After reading an old CIA report from 1967 titled Views on Trained Cats…, you may never feel the same around cats again.
In what sounds like something out of a science fiction dime novel or something dreamed up by a drug-addled teenager scribbling in his notebook between classes, the CIA implanted a live cat with electronic spying equipment and attempted to train it so it could be used as a roving collector of valuable intelligence.
According to a special assistant who worked on the project:
“A lot of money was spent. They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally they’re ready. They took it out to a park and pointed it at a park bench and said, ‘Listen to those two guys…’ They put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead!”
The report does not include the results of any other cats they used during the experiment, but with $15M to spend on the program there must have been other cats, perhaps hundreds.
How many people, I wonder, were misdiagnosed as paranoid by their psychiatrists when they began to claim that the neighborhood cats were spying on them. Or that Mittens always seemed to be listening to their personal conversations and didn’t seem quite himself lately.
In light of recent revelations regarding the widespread NSA surveillance apparatus where even smart TVs can be controlled remotely by government bureaucrats to spy on citizens in their own living rooms, using spy cats to collect intelligence seems absolutely primitive.
Now our government can track us through our smart phones, collect all of our calls and emails, and even watch us in our own homes as we talk to Aunt Marsh about how her day was, We’ve come a long way from the days of Mittens The Spy Cat.
I just wanted to write down a small message to thank you for some of the magnificent steps you are showing on this site. My considerable internet look up has at the end of the day been compensated with excellent strategies to go over with my family and friends. I ‘d mention that many of us readers are unequivocally fortunate to live in a fantastic site with many outstanding people with good things. I feel really blessed to have discovered your entire web site and look forward to really more fabulous times reading here. Thank you once again for a lot of things.
Do you know if they also did this type of experiments on people