THE PIGEON-GUIDED MISSILE (NO JOKE!)
Wire-guided, radio-guided or pigeon-guided. American research into a glide bomb steered by pigeons came out of a real World War II project, not out of a science fiction novel.
The German Luftwaffe had been using remote-controlled bombs against ships successfully since the end of 1941, and the Americans were working flat out on something comparable. One result of those experiments was the so-called “Project Pigeon”.
The screen was mounted on a pivot and fitted with sensors that measured every angular movement. As long as the target stayed in the middle of the screen, the pigeon pecked at the middle and the bomb held its course. When the bomb began to drift, the projected target moved toward the edge of the screen. The pigeon followed it with its beak and pressed in one side of the pivoting screen, which sent a signal to the control unit and corrected the course of the bomb.
As the bomb swung back toward the target, the pigeon followed the image again and brought the screen back to its central position. That way the pigeon corrected every deviation and kept the bomb on its glide path.
The National Defense Research Committee thought the idea of putting pigeons into glide bombs was thoroughly crackpot, but still put up $25,000 for the research. On October 8, 1944, the project was shut down anyway and the effort moved to electronic guidance systems.
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