out it hadn't just turned invisible.
2:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Some 200 miles away in Norfolk, Virginia, a group of wayfares were stood aboard an entirely different ship when they witnessed something that shocked them to their core.
2:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The USS Eldridge materialized out of thin air into the sea before them.
2:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Then as soon as it had appeared, it disappeared.
2:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it had never been there.
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in Philadelphia, onlookers were equally stunned when after a short tense weight, the ship reappeared in the dock.
2:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But as it crackled back into vision, it became clear something was horribly wrong.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Crew members were flailing about and talking gibberish.
2:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Others were running around on fire, and that wasn't even the worst of it.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Upon reappearing, some people had seemingly fused into the ship itself.
3:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Moaning sailors were stuck inside the vessel's metal structures.
3:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Their twisted bodies protruding from the walls and floor at odd angles.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a living nightmare.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The disaster prompted the Navy to quickly shelve the experiment and force everybody involved a sign-in oath of secrecy, never to speak of it again.
3:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But they didn't account for the unintentional witnesses.
3:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Or at least, that's how the story goes.
3:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite a multitude of witnesses coming forward since the 1940s, not one of them has had any real evidence to support the crazy tale.
3:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So, what actually happened?
3:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the entire event can be traced back to Pennsylvania's citizen, Carl Allen.
3:48
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1950s, Allen started sending odd letters and documents to the U.S. Navy detailing the account, which he called the Philadelphia Experiment, as well as a host of other strange stories.
4:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Surprisingly, these letters weren't dismissed, and in fact, they captivated some government
4:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite this fanfare, Allen himself remained elusive.
4:15
[SPEAKER_00]: However, his family has since described him as a fantastic mind, but also a master-leg polar.
4:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So is the whole tale just one big troll?
4:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, skeptics reckon so, but they admit it could be based in reality.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: During World War II, Einstein really did help the U.S. Navy with weapon designs, but probably not an invisibility force field.
4:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and the Navy did develop a way of making their ships?
4:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, not invisible, but undetectable demise.
4:48
[SPEAKER_00]: To do this, they wrapped electrical cable around the ship's hulls and sent electricity through it.
4:53
[SPEAKER_00]: This reduced the ship's magnetism and meant they wouldn't trigger German magnetic mines, a process called dig galsing.
5:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The similarities to the so-called Philadelphia experiment aren't hard to miss.
5:05
[SPEAKER_00]: If the whole thing really was just a story, though, what about the witnesses that continue to come forward all the way up to 1988?
5:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, considering Hollywood made a movie out of Allen's account in 1984, they were probably trying to cash in their 15 minutes of fame while it was still culturally relevant.
5:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think we can pretty safely put this one in the conspiracy trash can.
5:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But before you do, make sure to follow my podcast.
5:30
[SPEAKER_00]: That way you'll never miss any of my amazing content again.
5:34
[SPEAKER_00]: done?
5:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay then, you might hear the words stargate and immediately think of old school science fiction, but some things are far stranger than fiction.
5:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in the 1970s the U.S. government formed a secret unit of the army dedicated to psychic phenomena.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Name the stargate project it was initially established in response to a similar program supposedly being funded by the Soviet Union.
6:02
[SPEAKER_00]: U.S. officials determined that if there was any value in psychic research, they couldn't be left behind Russia.
6:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So they began funding tests to determine the credibility of psychics.
6:13
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1972, a group of so-called psychics were selected and took part in tests at the Stanford Research Institute.
6:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, famous celebrity Yuri Geller was one of the participants and apparently correctly guest symbols hidden inside envelopes to a wild degree of accuracy.
6:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The project's main focus was a phenomenon called remote viewing.
6:35
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a person being able to psychically see events, sites, or information from a great distance.
6:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Two of the most successful remote viewers were Gary Langford and Rosemary Smith.
6:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Incredibly, they located a loss-soviet spy plane that had crashed in a remote area of African jungle, with no prior knowledge of where it could have been.
6:57
[SPEAKER_00]: President Jimmy Carter was so impressed he became a firm supporter of the project.
7:03
[SPEAKER_00]: However, after some 20 odd years of research, it was eventually canceled in 1995.
7:10
[SPEAKER_00]: renowned psychology professor Ray Hyman had evaluated the program and found that, although something beyond statistical hiccups was happening, he wasn't convinced remote viewers were useful for intelligence gathering, so despite a modest amount of success, Stargate was shut down for good.
7:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Something beyond statistical hiccups?
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that mean?
7:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure where I stand on this one.
7:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Valuable researcher, waste of time and money.
7:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The Cold War was a period in which East and West raced against one another to try and achieve the greatest scientific and military feats.
7:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of the results of this were absolutely insane.
7:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Take the fully fledged laser tank developed by the Soviets in the 70s and 80s.
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep, in a move straight out of science fiction, the Soviet Union genuinely began pumping money
8:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a total of 12 aimable lasers created by focusing light through a whopping 66 pounds of artificial rubies.
8:18
[SPEAKER_00]: These lasers were then beam through amplification lenses, turning them into one mega beam of light that could reach twice the range of a conventional tank.
8:28
[SPEAKER_00]: But I know what you're thinking.
8:30
[SPEAKER_00]: What damage could a beam of light do against something that fired missiles?
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it turns out, a lot, by aiming the intense laser at an enemy tank's optical systems, it could blind them and render the vehicle unable to accurately attack.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently, during testing, one of the tanks actually managed to disable a helicopter's optical system from five miles away.
8:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Jeez.
8:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So, what happened to this fantastical bit of tech?
9:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Sadly not a lot, the prototype weren't ready until 1992, and by that time the Soviet Union had collapsed, sending the country into economic despair.
9:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly throwing heaps of cash in a glorified mobile flashlight didn't seem like such a bright idea.
9:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Now to a mysterious uncharted island.
9:22
[SPEAKER_00]: a series of sinister and inexplicable incidents and a government cover up.
9:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm talking about Vos Ros de Nia or Rebirth Island.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Located in the RLC between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the small, unassuming island began garnering attention at the start of the 1970s for all the wrong reasons.
9:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1971, a young scientist was sailing near the island on her research vessel when she realized she was headed straight into a strange brown mist.
9:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Days later, she was diagnosed with smallpox, even though she'd already been vaccinated against the disease.
10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: A year later, two fishermen were found drifting in their boat nearby, neither were alive.
10:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Somehow autopsy results indicated they'd fallen victim to the plague.
10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Not long after that, local fishermen started pulling entire nets of dead fish from the water.
10:20
[SPEAKER_00]: That's more than a little fishy.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: but then in May 1988 things got a whole lot worse.
10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: A huge 50,000 strong herd of antelope that were grazing nearby all dropped dead in the space of an hour.
10:35
[SPEAKER_00]: What?
10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It turns out all these incidents were linked.
10:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union had been using the island to secretly test biological weapons for half a century.
10:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Humans and animals alike had been participating in horrific experiments as part of a top secret project that saw the island transform from a peaceful fishing spot into a creepy wasteland.
10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the main things the Soviet Union was testing was anthrax, a seriously dangerous bacterial disease that can live for hundreds of years.
11:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But as the Cold War drew to a close, the Soviets dumped their remaining stocks of it into pits and left.
11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So to avoid it getting into the wrong hands, the US government splashed $6 million on a cleanup operation.
11:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Today the island has merged with the surrounding land due to the arrow sea drying up, but it still contaminated and littered with the burial pits of infected animals.
11:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Talk about eerie.
11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Flying a plane can't be easy, but how would you feel about flying a plane with a bear strapped into the seat behind you?
11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as crazy as it sounds back in the 1950s, U.S. pilots did just that.
11:46
[SPEAKER_00]: A new bomber called the B58 had just been developed capable of flying at tremendous speeds of Mach 2, which is twice as fast as the speed of sound.
11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem was that they were so fast pilots couldn't eject safely.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So a new ejector seat had to be developed, and rather than using humans to test it, the military decided to use bears.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Supposedly, American black bears and Himalayan brown bears simulated the weight of human pilots fairly accurately.
12:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, but how do you go about getting a bear strapped into a plane?
12:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you just don't miss the ties in, of course.
12:23
[SPEAKER_00]: After giving the bears a heavy dose of anesthetic, they were strapped into ejector seats and human pilots took off, flying the planes at breakneck speeds before hitting a jack, and sending the bears tumbling through the air.
12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Then their parachutes would deploy, and the furry payloads were sent floating back down to Earth.
12:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Whoa!
12:44
[SPEAKER_00]: On touchdown, any injuries were assessed and used to improve the design of the ejector.
12:49
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no denying this was super unethical and utterly bonkers.
12:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Luckily, the testing period wasn't very long and not many animals had to be subjected to this terrifying experience.
13:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't bear the thought of what they went through.
13:04
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're familiar with Star Wars, you'll know about the Dead Star, that huge floating laser weapon capable of destroying entire planets.
13:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it turns out German scientists were planning a weapon spookily similar to this during World War II, known as the Sungun, the idea was to build a space station over 5,000 miles above Earth.
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: From there, a huge concave 3.5 square mile reflector,
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: would harness sunlight and beam a concentrated ray of it, wherever the weapon was aimed.
13:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Hypothetically, the laser-like ray of light would be so powerful, it would boil oceans and burn cities to the ground, and this wasn't just a silly idea.
13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The Allies found detailed plans for the solar cannon in 1945.
13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: originally thought up by renowned German rocket scientist Herman Oberth, it was to be a crude space station with gardens to generate oxygen and solar power generators.
14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: There was even an estimated budget for it of around 3 million Reichsmarks, which was $1.2 million, or a whopping $25 million today.
14:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite these grandiose plans, the weapon was estimated to take a good 50-100 years to build, so wouldn't have been much use when it came to fighting the war.
14:22
[SPEAKER_00]: If things had gone another way and the Axis powers had won, though?
14:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you looked up at the sky right now, you might just have been able to see the massive, terrifying mirror looking back down at you.
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of some Russian swamp land near St. Petersburg, there's a collection of radio towers and abandoned buildings surrounded by a gated fence.
14:41
[SPEAKER_00]: If you happen to see it, you might assume it was some long defunct Cold War era communications base.
14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The truth is much more mysterious.
14:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Many people suspected it's not actually defunct at all, but rather the secret headquarters of a radio station known as UVB-76.
15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of playing Taylor Swift though, this radio station has been broadcasting enigmatic sounds.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been broadcast every day, every hour, for almost four decades.
15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Occasionally a voice breaks the monotony by reading out seemingly random words in Russian like dinghy or farm specialist.
15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But aside from that, nothing changes.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet the eerie broadcast keeps on going, and it sparked all kinds of theories.
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people think it's an encoded message used by spies while others are sure it's an attempt to commune with extra terrestrials.
15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the more popular theories is that it's a dead hand signal, meaning if Russia is ever hit by a nuclear attack, the broadcast will end and automatically trigger a retaliatory strike.
15:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I really don't know what to think about this one, but if it is the latter, let's hope that creepy broadcast never ends, right?
15:58
[SPEAKER_00]: When you hear the word warfare, what do you think of?
16:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Albert, whatever it was, it was violent, but there's a whole subcategory of warfare that isn't violent at all, at least not in the traditional sense.
16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called psychological warfare and focuses on influencing people's emotions, beliefs, and behaviors.
16:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The US waged a particularly strange campaign of psychological warfare during the Vietnam War, which they termed Operation Wandering Soul.
16:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It was based on the Vietnamese belief that if the dead aren't properly buried, their souls continue to wander the earth in pain and suffering.
16:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice.
16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Because of this, US engineers spent weeks recording eerie sounds and voices to imitate what could be the goulish cries of fallen soldiers.
16:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The final recordings termed ghost tapes were then played through loudspeakers in areas of Vietnam where the enemy Viet Cong were active.
16:58
[SPEAKER_00]: pretty unnerving, right?
17:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea was to spook the Vietcong so much they'd give up and retreat, but in practice it had limited success.
17:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes it worked, but other times Vietcong would realize it was a tape and shoot where the noise was coming from.
17:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite this, the US Psychological Operations Battalion, or PSY-OPS, continued the tactic for most of the war.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, PSY-OPS are still active today, as we've explored there's not much a government won't try to give itself an edge in war, so you might not even be surprised to learn that in World War II, the US Navy tried to create soldiers with infrared vision.
17:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep, the Navy wanted its soldiers to be able to see special infrared lights that would be invisible to the enemy in order to communicate things visually without them knowing.
17:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Normally, humans can't see infrared light.
17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: This is because the photo receptors in our eyes are only activated when light hits them with enough energy.
17:59
[SPEAKER_00]: All naturally visible light has enough energy to activate them, but infrared doesn't.
18:05
[SPEAKER_00]: U.S. scientists knew however that Vitamin A is key to our vision.
18:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They also knew there are different types of Vitamin A, and we usually only consume one of them, so volunteers were fed diets rich in an alternative form of Vitamin A and deficient in the usual form to see if their vision would be altered, and low in behold, it worked.
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: After just a few months, their vision changed and their eyes became more sensitive to a greater range of light.
18:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, hypothetically if they'd have carried on, their eyes could have adjusted so much they'd have been able to see better in the dark, and indeed even be able to see infrared.
18:45
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the experiment was canceled when technology became available to see infrared without biologically altering anything.
18:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Looks like I'll stick to eating carrots then.
18:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you know that Netflix's smash hit show Stranger Things was originally called Mon Talk?
19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: If not, you're probably wondering why I'm telling you.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's because the show was actually inspired by a real-life series of U.S. experiments collectively known as the Mon Talk Project, or at least they might be real-life.
19:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Supposedly, the U.S. government conducted a number of top secret projects at Camp Hero in New York,
19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The strange experiments were first discussed in a book published in 1992 by Ufologist Preston B. Nichols, where he claimed to have been a researcher for the project.
19:35
[SPEAKER_00]: According to Nichols' runaway children were abducted for the experiments, where they were trained in mind control, telepathy, and even opening spacetime portals.
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Sound familiar?
19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, hold onto your tinfoil hats because it gets even wilder.
19:51
[SPEAKER_00]: One Al Belek, who also claimed to have seen the Philadelphia experiment, said he was on board the USS Eldridge in the 1940s when a wormhole to the future opened up and dropped him into Camp Hero in 1983.
20:08
[SPEAKER_00]: While there he teamed up with Nicola Tesla, the famous inventor, and developed a special chair which amplified the psychic powers of anyone who sat in it.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if all this sounds bonkers, it's because it is.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if it was true, would there really be no evidence whatsoever?
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Another supposed witness has the answer.
20:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Stewart-Sword Low claims to have been one of the abducted children, and that after accidentally summoning an interdimensional monster, the base had to be destroyed in the project shut down.
20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, I guess that clears that up then.
20:43
[SPEAKER_00]: In reality, the Montalk project is probably a fabrication of nickels that got picked up by others wanting to be a part of the narrative too, but who knows?
20:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe there's a shred of truth to it, or 11.
20:56
[SPEAKER_00]: If you cast your mind back a few minutes, you should remember the Soviet Union's biological weapons test site, Rebirth Island.
21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, years before the Soviets, the British had a similar testing ground for anthrax, and it was in aid of a plan so diabolical, it would have changed history as we know it.
21:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The year was 1941 and World War II could still have ended with an allied loss, so the British were working towards using anthrax as a weapon against the Germans.
21:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Detest how dangerous the bacterial disease really was, they dropped an anthrax bomb onto Gruenard Island, a small, unpopulated island off the coast of Scotland.
21:37
[SPEAKER_00]: the results were shocking.
21:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Though the place was mostly deserted, 60 sheep were wiped out within days and anthrax spores were carried to the mainland for months after, infecting far more animals.
21:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Teams of people and hazard suits were sent to the island to incinerate the dead animals, and afterwards it was closed from the public until 1990.
21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But the plan wasn't to drop an anthrax bomb on Germany?
22:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh no.
22:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It was to infect linseed cakes with anthrax spores and drop them all over German fields.
22:07
[SPEAKER_00]: That way, cattle would eat the cakes, civilians would eat the cattle, and millions of civilians and animals would kick the bucket.
22:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Plus, those that did survive would face a huge food shortage.
22:21
[SPEAKER_00]: See what I mean by absolutely diabolical?
22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Thankfully, the plan never came to fruition, by the time it was ready the war had turned firmly in the Allies' favor.
22:32
[SPEAKER_00]: A whopping 5 million cakes had been made for it though, and all of them had to be incinerated.
22:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Jeez, I knew cake was bad for you, but that's something else.
22:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't think of many things more terrifying than fighting in a war and seeing a tank rolling over a hill coming straight at me.
22:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Other than, maybe if I saw a tank flying straight at me, yet that's exactly what the Soviets were trying to achieve back in World War II.
22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The proposed Antonov A40 was a tank designed to glide down onto the battlefield.
23:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Abled a glide like this, it was hoped that the tank could both arrive at its destination faster and also land alongside airborne troops to provide them near instant support.
23:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So they first lightened a T60 tank by removing its ammunition headlights and interior elements, then attached wood and fabric by plane wings to it alongside a twin tail.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The plan was for a bomber plane to fly the gutted tank across the battlefield and drop it at the correct time, so it glided gently to the ground.
23:36
[SPEAKER_00]: At least, that was the plan.
23:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The gliding tank was tested in 1942, but even after its modifications, it was still too heavy for the bomber plane to effectively fly.
23:47
[SPEAKER_00]: To avoid crashing, the pilot had to ditch the tank early, though it apparently did glide smoothly to the ground afterwards, regardless the project was abandoned.
23:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Guess they wanted to just glide over that one.
24:02
[SPEAKER_00]: When you think of super soldiers, you might imagine towering cyborgs with laser weapons and robotic augmentation.
24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I doubt you imagine chimps.
24:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet back in the 1920s, Russian zoologist Ilya Ivanov set out on a mission to create a human chimp hybrid that would be the perfect super soldier.
24:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Communist leader Joseph Stalin had seen potential in such a creature, as he believed they'd have the immense strength of chimps, but without a fully developed human brain,
24:30
[SPEAKER_00]: they'd be easier to control.
24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Ivanov himself was more interested in the political and scientific implications.
24:39
[SPEAKER_00]: He was part of the Bolshevik party who opposed religion because they saw it as dangerous competition.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: By breeding such a creature, Ivanov hoped to prove Darwin's theory of evolution and strike a blow to religion.
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So researchers went to Africa, where they torched trees and chased chimps into cages to use for experimentation.
25:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds ethical.
25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Once they were captured, it was onto the next phase.
25:06
[SPEAKER_00]: To try and create his human zeas, Ivanov ordered three chimps to be artificially inseminated with human sperm.
25:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Believe it or not, none of them felt pregnant, the whole plan failed, and Stalin later arrested a vano.
25:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Who'd have guessed this wouldn't have a happy ending?
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Humans' eyes have lived on in the international conscience though, and is recently as the 1990s a chimp called Oliver was believed by many to be one.
25:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't just look odd, he also walked upright, had a soft spoken voice, and was attracted to human women.
25:39
[SPEAKER_00]: DNA testing revealed he was, in fact, just a chimp, so no super soldier here, but I can't deny there's something super uncanny about this guy.
25:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Either way, I think it's safe to say that human z's are a load of monkey business.
25:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Alright then, that's about it for today.
25:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Which of those did you find the most interesting?
26:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And do you know about any other freaky experiments I missed?
26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.