The Day's Dumpster Fire
In this podcast, Kara and Ed regale history's greatest mess ups. They do not celebrate humanity's successes but its most fantastic failures! This show is not dedicated to those who have accomplished incredible things, but to those who have accomplished incredible things and how they royally screwed things up in the process.
You might ask why they are doing this podcast: it's because you've botched up the best laid plans and you know what? THAT'S OKAY!
Let this show help you navigate the mishaps that you have come across where there is no clear answer available.
So sit back, relax, and listen about people who messed up way more than what you could of possibly imagine.
The Day's Dumpster Fire
The Bat Bomb of WWII Fire Part 2. - Episode 73
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We here at the Day's Dumpster Fire felt that The Bat Bomb of WWII Fire Part 1 episode was so iconic and a breath of fresh air given the stresses of modern day living, Ed and Kara hammered through the recording and editing of Part 2 early so that you wouldn't have to wait tow weeks for the conclusion. Even though it would be worth the wait, Part 2 of The Bat Bomb of WWII should be released sooner than later!
In this episode, Ed and Kara discuss the establishing, engineering, testing, and subsequent conclusions of Dr. Lytle Adams' brain child, the bat bomb or better known in the top secret circles: Project X-Ray.
If the Manhattan Project consisted of elite top tier scientists and engineers headed up by one of the greatest minds of 20th century, Project X-ray was the exact opposite. Comprised of a team of only two scientists, a hotel manager, a body builder, a pilot turned movie star, two random brothers with nothing else to do in the 1940s, a lobster fisherman, and two high school students, the idea of a bat bomb burning down cities in Japan would have been better reflected in a television comedy series.
Ed will show how Project X-Ray was put together, how the bats were selected, how little napalm bombs were attached to them, how they were stuffed into a glorified toilet paper tube after being flash frozen and then dropped out of a B-25 bomber outside Los Angeles and the conclusion that were derived from such a test.
Furthermore, Ed will look at how those conclusions were put together to make a second bomb but with actual destructive capabilities!
World War II was a scary, intense, and involved time in American history, but it was also a time where any idea could be entertained. Some ideas were hugely successful and changed the trajectory of human history, and others... well... simply went up in smoke. Not to spoil anything, but we'll let you decided where Dr. Adams' bat bomb sat in terms of historical influence.
Hey before you go!
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Epler, I kid you not, he literally stopped off at the Park Services and got a permit for everybody to collect the bats.
Speaker 2:At least he's doing it. Through the right channels.
Speaker 1:Like he stopped off. Like, okay, he's a light colonel. And yeah, hey, uh, we gotta do the proper paperwork before collect all these bats. I respect it. Yeah. I thought that was kind of funny. It's like, okay, guys, nobody touch a bat until we get the filled out.
Speaker 2:So it's like when we were telling our kids when we were going camping, our students, like, all right, if anybody wants to go fishing, you need a permit. We we tried to like instill the fear of God into them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like the poaching sheriffs would come out, yeah. Yeah. I remember telling uh one of them, like, hey, if you get for catching a fish and you're not supposed to, I'm not your bail. Of course, it never would have happened, especially at the that we were at where the fish had more mercury in them than water.
Speaker 2:Right. Meanwhile, when we got there, I had two of the students pulling hooks out of fish mouths and stuff. It's fine.
Speaker:That was that was fun. That was fun.
Speaker 1:Hello, welcome to the day of Sumpster Fire, where we don't humanity's successes, but its most fantastic failures. I am your host, Ed, with me as always, as as is, was, soon to be, should be, should be, Cara.
Speaker 2:Hello. Hello.
Speaker 1:Hi, apparently I forgot all my tenses.
Speaker 2:That's okay. I am really bad about tenses when I'm not actually trying, I hear it. I hear it. It's okay.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, and I and I never realized how bad I was at until I got my new fancy keyboard. Uh, so like I'm typing along on it, and and I hate this everybody says, oh, it's super thawky and it's super creamy. And I really wish people would stop referring to their as creamy and everything. But I am literally typing up. There's a website out there where to practice typing, you like transcribe books. And so I'm I'm transcribing, um, I think it's HP uh Cthulhu. Sweet. Yeah, so I'm just like I'm on chapter two right now, but I that as I'm typing, like at 90 words a minute, I'm getting my tenses screwed up. So yeah, I have no I have no idea what time it is. I have no idea what time it was, and I have no idea what time will be.
Speaker 2:It's understandable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Especially considering I've been writing papers for the like two months, and my professor's like, this is good, but it can be better every single time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which I appreciate because it makes me better, but also like, oh man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. You kind of wish, like, okay, is there a time when like this is just fine the way it is?
Speaker 2:And it's only with the writing, like everything else, 100%, 100%, nothing but good things to say. And then it's it's like the essay part. But like I said, it makes me better, so I don't hate it.
Speaker 1:Well, you know what was actually surprisingly sufficient, the first go-around? Bat bombs.
Speaker 2:Napalm bombs?
Speaker 1:Yes, napal napalm bat bombs. Yeah, napalm bat bombs, yes.
Speaker 2:I like that. Oh, we gotta put that on shirt.
unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, again, you gotta do a drawing. You gotta get a drawing out there with like this little bat, like got like a little, like a little like 55-gallon drum of napalm, like underneath it. Like he's all cute, just flying along.
Speaker 2:Little kamikaze bat.
Speaker 1:It's got little aviators glasses. The bat with aviators glasses. I like it. Carrying a uh a keg of napalm.
Speaker 2:All right, we'll workshop that. Anyway.
Speaker 1:Yes, and and and and if you have, if you're joining us and is like your first time coming to the day of dumpster fire, um, you're probably wondering what in God's green earth about. Well, basically, the day Semster Fire, we look at all the in human history where we try to map out something so that is no way that it can possibly fail. And then five minutes after we implement the plan, it all goes up in flames. Sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, but we've there. And uh yeah, we've all we've all been there where we like, man, dude, I am I'm gonna I this is such a good plan. I'm gonna get promoted, and my life is gonna be perfect this, and then it all just completely falls apart.
Speaker 2:Do you ever try to put a party together and you think it's be great and you invite all your closest family and friends, and you think, yeah, it's gonna be awesome, and you dress up and it's gonna be fun where everybody's gonna dance and everything just gets set on fire?
Speaker 1:Or like nobody shows up or music doesn't work, or or or a happens and everything just burns. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess like a legit fire. A fire. Yes. Well, and that's kind of what happened in here. So, like, if you're joining us, uh you might want to to part one, which I believe was episode 72. Uh, we are talking about the famous bat bomb idea from World War II. And basically put, right after Pearl Harbor was bombed, uh, America was pissed. America wanted to exact some sort of uh um revenge, and they did. They had the doolittle raid, which was pretty cool, right? It it knocked over some buildings in Tokyo and whatnot, and it really sent a message to Japan, but it really sent a to America that hey, Japan isn't this unimpregnable, force. Like, we we can actually knock on their door, ring the and run away with a flaming bag of dog poo on their and get away with it. What the heck does that have to do with bat bombs? Well, this this little doolittle raid kind of opened up the floodgates for anybody who had you know crazy ideas. It doesn't matter that it doesn't matter uh how wild the idea was. This is kind of the cool thing about a world war is that hey, if it looks stupid and it performs stupidly, but it the job done, it ain't stupid. Like, that's kind of the motto when you're when you are to uh put together a uh some sort of a game plan to defeat a massive, massive enemy like the Japanese Empire during War II. And that is exactly what happened. There was a dentist by the name of Dr. Lytle S. Adams. I keep wanting to say Little, it's Lytle or Lentil, so L-Y-T-L-E. I don't think it's lentil, no, it's not, but I like I back of my head, you know, and some deep annex in there, want to say lentil s atoms, but I just think of like a green thing. A little tiny dentist. Uh little little s Adams. Uh, but yeah, where we kind of left off with on our on our episode is this Dr. Adams, dentist. Um, I believe it was from oh, Pennsylvania, Irwin, Where we left off is like this dude is very eccentric. Um, maybe borderline crazy, but uh a dentist nonetheless, he came up with this idea while he was in Carlbad. Um Carlsbad or yeah, it was Carlsbad, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:Uh, I don't remember. I should have skimmed over this.
unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Carlsbad, New Mexico. There we go. Uh, he was there on vacation because that's what apparently is go to southern New Mexico. And he saw dentists and physicists. Uh, yeah, yeah, it's either that, yeah, or physicists. And it's funny how like New Mexico comes back into play uh, both in the Manhattan Project and um this bat bomb idea or project X-ray. But yeah, the idea that Lytle had was we get a bat, right? And we strap a little thimble full of napalm on it. And napalm is really, really, really nasty stuff. It burns pretty hot. It burns for a long time. It's like gasoline but gelatinized.
Speaker 2:Yes. We also talked about napalm on our Vietnam episode.
Speaker 1:Uh yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:That a little bit more detail.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah. It is, I think it's one of those things that really should not be a part of war just because the injuries that it is absolutely horrific.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a bad deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. My uh I've had family that were were in Vietnam, and yeah, would go to pick up bodies on the ground that were death by um napalm, and like like their skin was crispy, and it would it would just, yeah, it it was some nasty, stuff. But the idea that Dr. Adams had was we take our bat, we put a little explosive on it full of napalm, and then we drop a couple thousand of these bats all over Japan. And the idea is that these bats will then want to fly to attics and uh you know alcoves, bridges, like these things just fly anywhere to you know hang out because they're like well, one day they're just minding their own business in New Mexico, and then the next day they are being shoved out of a plane over Japan, and they're like, This isn't Mexico. What's going on? So the bats would find a place to hide, and eventually a timer would go off and it would ignite the napalm. Unfortunately, it would ignite the bat to go with it, and it would start fires.
Speaker 2:I hate that.
Speaker 1:And these fires, like people would be like, okay, why we just drop incendiary bombs? Well, that's exactly what the Americans did, is they would, especially towards the end of the war, like 1944 or 1945, would just drop these incendiary bombs, where each bomb could have like maybe a 40 building diameter like radius kind of a thing. Uh it was projected that these bat bombs could actually do 400 buildings. So, like, this thing, if it actually worked, could be almost as devastating as the nuclear bomb, which was being in New Mexico at the same exact time that Dr. Adams had this idea. So we have two two very wide-ranging projects here, uh, both of which nobody, like including President Roosevelt, had idea if it was actually going to work. Yeah. But probably the coolest thing about this is how Lytle got project to Roosevelt. And uh Lytle uh or Dr. Adams took his plan to the military. The military's like, this is the most bad-brained idea ever, go away. So what did um Adams do? He went over the United States president's head and went to the real person in charge, Eleanor Roosevelt, his wife. And Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. Adams were actually good buddies, and uh she basically took the idea and presented it to Roosevelt, and then Roosevelt was like, Oh yeah, yeah, it's a crazy idea, but it's worth trying. So Project X-ray was in the works as a result. Cool. That's a gross summarization of everything. There is uh a lot more stuff going on, especially some of crazier weapons that came about and everything. So, yeah, if you're just joining us, like yeah, you could get through this episode and be fine. But I encourage you to go back and listen to episode 72. Uh, the other thing, too, is like you'll probably notice this episode is coming out on Wednesday. So part one is came out on Monday, and then normally we have two weeks in between episodes, but I want to try to get this one out sooner. So by the time you are done with part one, part two will be out um like two days later. So hopefully, hopefully, if you're listening to this, you've already listened to part one. And if this is your first time on the show, and uh like this is your first introductory episode, go back, 72, and then come to this one if you want the full effect, the full the full experience, yeah. The full HD experience, the all the things, the experience, all the things, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all the things.
Speaker 1:Yes, you will be a happier person for listening to the episode. We had the Manhattan Project going on. Manhattan Project is filled with all sorts of really, really smart men, and uh, even some women were involved, like women scientists. Yep, and it was on the side note it's kind of funny because these men scientists were like, Well, we can't have women on the project, not because they were women or because they were bad scientists or whatever, they were actually very scientists, and a lot of the men in the Manhattan Project like, Yeah, these women are very, very, very capable, but didn't know what prolonged exposure radiation was to them.
Speaker 2:They were worried about babies, yeah.
Speaker 1:Worried about the whole reproductive thing, and it's true. Blah, blah, blah. Well, yeah, but uh, what if they don't want babies?
Speaker 2:Like, it's their decision.
Speaker 1:Uh, but yes, it is their decision, and they may not want at that time, which is fair, right? Women should have the right to have babies whenever they Uh, but if a woman is exposed to too much radiation, then can cause the eggs to get genetically corrupted, and then when they do decide to have a kid, birth defects and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:If they decide to have a kid, if yes.
Speaker 1:But I would assume that there was a good possibility that of the women maybe would want kids, and um maybe, but if super smart scientists, then they know exactly what they're getting into, or at least they have an idea of what they're getting into and they can make that decision themselves. Yeah, well, and that's where like you'd want to go back and listen to um uh Oppie's Demon Core. Uh because I kind of go in in a lot more detail about like radiation part of it, uh, how the radiation affects the body and and all that kind of stuff. So, like, yeah, it the the the the issue was that they fully didn't quite understand the long-term effects of because this is all uncharted territory.
Speaker 2:Sure, I get that. I'm just saying I don't care that the men are concerned reproduction because that has been the bane of women's for all of mankind.
Speaker 1:Well, I I th I think what the issue okay, there's there's two types of concern. There's, and I think a lot of these scientists had the concern, like, hey, we really don't know what this is gonna do. And if you do decide to have kids down the road, this could negatively impact it. But then there's the other kind and of concern where it's like we just don't want women involved, so we're gonna use whole birth thing as an excuse not to have them on the
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think there's two types of concern.
Speaker 2:That first concern is still you're worried about when it should just maybe you should worry about your own instead of hers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I I don't I don't think they were I don't think out of the question. Like, hey, just we don't know. I know, I know. Especially at the time, they they legitimately had no idea the long-term effects are gonna be.
Speaker 2:I know. I'm just saying, I just gotta I'm just saying it's been a thing for like ever in patriarchal societies, and it drives me mad.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think uh well, and a lot of it is I think the excuse of using the whole reproductive thing as a means to control. Yes, and that that that has been abused time and time again. But I think with the Manhattan Project, I think for the part these doctor or these professors were like, we just know. And hey, just we want to throw that out there in case if she wasn't aware, because these were these were these were walking, talking calculators, right? So they would have had they would have even less idea of radiation was going to do. But yes, I I I see the point. But what didn't have this problem was Project X-ray. True. Even though an X-ray is a radioactive uh yeah, that's that is kind of weird, but there was no there was no radiation here.
Speaker 2:No, just a lot of um bat deaths, which is also unfortunate.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, and um some really, really weird stuff that that down. So yes, we had the Manhattan Project going up there um turned into a uh female reproductive rights discussion. Sorry. Uh sorry. That's okay. I hey you've got you've got very strong views.
Speaker 2:I do. I have strong feelings when it comes to women in history.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially men determining what women can do.
Speaker 2:Yes, it drives me insane.
Speaker 1:Yep. Um so when we look at Project X-ray, uh now that Adams got yucky dokie from Roosevelt himself, the next step was an elite team of scientists, kind of like the right? You want the best of the best out there, you really want and and and here's the thing uh nobody in it on Dr. Adams' team, they nobody really knew about the Manhattan so it wasn't like they were competing. If I make it out that way, like they are competing, no, just comparing the two the two projects. Um, so if you're Dr. Adams and you got the go-ahead and the money now to put the this bat bomb thing, then yes, let's put together the elite team, like the Avengers, to like burn down Japan.
unknown:Okay.
Speaker 1:Because, yeah, yeah. I mean, don't hey, this is the same guy that honestly that the bat served no purpose in nature, but it was put by God for America to use to bring down the Japanese. Yeah, I know. He was a little out there.
Speaker 2:He was his best.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. So, some of the key people he recruited with the skills to put something like a bat bomb together were Dr. Jack von Bloker. I love the name Bloker. That's pretty good. Yep. Uh, he's a mammologist from the uh Los Angeles uh Museum of Natural Science, it's the one that's in LA. Cool. Yeah, yeah. I I guess actually do some legitimate research there. So yeah. Cool. Have a guy that may actually know something about bats team. Good, good, good, good. We have Lieutenant Tim Holt. So he is a pilot that I don't know if he was a good pilot or whatever, but at the age of 24, he became an actor, like a actor.
Speaker 2:That is the most 1940s thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah, he's probably like a real, a real handsome piece of a man.
Speaker 2:Oh, hold on. Let me look, let me look.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're gonna look him up? Yep. Yeah, we might yeah, we might as well have him in the show on on uh on the website, the daysimsterfire.com.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Please tell me he just looks like an idiot.
Speaker 2:He just looks like a dude.
unknown:Okay.
Speaker 2:He's just a dude. Yep. He's in some westerns.
Speaker 1:You know, he looks like yeah, he just looks like a dude.
Speaker 2:And uh just a dude.
Speaker 1:Actually, what he kind of reminds me of when I for when I up his picture, he kind of reminds me of like a character uh the Fallout television series.
Speaker 2:I could see that. Is it the cowboy hat?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and then like the outfit and everything. Like, man, this is this is a ghoul in the making.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's so funny.
Speaker 1:So, yes, we have Lieutenant Tim Holt, pilot turned Um, okay.
Speaker 2:He was in the movie Stagecoach 1939.
Speaker 1:If you ever wanted to check out I I'm I'm sure there's a on the team for him of Elite brains to put together a bat Then we have brothers Bobby and Eddie Harold. Okay. Okay. Bobby was an ex-hotel manager, and Eddie was like a enthusiast. Oh. Yeah. So like Eddie was like maybe like he's like that dude you see like an Instagram shorts that's like, you know, like my protein recipe, and then you know, he's doing all these and all that kind of stuff. And okay. Again, an ex-hotel manager and a workout guy. I mean, I would have loved to seen the uh the job process for that.
Speaker 2:I'm just trying to figure out what role they're gonna play.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah. But okay, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You asked about temperature. Um, probably one of my favorites here is Patricio Patsy Claimed to be a gangster uh who worked for Al Capone back in the day.
Speaker 2:Oh, friend of the pod. Good old Al Capone.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we know Al.
unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On a first name basis. You mentioned him a couple of times, like everything tax evasion to Alcatraz to syphilis.
Speaker 2:It's it's all there.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, yeah, I know. Al Al really checked a lot of boxes in the early 1900s.
Speaker 2:So good old Al Capone.
Speaker 1:Good old Al.
Speaker 2:If you do actually want to hear about Al Capone and the of the 1920s, go check out our Prohibition episode, the one, episode four.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What episode number was that?
Speaker 2:I don't remember the actual episode number. I just remember it's the fourth one out of the series.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It is uh Prohibition. Yeah, that would be episode 62.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:We actually get a lot of episodes. This is kind of cool. We actually have a library to refer to.
Speaker 2:Alcapone. Um episode 62. Anyway.
Speaker 1:Anyways, Patsy Batista, again, perfect candidate for making a bat bomb project. Al Capone gangster. So he says. There's actually nothing that confirms it.
Speaker 2:I will not confirm or deny based off of my current memory. I'd have to go check. I'll have to go look.
Speaker 1:Again, I'd want to be there on the interview process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, we've got another set of brothers here, Frank and Mark
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:They're just a random set of brothers.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Love that.
Speaker 1:So, like, this is this is quickly turning into like a Deadpool interview process. Like, like, luck is not a superpower. Yes, it is. No, it's not. Yeah, yeah, no, it is. Um, we've got Ray Williams. He is a lobster fisherman turned marine.
Speaker 2:Okay. Uh, I kind of understand the marine part.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Um, maybe we like lobster for lunch. That's cool. All right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh sure. I mean, cool.
Speaker 2:I'll I'll take a lobster lunch and uh marine knowledge on mission. That one's a little more useful. I'll take that one. I'll buy that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Compared to the two random brothers and uh and the yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Even Lieutenant Tim Holt, like at least he's a pilot.
Speaker 2:Like that's understandable. I can buy that.
Speaker 1:And then we've got Jack, I think it's Kopher, Kowfer, Jack and Harry Fletcher. Two high school students. And uh yeah, they worked part-time with Dr. Jack von Bloker. Oh, um, in his lab.
Speaker 2:Okay. Um, I'll take apprentice of the Bat guy. That's cool.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Batman, Robin, and Robin. Perfect. All right.
Speaker 1:Uh, yeah. I mean, hey, these two kids, man, like now that imagine that on your college application.
Speaker 2:That'd be cool.
Speaker 1:That that would be yeah. Like, by the time I graduated high school, I already had a top grade security clearance working for the military top secret bomb. And of course, after the war, everybody'd be like, Oh, you're on the Manhattan Project. Uh yeah, yeah, I was that's the one. Yeah, just just like the Manhattan Project, nothing about So, yeah, uh, actually, and and Jack Kofer Kaufer, he wrote a book that in the early 90s that really expounded upon this whole project. So, uh, these two dudes actually play a part, and then the only guy that is actually really, really, really other than Dr. Jack Von Bloker. We have Dr. Theodore uh Pfizer. He was a Harvard chemist, so like, yeah, straight up professor of chemistry, PhD in chemistry. And uh, he got put on the team because he had just recently developed the composition of Napalm.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, we're gonna see Pfizer come up many, many times because he's like he's like the legit brains of this whole who he really tries to make this work, right? He he takes Dr. Adams' vision and he really applies Pfizer, really know-how to make this work.
Speaker 2:So we've got the bad news bears of scientists here.
Speaker 1:This is literally, for the most part, this is the group of that applied to be on the Manhattan Project as like janitors and got rejected.
Speaker 2:It's like any sports comedy ever. Bad news bears, the replacements, whatever it is. You got the team of misfits with the one good player. Yes. That's where we're at. I like it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like the Avengers, but it's more like the
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Like, this is the most out-of-touch type of cast you could imagine for a top secret military project.
Speaker 2:The ex hotel manager and the workout enthusiast. That's yeah, it's good. It's a good cast of characters. I like it.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, and then you've got Frank and Mark Benish who are just some random set of brothers.
Speaker 2:Just like some dudes, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like then, like they they got lost and walked in on the process. Like, what's this all about? Well, and the and the brothers, like, we're in. I got nothing going on. Do you have anything going on? No, I'm good, man. Hey, we're uh uh we we're not hiring you because you have any you don't have any qualifications. It's fine, we're fine. You we'll we'll start tomorrow.
Speaker 2:We'll figure it out, yeah. We'll wing it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So out of the entire team, there was only like two legit The rest were a bunch of dudes who were waiting to be a part of like Deadpool's X-Force, right? But they they settled on the next best thing, which was to a bomb full of explosive bats.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:Uh the hiring of two scientists and even their students' makes sense, but the hiring of a former mob member, a fisherman makes no sense, and it didn't to most of the people uh associated with the team. So the military was obviously watching this, and the like, Adams, what are you who are what are you hiring? Like who are these people? Yeah. Can can you help me understand the the logic behind who it that you're hiring? And who knows? But Adams was very charismatic. He had a way of selling things to people in a way that would inherently want to just get on board with, right? He's the kind of guy that could he's like that manager that would tell you that, hey, we are instead of doing a pay raise, we're doing a pay decrease, and he can sell it to you that gets you excited for it.
Speaker 2:Oh god.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, he he's he's one of those guys. Um, his rhetoric was always ensconced in the realm of Uh, he would play up human emotions, it you know, hence whole like men are expensive and their families or men or brothers, they're fathers, and so on and so on, where bats are expendable. And so, like, yeah, he was real big on the whole playing up emotions, right? So, like, cool. But sometimes, like, that would get in the way of putting the right people in the right spot. And I think for this project, everybody that he selected for Pfizer, they really had no place on the team. I think Pfizer was the guy that really was the one, like, this is a crazy idea, but I think I can make it work. So, with the elite, and air quote, the elite team of experts selected, the task was to start hammering out the specifics of how to build the bat bomb. There were a few things they had to work out. Apparently, you do actually have to come up with a You can't just find some random flappy thing in the sky, a bomb onto it, and expect it to work, right? This is why they brought on these experts and the these elite contributing members, is so that they could work out these So, first thing, what species of bat was going to be the fit for the job? So, this would also entail how the hundreds of thousands bats would be captured. So, gotta find the right bat, and you gotta find enough of
Speaker 2:So, just picture this quickly. I'm so sorry. We've got our maybe, maybe not mobster, our two random guys, the workout enthusiast, the ex-hotel manager, have you, running around Austin, Texas at around 4 p.m. in the river trying to catch bats with their bare hands. Just picture if you will.
Speaker 1:They had nets.
Speaker 2:Okay. Even better. They look like SpongeBob and Patrick trying to catch
Speaker 1:And they're getting peed on.
Speaker 2:And peoed on. It was great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Kara and I are speaking from experience.
Speaker 2:It's true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were in Austin and we did the that barge or that ride thingy right around like 4 4 30 when all the bats to take off. And it's a really cool thing. Like, uh, it it's yeah, like check that off my bucket list. The only issue is that like when they're flying over, it like a really, really light rain, like a mist. And uh, yeah, that's that's uh bat excrement. It's the yep, yep, yep, fresh from the cloaca.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good thing I have all my shots.
Speaker 1:I thought you were gonna say something about a cloaca and be like, uh you don't have you don't have one of those. No shots. That would be that would be weird.
Speaker 2:Vaccines.
Speaker 1:Anyway, but yes, yeah, you got all your shots. Uh no citicosis for you. So um, so yeah, first things first, you gotta find the bat. Then you gotta figure out how you're gonna capture all of bats. Uh, then came the issue of what sort of incendiary would be best used. Uh how will the bats wear the mini bomb and still be able to fly? So there's some engineering that has to get involved okay. It admittedly. Uh keep in mind timer technology. So, like, you can't just let the bat out of the plane and this immediately burst into flames. Like, that would be a fireworks demonstration more than Yeah, you gotta have you gotta have a timer. And if there was one invention that vexed so many folks during World War II, it was the freaking timer, That you can't use an alarm clock because they're big, and try to make like a really, really small timer that was and reliable, it yeah, if there is that was like the one thing that came out of World War II that like most people that on these projects, like trying to time something to go off a specific time was an absolute nightmare. For example, there was a hundred plus assassination attempts of Hitler, and all of them failed because of a bad timer.
Speaker 2:There's a movie about it.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, yeah, Valkyrie.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, but also you could also just like read the actual story. I think the actual story is better than the movie.
Speaker 1:But anyway, and actually, I digress, uh, in Valkyrie, that actually went off on time.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:That one actually did go off at a correct time. The problem was that where Hitler's suitcase was where it or where uh the colonel's uh bag that he had the bomb in was located underneath a solid concrete desk and that of it. And uh yeah, it that would actually be a good episode. Like spending some time on all the bad ways of trying to Hitler.
Speaker 2:Oh, the jokes in my head. Okay, yeah, I like it.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, I'm gonna put that on the spreadsheet of ideas.
Speaker 2:Please do.
Speaker 1:Uh, because there were so, so many of them. Um, so yes, a timer. And uh yep. So we've got to make that work. Once selected, the bats would need to be collected and Okay. So like you gotta put the bats into like a hibernation stage so that you can put them inside of a bomb and they're not flapping all over the place and going crazy.
Speaker 2:I feel like Batman Robin and Robin are doing a lot of heavy lifting in this.
Speaker 1:Yes. Okay. Well, and I have visions of like because the bats they used were tiny, they're only like a few inches long, and I could just vision them with like little clips like hanging them the little these little perches upside down inside of a bat bomb.
Speaker 2:Just imagine the workout enthusiast trying to be delicate his giant hand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he here he comes in, he's just carrying this massive five-foot bomb on his shoulders, plops it down, and then next job is to hang these tiny little bats up, like in each little also.
Speaker 2:That is not historically accurate. We are making jokes.
Speaker 1:Yes.
unknown:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But this is one of these stories where you can blur the lines between historical accuracy and straight up comedy. It there's this and and and wait till when stuff like once actually get to the part where stuff actually goes wrong. So yeah, we gotta we've gotta chill the bats down um so that you can put them into a bomb, so that you can be dropped out of a plane, and then they can wake up and and do their thing. How were the bats going to be transferred to the target so they can wake up in time and you know save democracy? Uh, then there was the matter of testing and supplying that the military could actually use. So these were some of the things that they this elite team of experts had to tackle. So let's take this one at a time because you really the the devil's in the details here. So the team selected the Mexican freetailed bat as mentioned before, uh, especially in part one. It seemed like Dr. Adams was truly a fan of these things, according to Pfizer, and we're gonna see him come up a lot. Uh he he did a lot of testing with this bat, and on their lifting capacities. And so, yeah, he would have bats, so like they're flying, have like a little string attached to their leg or whatever, and then like he was hanging weights off of it, so it'll to fly away and carry weights with it and and stuff like Um, he concluded that a 10 gram bat could lift about 20 to grams, about two to three times their weight. Again, Fazer is like, this is this is good information, If you're gonna try to make this work, it's probably good kind of like mythbusters it and start small and and work your way through it. So good on him. Uh the project was going to be housed just outside of LA so that millions of bats could be captured and moved to a location. I think it was Murrack, California, or Edwards Air Force today. The military and Adams agreed uh that his team would be for collecting 3,000 bats for testing purposes. The military, they were gonna catch the rest. So cool. Good on good on the military. The bunch of highly trained Marines just running around nets and Spongebob and Patrick. Admittedly, like you can just go into these caves in during the day and you can just like pluck them off. Got one put it in a bag, one right after another. Once again, Dr. Fazer was put to use in determining what sort of bomb the were going to wear. So I'm gonna go over this really, really fast because he was the inventor of napalm. That I think that was like the main reason why he was for this. Uh the original plan was to use a substance called red Now, red phosphorus uh is cool because once it hits air, it ignites. So, like red phosphorus is gnarly. There's an episode in the making there where they used to use red phosphorus to make matches, and all the health issues derive from people ingesting this stuff, being exposed breathing it in, kind of like the radium girls, uh, but with matches.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh gnarly, gnarly stuff. Yeah. Um, only problem is that it's very, very toxic, and uh it a high chance of killing the bats before they could even do anything. Not to mention you run the risk of the bat bomb quote detonating and catching on fire in the plane.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That would be a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of pilots did not like dealing with red
Speaker 2:Understandable.
Speaker 1:In fact, I think the two guys in this whole story that have uh like the most logic about them or the most are the two pilots that fly the B-25 uh during this whole Nobody on the team. No, these are just two guys that are just like, what did we get signed up for? So this is where Fasier is like, hey, let's use napalm. And uh napalm is put together by mixing naphthenic and acids with like gasoline or benzene or kerosene or whatever, and in the process of doing that, uh you make like a form of this stuff, so it's sticky and it gets everywhere it burns and it burns hot. I I guess one way you can do this if you take gasoline and you grab like styrofoam or polystyrene and you put it in it will actually turn into like a gelatinous goop. And then you what a lot of people will do is they'll take gelatinous goop and then they'll put it in like um an empty soup can with some cardboard or whatever, and it makes great fire starter. So just do me a favor, don't make any of this stuff at The trying to make your own napalm, dude, this stuff will down your house. It is very hard to put out, and uh the injuries that you sustain from it is awful. Normally, napalm was crammed into a 55-gallon oil drum a detonator attached, and uh then dropped from a plane. And uh the real goal behind it is that when it drops, it a mile-long explosion. It's like a wall of fire. I actually saw this at an air show one time where they napalm from a plane just to kind of show people, and it was out like a mile away, um, super far away. But even when that thing was so far away, we could all in the audience feel the heat coming from this. It would be hundreds of feet up in the air and about a mile long in length, and like I said, it's just a wall of fire. Um, so like if the fire doesn't get you, its other purpose to burn up all the air. So, like, there was no way to breathe around this stuff. Um, or uh you would suffocate from the smoke or I I give you not Napalm is on par in terms of its brutality, in terms of killing people, is on par with the nuclear At least a nuclear bomb, it's an instantaneous vaporization, and that's it. If you're lucky enough to be close enough, if you're on the outside of the blast radius, then yeah, you're sustaining burns and radiation and all that kind of stuff. Napalm is nasty. And uh they figured this would work out great because yes, bomb, our little bat bombs would be tiny and the little explosives, but they figured since all of Japan was made paper, which again, the racial stereotyping, amazing uh for the time period. Uh, they figured, hey, since all of Tokyo is made with it would go off easier. Anyways, now it came the matter of getting the bat and bomb to become one effective unit. So AC Gilbert, a company famous for making the ubiquitous toy erector set, uh, came up with and produced the timers needed for our little bats. The key was to make them small enough and accurate enough to detonate when the bats uh got to the ground and settled into an unassuming Japanese house. Um, it also had to be light. Uh basically, I think these things were set for like a timer so that once they got out of the bomb, 15 minutes it would go off. It's funny how a toy company got involved making weapons.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Considering the um scale of manufacturing during World War I'm actually not surprised.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, everybody repurposed during the war. Um, to mount the little bat bomb to the bat, uh, Fasier to basically super gluing the 15 to 17 and a half gram bomb to the bat. A well uh weight well within the lift capabilities of the freetailed bat. So, like instead of like a little harness, right? I think it would be adorable. Like it'd be like all bat wearing a vest and stuff like that. Um, but no, he just super glued it essentially to the bats.
Speaker 2:I don't like that, but okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Really the ones that got the worst shake and all this were bats for sure. The next step was to get the first one collected bats from Mexico and Texas to California. Uh on the surface, it seems like a weird mini-game inside Crossing, when you really think about it. Uh, where you would run around a cave uh with a net and try to catch as many bats as possible, uh, then stick them in a container with a prepaid postage label to Los Angeles. However, in order for the bats to properly do their job, they would need to be in hibernation uh mode. So the bats would have to be cooled. It was uh it was actually getting pretty warm. We're approaching May for the first test time, so getting warm, these bats aren't gonna fall asleep so easily. To help with this problem of logistics, the army came in at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. And um, they came in with a custom-built refrigerated truck. Uh, fun fact if you ever see a refrigerated semi-truck going down the road and you see the brand name Thermo King, that was that was the company that was contracted to make the first bat transports.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What a legacy. The truck had a special refrigeration mechanism that could adjusted to any temperature needed. Since these early large refrigeration units weren't super or fast and chilled things down, it was determined that trucks uh would be set to the coldest setting prior to picking up our freshly cut bats to reduce fuel usage and the time the truck to get down to temperature and everything. So, like, they're like, okay, turn this thing on, set it to max, let's go. Uh, now is time to figure out how to actually bombify of bats so that they can be dropped on a target all at once. Our mega smart team put together the epitome of American and planning of a bomb. They plan to use a five-foot-tall metal canister with a and a half-inch uh diameter holes drilled around the to let the bats do three things while in transit. Okay. One, uh, while the bombs being transported on the usually in the belly of a bomber, um, the holes in the bomb itself house like a thousand thirty bats, and the bomb had to start to warm the bats up. Uh, and then the other thing is that they had to be able to fly out of the canister after they woke up. So that's what the holes were for. It was to bats wake up. Oh, hole, fly out. Lastly, but more importantly, breathe. Um, dead bats in a bomb are nothing more than a bioweapon of disease and an incendiary weapon of mass japanification. And yeah, I made that up. Djan depanification. There we go.
Speaker 2:I don't know how I feel about the term.
Speaker 1:Yeah, neither do I. I was really tired when I wrote this. So uh, but at that time, they were the the Americans would been like, oh yeah, let's let's go with that. So yeah, the canister could hold to a thousand thirty and the B-25 bomber that was intended to drop these things hold up to 25 of these shells. So 25 times 1030, you know, we're talking 26,000 bats in payload. That's a lot of bats. That's a lot of bats, a lot of napalm. Yep, a lot of little fires in a stereotypical vision of That's a lot of destruction. Yeah, um, each bat was clipped to its niche inside the and a little wire stemmed from the napalm charge slash timer combo to the perch, um, the upside down bats were clipped So basically, you know how like you see uh film footage of jumping out of a plane, right? And as soon as they jump out, their parachute immediately is deployed. That's because their parachute is connected to a cable the plane, so that once you fall out of the plane, that pulls the parachute automatically. Okay, this is the same principle here, except for that when the bat leaves the the shell or the canister, that cable uh like it automatically deploys the timer. It's actually a brilliant idea. Yeah, I gotta give him credit. Yeah, it's a real simple idea. It's like it works, it's tested. Um, let's go for it. So, okay, yeah. Once the target, uh, once over the target, the shells would be dropped at 4,000 feet. A parachute would deploy out of the bomb, thus slowing the of descent. Right. So that you would see like this canister just kind of like in the air. It was just coming down. But that was intended to give the bat some time to wake up, fly out, and start looking for a place to hang up for Um, and so like I could just imagine the Japanese, they see like this giant can just like drift to the ground, and like, um, okay, uh, what are the Americans up to? They they're trying to bomb us, but they forgot the bomb. Like, all right. Must have been a very confusing sight if they ever got far. Yeah. Um, note, okay. Today we have bombs, missiles, rockets, etc., uh, which with surgical precision. Uh, modern propelled explosives are like laser guided assist and all sorts of other top secret technology that deployed, the projectile can be guided to a specific window outside the target and only destroy a specific thing. It is scary how accurate it bombs can be today, where like can take out a target in the middle of a populated city and not think anything of it. It's wild, and not like destroy everything around it. However, though, in World War II, no one cared about Um, this is Japan. We're talking about what's that?
Speaker 2:Pure firepower. That's all they care about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just like many Americans just wanted to see the country go up in flames, regardless of the target. They didn't care that women and children were being nobody really cared. It was just, hey, just level the country, right? And it was the same thing on the on the European front and and all that kind of stuff. So, again, a very, very different mindset. Uh, accuracy was irrelevant just as long as the right was being bombed, and that was kind of what the bat bomb about. The bat bomb was not about precision, it was just mass Yeah, that that that's all it was for. Like, who cares if it takes out the emperor's palace? That would be like a cherry on top. But if it took out like a neighborhood and like a daycare hey, that works too. It's a really weird mindset.
Speaker 2:That is a really weird mindset. That's a nice way to put it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Lastly, Adams and his team of super scientists ultimately Lastly, Adams and his team of super scientists ultimately to the army. Well, the army likes to see explosions and total Believe it or not, they also like numbers and figures and and accurate results even more, right? When you are in an industry of killing people, yeah, a lot of accounting involved, and the military is all that.
Speaker 2:Some stat statistics. Yeah, statistics. Some statistics, uh, logistics.
Speaker 1:The really like the unexciting things about a war is military is all about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because he gotta not only do they have to like kill the enemy, they have to be able to reproduce it over and over and over again. And it was almost like some of these meetings, it was like sales figures. Oh, you know, yesterday we killed X thousands of the enemy. Uh, today we want to go for a 5% increase, you know, day day or week over week. And you know, like a lot of people and companies, they have these morning huddles where they kind of go over the sales from the day before, the week before. Same thing, just in military terms, and instead of is human lives. So once again, Adam's turn to Dr. Pfizer, to be honest. I have no idea what anyone else was doing on this I really couldn't find much information on it. I I do want to get uh was it Jack Culfer's book? Because I think he kind of shed the light on some of what were doing, but I I just can't get the book in.
Speaker 2:They're working out and writing letters to Alcatraz.
Speaker 1:Uh, yes. So, hey Al, how's the uh syphilis treating you? Um there's a still burn when when it pee when you pee. So um oh gosh. So Dr. Fazer uh was assigned to come up with some projections of the destruction of the potential of what these things were these bat bombs were gonna be capable of. Fazer concluded that a standard incidiory bomb could start 400 fires, not 40. 400 fires after detonation. I'm not sure how we got this figure, but seeing so Dr. Fraser seems to be the only one of a few people with brain cells on this project, I'm gonna trust his right?
Speaker 2:That's fair.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh the bat bomb, however, according to Fraser, could start at the 4800 fires with one pass. That is a 12 times increase of destructive power. So there's some potential here, right? This bat bomb is a crazy idea, but man, if you could deploy it, it could wreak a lot of havoc. And it's not like something you can just shoot out of because it's so small, and what are you gonna do with a of farmers with shotguns start shooting bats out of the air? Like, yeah, you really can't defend against it. In essence, the bat bomb idea could be the middle ground a conventional bomb and the nuclear bomb that was also being worked on at the same exact time. But of course, nobody knew about the nuclear bomb, only communists, uh, only the people that Oppenheimer was sleeping with at the time, um, only Oppenheimer's brother, and a of his social slash or socialist slash communist friends he went to college with. Right. Um, so other than other than the actual project and the other people that Oppenheimer knew who kind of spilled to, it was a pretty secure program. And yes, there were actual Soviet spies in the Manhattan
Speaker 2:Yes, that is true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that that's actually what did Oppenheimer in Um, it seemed as though Adams and his crew had worked out much everything. Okay, here we are, here's the dumpster fire, like, or the like we Adams and his crew figured out everything. What could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 2:Right, what could go wrong sending a lot of bats with strapped to them? Yeah, yeah, no, this is questionable timers made from toy
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it it is uh it it it is actually I I do give them credit. They really did think this through, they really did do a of I don't know, research, I guess, and they they know put the effort into it. So Fasier's projections raised a lot of eyebrows with the leaders covered in brass and ribbons and you know, and medals for stuff that they haven't really done in 30 years. So like I I always love it when you see a military leader like all these metals on them, and it's like what did you do? My favorite are like like North Korean generals, right? And they're standing there, and their whole breast is but all these medals, and it's just like, how did you what did you do to earn these? How? Yeah, it's like what like there's not even enough like the war that you guys were in was in the 50s, or like you look at those African warlords, and uh they they take over their and again they're just loaded with like all these accolades and metals and ribbons. It's like you you you took over the government with like dudes in AK-47s, like what worse? What is what is going on here? So, but that's uh that's just a a tirade on me. Like, I I honestly I think like if you have a general, wouldn't know that they're a general by how they They may have a star on their hat, and that's it. Like, you don't need to walk around some like a China or a wind chime of crap to get your point across. But, anyways, by May 15th, and the dates get a little here. I saw some dates were like as early as May 10th, and is like May 17th. Guys, just it's in May, middle of May, okay?
Speaker 2:Mid-May. I like that. That's good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll just go with that. 1943. Um, it was time to test this. So, Fazier and two officers from the Army's chemical service arrived in SoCal, as in like Southern California, and proceeded to Adam's house for like a pretest discussion of like insanely top secret, heavily guarded. Uh, if you know, you know. Like, nobody knows about this type of project.
Speaker 2:Okay. So they naturally told the newspapers.
Speaker 1:Uh Adams. Uh yeah. Adams, much to Fazer's horror, was like he shows up there, Adams had invited a large company, including ladies and like reporters, to a dinner party in celebration of the of field tests. Nice. So, like, I could only imagine Fazer who is like, because actually he uh the military brought Frazier into this Like, we don't know what this Adams guy has got going on. So, Fazer, we need you to kind of like keep it grounded for us, please. That would be great. Um, instead of being a top secret, Adams did the exact and decided to celebrate his accomplishment with a bunch of people who should know nothing about this project. There is something about top secret weaponry in World War II that seems to leak like a sieve, right? A dumpster fire in its own right. Uh Oppenheimer knowingly recruited communists, and even his security clearance, yeah, uh Oppenheimer knowingly recruited communists, and even his security clearance uncleared brother to Los Alamos. So, like, yeah, Oppenheimer brought in all sorts of and it was like, trust me, military, I know what I'm doing. So great. To make matters worse, Adam's team was supposed to collect, you know, 3,000 bats from New Mexico. They only had 150. Oh, good. So according to Adams, it was a mating season, and uh yeah, I guess during mating season, bats had different in mind instead of like serving their country.
Speaker 2:Um their God-given purpose, uh, yes. For democracy.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's it's it's this is interesting how like how males are no different. When it's mating season, everything flies out the window, and it is like that's the priority.
Speaker 2:I was referring to uh our friend's fancy speeches.
Speaker 1:Uh oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um yeah, they serve absolutely no function in in nature than being put here by God for the sole purpose of the enemy.
Speaker 2:Right. So, what is this other priority? Come on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Um, but again, uh male bats and male humans, they're no different, especially right before going to war. Um, there was a lot of babies that were made uh during the shortly before men uh were transferred out.
Speaker 2:And shortly after, that's why they called them baby boomers.
Speaker 1:Yes. Fun fact actually that on a side note, so when after D-Day, uh, if you're an American soldier and you were in Paris, like part of the liberation group, like I knew one guy, uh he laid so many times during Liberation Day in Paris because like all French women just wanted to hook up with an American. Like, this is the like, and of course, France has always a little bit more cavalier about uh open sex and to like other more conservative countries. So, like all the women just wanted to hook up an American so they could say that they could. And uh shockingly, a lot of babies came out of that, too.
Speaker 2:That's not shocking at all. The baby boomer generation. So if you ever want to know where that comes from, that's that's yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, the baby boomer generation is more like right after war when everybody came home.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's such a long span of time that it's like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it starts in like 1945, whereas there's a lot of that were born during the war, especially like in France. This this kind of became a bit of a problem because there was all these babies being born shortly after uh like V E Day, um there was no men, no fathers to support them. So there was a lot of um it caused a lot of problems.
Speaker 2:Uh so anyways, but yes, you're right. The baby boomer generation is like 45, 46 to 64, but my point stands.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I mean when when you get a whole nation where of the male population is in their early 20s, physically fit, like this is the healthiest they're ever gonna be. Um, yeah, they're gonna see a lot of action on the way out, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And again, it's so it's I find it so humorous that like, oh, you know, good old-fashioned conservative American No, there was a lot of uh there's a lot of uh swapping of DNA going on before they shipped that. It was America was not this ultra clean, morally pure There's no such thing.
Speaker 2:Never has been.
Speaker 1:No, no, because humans are gonna be human. That's just right. Yeah, humans be human in anyway, and and making more little humans.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Or die trying. So to make matters worse, let's meet up with the chemical service uh lieutenant. Colonel R. Bruce Epler.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:This guy is kind of an interesting character in his own He's he is the type of guy that's like, okay, if it looks but it works, is it really stupid? Right? He kind of embodies that. And he also kind of struck me as I was researching this. He kind of struck me as the kind of guy that's not easily up. Like, you'll see. He's uh, yeah, he's an interesting character in that he's your typical military leader that's like warmongering and and whatnot. But Epler wasn't going to take 150 bats as a substantial sample space for the test that was going to take place. So he like in the middle of this party, he took everybody uh responsible on this little project, shoved them into the bomber. That these poor pilots, man, they just like what the hell is going on? Uh, but yeah, he threw them all into uh a plane, headed for Carlsbaden for an overnight bat collecting marathon. And uh Epler, I kid you not, he literally stopped off at the National Park Services and got a permit for everybody to the bats.
Speaker 2:At least he's doing it through the right channels.
Speaker 1:Like he stopped off. Like, okay, he's a light colonel, and yeah, hey, uh, we gotta do the proper paperwork before we collect all these bats. I respect it. Yeah, just I thought that was kind of funny. He's like, okay, guys, nobody touch a bat until we get the filled out.
Speaker 2:So it's like when we were telling our kids when we were going camping, our students, like, all right, if anybody wants to go fishing, you need a permit. We we tried to like instill the fear of God into them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like the like the poaching sheriffs would come out, fish. Yeah. I remember telling uh one of them, like, hey, if you get for catching a fish and you're not supposed to, I'm not your bail. Of course, it never would have happened, especially at the that we were at where the fish had more mercury in them than water.
Speaker 2:Right. Meanwhile, when we got there, I had two of the students pulling hooks out of fish mouths and stuff. It's fine.
Speaker:That was that was fun. That was fun.
Speaker 1:So the next morning, the plane returned to LA with a cargo of eight crates of thousands of screeching bats. These things were pissed, and everybody in the project was tired. Uh, with live testing right around the corner, the bats loaded into the refrigerated truck, turned to max you, so the bats could be put into their induced hibernation. Okay, everything is going to plan so far. Even with the truck running at full blast, it was taking too long for the bats to quiet down. That's how they could tell if they were asleep, is they eventually just shut up. So they figured, yeah, quiet bat was a hibernating bat. So to speed things up, they got a bunch of blocks of ice, them inside the truck with fans blowing on them so like ice would make it even colder in there in a in a very, very short order.
Speaker 2:I feel like this is gonna backfire. Um soda in the freezer, and then you forget about it.
Speaker 1:Um kind of like that, but not quite. Okay, you'll see. Cool. So yeah, it and and minutes later, everything quieted up in the truck. So, like, cool. Bats are asleep, part five. Operation bat flavored popsicles. Yeah, and I forgot to mention that part four. Uh what did I have that? Um, oh wow, terribly exciting. Operation X-ray, part four. So now part five is Operation Bat Flavored Popsicles.
Speaker 2:I like it.
Speaker 1:At this point, I think it's the 19th. I don't know. It's still the middle of May. Um, there's so much craziness that goes on that it was hard to kind of keep track of what day it was. Kind of like the beginning of the show where I don't tenses. Um it was time to test a bat bomb once and for all. The team loaded up a uh 5 foot by 30 inch shell with around a thousand snoozing bats, right? They're just like little hanging just you know, just hanging there. The issue was is that Adams hadn't quite finished a metal shell for the test. Instead, he had a cardboard mock-up of the actual
Speaker 2:Okay, wait. He used a cardboard shell to shoot out a thousand bats with napalm.
Speaker 1:Well, sort of. They actually did put some safety precautions in here.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 1:So, uh, like it would be really, really stupid. And the pilots spoke up and said, no, we are not having live ordnance put on this plane. Like, we're I I understand that these things are burn and catch everything on fire. We are not putting live ordinance on this plane. Uh, you can put smoke bombs on them all you want, and that be a good way to test it to see where they landed, and you you start seeing smoke everywhere. You can get an idea of the level of destruction here actually burning down half of LA. My favorite part though is it's like uh a cardboard mock-up of an actual bomb. So, this is the thing that was going to be dropped out of bottom of the B-25. It was basically a round cardboard tube.
Speaker 2:So, okay. Drop the toilet paper roll through you two.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it was basically a giant toilet paper tube uh bats with little smoke bombs on them. Uh, the trusty B-25 that had been around for some time uh errands and doing other things, took the bat bomb up to an of about 10 to 20,000 feet. The testing ground was Murray, California, and the target going to be a dried up lake bed outside LA. Okay. I feel like all of LA is just a bunch of dried up lake beds everywhere.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:No?
Speaker 2:No.
unknown:Oh.
Speaker 2:That's not true.
Speaker 1:I'm not really from LA, so I don't know much about it. Other than I have family that lives there, and that's it. Once up to altitude, this is where things started to go wrong. The major problem was that the cardboard bomb began to apart in the bomb bay.
Speaker 2:Didn't see that coming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. There's something about cardboard and durability and a rough running plane. I'm not sure how many of you out there have been inside of a B-25 while it is even with the engines running. Um, I have it, it's a really shaky thing. It it's not it's not like a smooth fly, to say the least. Um, so I guess they didn't really have military grade cardboard back then, but I think what happened was that when they got to altitude, the glue started to break down from our cardboard like high school science project of a ball.
Speaker 2:Made by Batman Robin and Robin.
Speaker 1:Yes. Um, yeah, it's like the the uh the two random brothers had job to do, and that was find the good glue. Um or they ate the glue stick, who knows? So our our bat cardboard tube fell apart, and now we had like a thousand plus bats, little little sleeping bats rolling over the inside of the plane. Amazing, just like a play, the experiment must go on. So the crew ran inside all over the plane, and they were gathering them up. They actually used their hats, and they were starting to these little bat bombs into their hats, and then they up a window and literally just launched them out the window.
Speaker 2:Chuck them out. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:So uh and they didn't really adhere to the 4,000 foot just they were like, hey, whatever, man. Let's just get these bats out here before the timer goes off or whatever. So they started launching these little bats out the window at around 2,000 feet. Um, I'm not sure how they figured out the 2,000 feet part of it and like how that would be like useful, but at this we're just along for the ride. Adams, uh Pfizer, the army folks, including the uh light Epler and an undetermined number of other onlookers that had like zero top secret clearance at all, were on the ground binoculars waiting for the show to start. Uh, instead of seeing one large shell being dropped from the B-25, they saw handfuls of bats being thrown out the in clumps of a dozen or more. So, like these little black dots are just being so they're what the heck is going on up there? Uh the Project X-ray team figured that something went wrong with the cardboard. Shocker, but they're like, that's fine. All right, at least we can test the detonation thing. And this is where that colonel comes in. He's like, okay, well, yeah, we have obviously got to use other than cardboard for the bomb. Um, but let's we can still collect data, right? I respect that. You know, it's kind of a a pusho of a test, but you any data is good data. So seconds pass, and around the 2,000-foot mark, uh, was uh terribly wrong. Um, none of the bats were waking up, they were just falling like little rocks, right? The idea was the bats were gonna wake up at around 2,000 and then begin flying looking for a covered location. Yeah, they were just gonna like fly around, try to find a to settle down for the day, wondering like what in the hell is going on. Um a lot of confused bats, but yeah, nothing was The little bat bomb would go off, and the spectators would see plumes of smoke emanating from wherever they landed. That was the plan. Instead, the onlookers heard, not necessarily saw, but they heard little minute poof splat you know, plop, followed by a little pus of dust on the bottom of the lake bed. After about 10 minutes, the test was over with approximately 1,000 bats splattered all over the ground. Some men some men were sent to the lake bed to see what had happened and why the bats didn't wake up and why the smoke didn't detonate. A few of them returned to Adams and the army men with some bats, and it became very apparent what went wrong. The bats were frozen solid from the day before when they to chill the bats down into hibernation.
Speaker 2:I knew that was gonna happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hey, their method of like speeding up the cooling down process worked just a little too well. Those poor bats. Yeah, actually, those are the lucky ones, if you really think about it.
Speaker 2:I guess that's true.
Speaker 1:Because they just got cold and fell asleep and never woke Dr. Frazier later wrote uh eventually it became clear that the were not in hibernation, but dead instead of freezing them to hibernation. We had frozen them to death the night before.
Speaker 2:So our bad news bears, they they're winning.
Speaker 1:Oh, but it gets better. So the colonel's like, okay, well, this test is a dud. And um Adams and Pfizer and the military leaders and they pile into the colonel's car and uh they they bring of the bats with them so that they can take him back to the lab and see what went on, like why, you know, why didn't the uh the at least the little smoke thingies, like how come didn't work, right? Let's try to get some sort of data. In the process of driving back, uh one of the bats little charge detonated, and it filled the car full of leaders of team and the military folks. It filled the car with smoke. Nice, and uh, like everything became opaque, and uh and caused the whole car to crash.
Speaker 2:I I'd imagine.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just imagine just driving along a little pop.
Speaker 1:It's just like white smoke everywhere. Nowadays, if you're in California and you see a car full of white smoke, it's not a bat.
Speaker 2:That's that's a probably a more fun reason.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's uh uh that's intentional. Yeah. So yeah, I can just imagine just like 1940s four just all over the road and crashing, and all the guys come out and coughing. So as frustrating and disastrous as just as this test had out, the key part of the plan worked. Detonating a time charge on a bat to go off at a specific was actually a huge success for Adams and his team, as as the army folks. This was good enough to move on to the next test. All right, and and I think what it was is uh instead of 4,000 feet, everything was skewed by the 2,000 feet, and why the bombs were delayed in going off. That makes sense because and the bats were also supposed to fly, fly, which would buy more time, yep, yep, and not just yeah, turn into I and I could imagine too, because like what do we do about the other thousand bats that are laying Like, you can just see like some farmer driving along, and all of a sudden you just start seeing little plumes of smoke going up all over the lake bed. Like, what is going on? What is the military up to? Alrighty, part six Operation Mayhem. So Lieutenant Colonel Epler, and by the way, I sometimes a lieutenant colonel a light colonel. So instead of saying lieutenant colonel um in the a lot of them, a lot of people call them light colonels they're not like a full, full colonel yet.
Speaker 2:Colonel light?
Speaker 1:Yes. Okay, so yeah, if you hear me say light colonel, that's it's a lieutenant colonel. So Lieutenant Colonel decided or lieutenant colonel Epler to move to phase two of testing because hey, the first one great. But yeah, phase two of testing, but decided to take some stake away from Adams and his team. He kind of had enough of the bad news bears.
Speaker 2:You don't want the bad news bears to continue any The guy who thinks he had a good relationship with Al Capone, the two random brothers, the fitness guy, the hotel owner, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the two high school students that got military top You know what?
Speaker 2:I'm I'm on I'm on those guys' side. I I'll support those guys. But Batman, Robin, and Robin, I'll support.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or the pilot turned movie star.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the pilot turned movie star. He has some some clout, but not that much.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's fine.
Speaker 1:Shockingly, the military is like, yeah, team, you're you're you're off.
Speaker 2:So you're fired.
Speaker 1:Well, they weren't fired, they still actually played a major part, but now the military is like, okay, we're gonna gonna do the test site. We're gonna like we're gonna have a lot more oversight on this. So fair enough. So Epler wanted to see an actual shell get dropped with an bomb fall to an actual height of 4,000 feet, where an parachute would eject, thus slowing the descent. And he wanted to see actual 1,000 plus bats fly out and for cover from there and see actual smoke plumes billowing they landed, right? Fair. He's like, all right, no more screw ups, guys. We gotta make this work. So check all those boxes and maintain a more military Epler moved everything to a freshly built landing field near Carlsbad, New Mexico, replete with barracks and control command building, hangars, and other sorts of military right? It's your standard issue, typical military base in the middle of the desert. Epler, only being a late colonel, told the full colonel of base that they needed to conduct a top secret experiment at the base, and that he and his men would need to be excluded from the experiment as a result. So on the day of the test, almost everyone was removed the base, right? The the full colonel. All right, guys, we're gonna go for you know a 50-mile run the mountains because they the military's gotta do some with our base.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:This was probably the best thing that happened out of this ordeal was that. Thankfully, the full colonel understood and even inauguration ceremony of the newly minted airfield uh for time. So the top secret test could be initiated. There were actually that day that they're ready to the test, they were going to have a uh all the pumping ceremony and all that kind of stuff of a new airfield, right? There's a lot going on here. Adams, and let's be real, the real brains of the operation, Dr. Fizer, hammered out a lot of details between the first and the second tests. An actual five foot by 30 inch bombshell was manufactured by Crosby Company. That is the same Crosby company that Bing Crosby and his founded to manufacture supplies for the war effort. True. So, like Bing Crosby's White Christmas. Yep. So that Bing Crosby. Yeah, I didn't know they had a company that they this supplies for for troops. Um, this shell was a full-fledged working prototype with parachute, uh, timers to open at 4,000 feet, little for sleeping bats to hang out on. I mean, this thing was cool, like it had everything except a bathroom inside of it. Nice. And the bats don't need a bathroom because they're yeah, they're bats. Yeah, they're bats, they're just gonna pee and poo on Yep. Fresh bats of bats, fresh bats, fresh batch of bats uh was days before and instead of the day before. This allowed the uh refrigerated truck to like slowly bats down to put them in hibernation mode rather than flash freezing them.
Speaker 2:I'm glad they learned.
Speaker 1:That's good. Dr. Frazier still hadn't quite figured out the safety wire so the pilots wouldn't allow a live ordnance in their Can't say I blame these pilots, but the smoked the smoke were perfectly functional and way more safe. So they were like, fine, we'll just do another smoke test Uh they assume that napalm will burn. Like, we know that if you light napalm on fire, it burns. So I think we can just write that off as like a success, Sure. If we can detonate a smoke bomb, we can detonate napalm. So the last thing like they needed was like the whole base to the ground. The day of the test actually went smoothly for the most Bomber got to an altitude without any issues. The crew inside prepped the bat bomb to open the parachute 4,000 feet. Uh they checked to make sure the bats were in fact still I don't know what they maybe they had like a little mirror they put their little noses and see if the bat like a itty bitty tiny stethoscope. Just yeah, yeah. And of course their heart rates are like they're so tiny. Yes. Uh yeah, I don't know how they checked because I I don't know if you've ever held a bat or been up close to one. They're they are small.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're bitty bitty things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're bad.
Speaker 2:I've been up close to them, but I haven't like held one.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah. They're yeah, they're they're literally like mice with That's how how big they are. So, yes, they checked the bats, they were doing great, they were fast asleep, hanging upside down on their bomb. Uh, they checked to make sure that the smoke bomb detonators were good to go. That must have been tedious. Like they were having to like sort through all these little hanging bats and make sure that the smoke bombs were on properly. Like, I don't know. I I feel like they were like kind of like that uh you ever those Australian hats with the corks that hang down? It's like a very stereotypical thing from the 70s and Like Australians would wear like a broad brimmed hat, but would have like little corks with strings on them. And the idea was that it would like chase away mosquitoes and whatnot. That's kind of Of what I envisioned for these bats got it around in there. So yeah, uh, everything was good to go. Adams Pfizer, Lieutenant Colonel Epler, and for good measure, Marine Corps generals, um Lewis or Louis de Haven and his new Jeep. Actually, there wasn't generals, uh, Adam Fizer, Lieutenant Colonel Epler, and for good measure, Marine Corps General, Lewis de Haven and his brand new Jeep, uh, with all the befitting a general of his rank, like decorated, like brand new Jeep. Uh, they were all there on the ground. Eventually, they saw the tiny little cylinder drop out of the bomber. Uh, thankfully, gravity decided to work that day because you know, who knows everything else went wrong with this
Speaker 2:At this point, why would the gravity not work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gravity worked in reverse that day and shot it out into space.
Speaker 2:Like, like, well. On to the next one, I guess.
Speaker 1:Project zero point. Here we go. Um, so yeah, uh, the bomb dropped straight down where at 4,000 feet a parachute could be seen, uh, ejecting upward unfurling without a hitch. Okay, the shell slowed to a crawling descent as planned. Perfect. A few minutes later, Jack Kofer, you know, one of the high students uh brought onto the team, wrote, Soon tiny moats to flutter across the sky so majestically, uh flying in all directions, most born northward in a fluttering clump by breeze. So far, things were looking really, really good. Investigators hopped into jeeps, uh scurrying in all to track the bats as they looked for little hidey holes. So uh, yeah, uh that the bats kind of dispersed everywhere, um, mostly all over the desert. They tracked some bats flying into a barn of a nearby farm to hold up for the day. Investigators talked to the rancher asking if they had seen anything unusual. And this farmer's just the epitome of Hillbilly here is yeah, like bats flying around in broad daylight, unusual that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's that's that sounds right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're if if that's what you mean by weird stuff, yeah, I saw that. Uh the investigators were real quick to be like, hey, look, top secret project, like, please don't tell anybody, like, you know, this could really help the war end sooner. Uh, so yeah, don't spread the word on this. It's you know, you know, we'll we'll say it's an alien in near Roswell. Again, all the weird stuff is happening in New Mexico World War II. It's interesting. The rancher, the farmer, replied, I got two sons somewhere in Europe fighting the hun. Uh the rancher replied, I got two sons somewhere in Europe the hun. I guess the Germans. If you tell me that they were your doing, however damned it looked like to me, is a military secret. Nobody's gonna get me to say a peep, even by putting bamboo splinters under my fingernails and lighting them on Wow.
Speaker 2:That was very specific.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, yeah. He uh definitely uh, you know, rural American here. Uh he then pointed to uh one of the bats wearing a dummy sitting on the windowsill, just chilling. So, like they were inside of his house talking about this, and he's like, Oh, by the way, there's one of the bats that talking about, right? He's got his little bomb on his chest, and so the bats The plan was going perfectly. Back at the base, uh, bats could be seen flying into the on the side uh on site and hiding in dark locations. No smoke could be seen yet, but that was by design. Uh Phaser uh purposely devised the timers to take about 30 15 to 30 minutes before detonating. Okay, to show his brilliance to Dr. Or to the doctor to show his brilliance to the general, took one of the bats with a dummy bomb on it and pointed out to the tiny timing mechanism. He said it's based on a copper chloride dissolved trigger. Once the copper chloride was administered, the timing wire at a controlled rate. And then once the wire is gone, then the trigger activates the smoke bomb. Right? It's basically a chemical timer, kind of like a really weird iodine clock experiment.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In front of a bunch of uh photographers and witnesses, uh, he injected some copper chloride into the bat bomb within minutes, a little poof could be heard, followed by a plume of white smoke. The bat bomb was attached to, or yeah, the bat the bomb was attached to freaked out and flew away. So I'm like, yeah, like what the crap is coming out of me. Adam and Phaser did the same demonstration to a dozen or so other sleeping bats. Adams and Phaser did the same demonstration to a dozen or so other sleeping bats they had on hand, and like clockwork, flew off to the military base to find cover, right? So they injected him with the the copper chloride and it's let him go, right? So that that's how easy it was. The day couldn't have gone any better for Adams and his They were at the pinnacle of military genius that would bring Japan to its knees in bat bomb destruction. About 30 minutes later, people pointed out the that smoke coming out of the rafters of the barracks, then the control tower, followed by the supply buildings, and finally the building. Some investigators began to laugh when they saw their jeep started to smoke. So they were like, cool, the the bombs are detonating, and we've got smoke everywhere. The lighthearted moment turned sour when someone asked if were supposed to see flames inside the barracks. Oh no! Everyone turned to see the barracks erupt in flames. Then the control tower went up like a torch. The supply buildings were engulfed in flames, and lastly, the command building, including the colonel's office, just into an inferno. Absolute mayhem broke out as people tried to find fire However, it was evident that none were brought along because this was a test, and it wasn't supposed to have incendiary All the men in Project X-ray could do is just stand there watch while the military tried to put the base out using means they could find. The general turned to Adams and Fasier after seeing his Jeep explode into flames before their eyes. Without so much as raising his voice or displaying any the general simply asked, Gentlemen, is it safe to assume that not all the bats were fitted with dummy smoke bombs? When there was no reply from the Denfo Man, the general I may not be an expert in these matters, but it does appear that some of these bats had live bombs on them.
Speaker 2:I may not be an expert on it.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, like Adams and Faser are like, Well, I'm going to Labanworth, what are you gonna do? An hour or two later, the freshly built base near Carlsbad, New Mexico was nothing more than a pile of ashes. The whole place burned to the ground. Oh man. Literal dumpster fire. Yeah. Meanwhile, 300 miles to the north in Los Alamos, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer got the go-ahead to start mass of uranium 235 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The Los Alamos lab itself was instructed to increase the speed of research and development of the first nuclear history. Adams nor Oppenheimer had any idea of each other's projects at this time. So one that was worth like seven billion dollars got the the other one worth$100,000 and maybe a few million and destroyed property got the axe.
Speaker 2:So I mean, after all those failed attempts and such, I of understand.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's one of these things where like this was on cusp of working. Like it like the idea was sound, like everything on paper good, but it's just like in practice, impossible to uh try to like work out every little thing that could possibly go Yeah, which leads us to our final part, part seven Operation Change of Plans. After the destruction of an entire military base in New the army decided to hang up Project X-ray and see if anyone else wanted to try researching it. Shockingly, the Marines wanted it.
Speaker 2:Of course the Marines wanted it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I mean, the Marines were in the thick of fighting the Japanese at the time of the Bat Bomb incident, and they're well, if it burned down an entire military base, they okay, it could probably burn down entire Japanese So that was the one thing that came out of this disastrous is like it really did have destructive capabilities. That's true. What does success look like? Well, a burned down military base, uh, a general's Jeep torched, and uh, and all intents and purposes to the Marines, that was a successful test.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hey, positive assumptions. I gotta give them respect. Um, the Marines' assumption of the potential uh was corroborated when investigation found out that the took down the base were not the ones that were dropped from the bomber. Okay, the bats that caused all the damage were the dozen so that Adams and Phasure set off for demonstration purposes in front of the investigators and the photographers. So all this destruction came about from like a dozen to two dozen little bats.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Again, that is a lot of destructive power, like it's so to working, just the implementation of it just went in so many different ways. You see, the bats and the bomb were in fact loaded with dummy smoke bombs. However, the dozen or so that Adams and Fraser used weren't expected to be in the plane and were thus never switched with a dummy bomb. Kind of like, oh, this is just a test. We don't need fire extinguishers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, who needs that?
Speaker 1:What could possibly go wrong? The fact that 12 bats could do so much damage was to the Marines, and they were happy to take on the project imagine what would happen if thousands of these bats were set loose in Japan.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Some even argued that the bat bomb would be more effective the nuclear bomb if they could just get it to work. It would have been an experiment of the ages to see what
Speaker 1: be more effective:hundreds of thousands of little
Speaker 1:bat bombs versus the might of one nuclear bomb. The world will never know because by the time the bat bomb was deployable on the Japanese front, a nuclear bomb was on Hiroshima, which vaporized tens of thousands of men, and children in seconds, and another one was dropped on a few days later, uh thus doing the work of divisions of bats. So the nuclear bomb was just too dang reliable. As for Dr. Uh Lytle Adams, he stepped away from military projects the bat bomb initiative ran out for him in 1944. After the war, he continued his career as an eccentric and tried his hand at making an aerial sea dropping to help rebuild the fauna of destroyed lands across the globe. Okay, fair enough. That's noble. Yeah, I dig it. I mean, not as glamorous as the fried chicken dispensing Remember in the last episode?
Speaker 2:I do like that one.
Speaker 1:I I can see you, I can see you having one in your house.
Speaker 2:No, no, it's too much.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:At least as a collectible, maybe as a collectible, functioning one.
Speaker 1:So, yeah.
Speaker 2:Burn my house down.
Speaker 1:Right. Uh he also pursued ecological engineering programs and his active years trying to fix the world rather than trying to burn it to the ground. So, yeah, he actually did try to have a life after all of He did he uh DI'd. He died on December 29th, 1970, in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 89 years old. All right, yeah. I mean, as weird as he was, I mean, the guy had a good if not a weird one.
Speaker 2:It was eventful.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, eventful as yeah. Dr. Lewis Pfizer went back to Harvard and studied organic Uh, throughout the decades, he was asked if he ever about creating um napalm, like um, kind of like Oppenheimer's feelings about his role in the nuclear bomb. Remember, Oppenheimer had a lot of regret, a lot of remorse. It really like you see that video of him on television, reciting that that Indian verse, like, yeah, it really the couple years of his life were just miserable. Yeah, I would probably be about the same. He was also dying of lung cancer, but still. Um, he had a lot of remorse about it. But unlike Oppenheimer, uh, Frazier was uh kind of the He was unapologetic about napalm, but he refused to do any military-related projects. Uh, he and his wife Mary wrote very successful chemistry in 1962. He served under the uh Surgeon General's 1964 report that the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Yeah. Uh in 1965, he developed lung cancer himself and quit smoking and actively promoted the committee's findings. He died in 1977, so he had lung cancer for 12 years.
Speaker 2:He that's a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a long time and a hard life. Like that's tough. Lung cancer is that's uh that's a rough one. That's uh that's a gnarly cancer. Lastly, uh Lieutenant Colonel Epler continued to work in developmental technical work until his untimely death in 20th, 1944, in a plane crash at Elgin Field, Florida. And uh yes, the plane that he was in was top secret. I don't think we know what plane he was in.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Lieutenant Colonel Epler, man, this guy was all about top secret stuff, man. He was just That's what he did going from one top secret to the next.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's that was his jam, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a shame he died though, because he he sounds he was a pretty interesting character, to say the While the bat bomb of World War II was a crazy and idea with uh humorous components to it, Project X-ray did that a result in science is still a result, especially if it ends in disaster, right? It was World War II. Any idea, let's entertain it. We don't care how crazy it is, the same way that whatever even if it's a complete disaster, is still a result. So it's an interesting mindset of the time period. During World War II, America was not afraid of trying new and the country knew that not all ideas are going to work. But it's important to understand that doing something is better than doing nothing. And who did I quote? I don't know, it's almost midnight. Doing something is better than doing nothing. Roosevelt. Ah. Fireside chat. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:I'm tired.
Speaker 1:So that is our uh that is our that is our bat bomb. Um nice. Very different episode than what I what I normally do.
Speaker 2:So good one though. It's a good one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's uh that this is like my version of the emu right? Which I think we want to do a revisit on that one sometime.
Speaker 2:I do down the road at some point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks for hanging around, guys. Uh, appreciate you listening. Uh stay tuned. I think Kara is gonna have an episode coming out here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, remember that party I was telling you about where you have everything planned, and then you know, you have the food and the dancing and all of that fun stuff, and then it fire.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's the episode.
Speaker 1:Oh this is medieval times, right?
Speaker 2:Uh yeah, medieval France.
Speaker 1:Medieval France. Okay.
Speaker 2:I don't know why I go for the French stories when I can hardly pronounce half of their names, but I'm gonna try.
Speaker 1:It it I mean it it is fun to listen to you try to pronounce that stuff.
Speaker 2:That's fair.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, guys, uh be sure to check out the our lovely little website. We will be getting that updated with show notes. We also we will have our podcast, each episode will have its own embedded player on the website so you can actually to it. So if you're sitting at your computer at work working hard, uh you can actually be streaming the day of dumpster fire your computer. Just make sure you minimize your window uh so that when boss walks by, they can't see that you have the podcast So unless your boss is cool, yeah. Unless your boss is cool, or if your boss is interested in uh plans going horrifically sideways five minutes after them, tell your boss about the podcast. Yeah, we're uh everywhere. We're on, you know, iTunes and Amazon and the Googles YouTubes and and all that kind of stuff. So uh be sure to spread the word on that. Uh, you can also send us a uh email for ideas. We are totally open to ideas, just like World War II. I don't care how crazy. In fact, crazier the better.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that's the kind of to an extent. To an extent, yeah. But that uh yeah, if it's a bad brained idea, let's go for it. So that is all I got. I know, Kara, you're gonna have an episode involving a yeah, and France burning up.
Speaker 2:Um, no, not France, just just fire. It kind of ruins the whole party. It's the whole thing. Oh, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So yeah, stay tuned for that. And uh, in the meantime, we will catch you on the next one uh keep it a hot mess. Bye. Philadelphia, um, or Pennsylvania. Um, somewhere on the east side of America.
Speaker 2:Sounds like something with a P.
Speaker 1:Uh yes. Uh get it right up right off the bat. Right. Yeah. The tw the twisty killed a wabbit, kill the rabbit. Um the trusty B twenty-five.