As reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached the American public on December 7, 1941, a dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams was driving home to Pennsylvania from a trip to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, where he had witnessed the famed spectacle of millions of bats spiraling out of the cave mouth at dusk.
Inspired by the chiropteran display, Adams came up with an idea he believed could win the war: strap tiny bombs to bats, release them over Japan, and let the animals do the rest.
He fired off a letter to the White House, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt was intrigued enough to scrawl a note on the memo:
