Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here a little bit of a warning on this one. It's the story of Cold War experiment patient on a cat that did not wind up going well for the cat. That we don't get graphic, but I wanted to give you a head step. Okay, okay. The Cold War made people do some pretty wild things.
The United States government was so desperate to defeat Communism that it threw money at pretty much any half baked scheme that might give Americans an advantage over the Soviet menace. Today we're talking about Project Acoustic Kitty, a top secret Central Intelligence Agency research program that tested whether house cats could be used to spy on Soviet operatives. If that sounds like the plot of a bad movie from nine six, well it was just with a dog instead of a cat.
It might also remind you a bit of the nineteen seventies TV show The six Million Dollar Man, in which a badly injured test pilot was rebuilt with mechanical parts and transformed into a cyborg superhero. But Project Acoustic Kitty was a real thing that really happened, and we have the heavily redacted CIA documents to prove it. Back in the nineteen sixties, the CIA wanted to create a cyborg
superspy out of a cat. The CIA's Office of Technical Research and Office of Research and Development spent five years and an estimated twenty million dollars on Project Acoustic Kitty. The high price tag came from the high degree of technical difficulty in that era, before microchips and digital devices. The CIA scientists had to figure out how to discreetly equip a cat with a microphone, antenna, transmitter, and battery.
In the end, they implanted a three quarter inch or two centimeter transmitter into the base of a cat's skull, uh stitched a microphone into its ear canal, and wove an antenna into the fur of the cat's tail. The CIA team, who didn't seem to know much about feline behavior, spent months trying to train the cat to follow simple instructions. The problem is that it would wander off when it
was bored or hungry. Eventually, though, the training and implanted equipment seemed to be working, and the CIA was satisfied that Acoustic Kitty was ready for a field test. It was your typical spy movie set up. The CIA guys pulled up to a park in an unmarked van. They slid open the door and gave their feline operative its mission slink over to those two guys on the bench and eavesdrop on their conversation. But it didn't quite go as planned. When the cat crossed the road toward its marks,
it was hit and killed by a taxi cab. The team was left to cover remains not reconnaissance. Not only did the poor Frankenstein's technical monster of a cat lose the last of its nine lives, button Project Acoustic Kitty was also put to rest that day. In redacted CIA documents, the agency was surprisingly upbeat about the twenty million dollar flop.
The authors of the reports that it was a remarkable scientific achievement to learn that cats can indeed be trained to move short distances, and they lauded the CIA scientists for their pioneering work. But in the end, the CIA concluded that given the quote environmental and security factors in using this technique in a foreign situation, it would not be practical. However, it certainly wasn't the last time the
US government has tried to create cyborganimal soldiers. DARPA, the Defense Research Agency, has also messed about with attack dolphins, spite her les, and remote controlled sharks. Today's episode is based on the article Acoustic Kitty, the CIA's not so perfect plan to make a cat a spy on house toff works dot com, written by Dave Bruce. Brain Stuff is production of i Heeart Radio and partnership with how stuff works dot Com, and is produced by Tyler Klang
and Ramsey Yamp. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows