Five Crazy Government Experiments

Chuck and Josh discuss five of the most bizarre experiments ever undertaken by governments, from transplanted puppy heads to Cold War psychics, in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot Com. Sometimes science goes too far,
dog matters twisted but true. Wednesday's at ten on Science. Hey,

(00:25):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. Say, hey, Chuck, Chuck. That makes the stuff
you should know. It's such an old joke. Yeah, terrible,
It's still It's got a lot of little staying power
and little else. It has as much staying power as
cat urine. Chuck, you want to hear the history of
the microwave? Woman? I love in forty seconds or less?

(00:48):
All right back in, a guy named Percy Spencer was
touring the labs of the Raytheon Corporation when he passed
by a magnetron. If he had unpopped popcorn in his pocket,
then I'm leaving right now. We'll get to that. That
doesn't count against my forty second I thought, like popcorn
popped in his pocket? No, he had a chocolate bar
in his pocket and it melted, And he's really, what

(01:09):
the hell is going on here? So he actually ran
and got a bag of popping corn and it started
popping too. And then he finished the whole thing off
spectacularly by getting a pot and a raw egg and
holding it near the magnetron, and it exploded into his
buddy's face. Anyway, he figured out he was producing microwaves. No,

(01:29):
he lived to be an old man, but he figured
out that this was producing microwaves, and he um put
it in an invention. So everybody has a microwave oven
today has a tiny magnetron in their house. He put
it in an invention. Yeah, that's a unique way of
saying that look good for him. Yeah. Anyway, the point
of this is that that's the Raytheon Corporation where it's

(01:50):
this discovery was made. And the Raideon Corporation was largely
a government funded outfit, so we would call that a
government experiment of sorts. It's not the craziest though, Chuck,
Not not even close. No, you want to talk about
some crazy government experiments, maybe five of them today. It
sounds like a great idea. All right, let's do it, man.

(02:10):
This is written by Robert Lamb with stuff from the
science Lab we should point out. Yeah, I hope we're
not stealing this article. Is here gonna do this at
some point I didn't even ask him. I'm sure that
he wanted to. It's too late now, which it was
the first one here, Josh about transplanting heads onto other bodies,
let's talk about that. Yeah, because think about it, Chuck,
think about the applications of this. I mean, like, technically,
if you don't look at it as a head transplant,

(02:32):
you can make the case that this is a full
body transplant. Appere's on if you're the chicken or the egg.
I guess it definitely definitely makes sense a little. We'll
find out when the people right in um the but
this is something that we could definitely use if we
could attach the spinal cord. Uh yeah, I cannot. Is

(02:52):
that the thing that's holding it back? Well, that's the
thing that keeps the result from being a quadriplegic. Oh
what they said that applications. Maybe if someone just wants
to live, they'd rather live as a quadriplegic than die. Yeah, okay,
especially if you're already a quadriplegic and you're used to it,
but you have oregan failure. Hey, that's pretty random. But

(03:14):
I let's think about it. We talked about brail. What
if you are blind and handless. I guess you used
it that e readers that read things to you out loud, Chuck.
This idea of full body transplantation does have its roots
in government experiments, specifically as far back as night when

(03:36):
a US surgeon named Charles Guthrie decided that he wanted
to find out if he could put one dog's head
on another dog's body. And by god, Chuck Bryant has
a picture of it, the two headed dog. Yeah, he
actually did this, and it was not replacing one head
with another like you said. He he attached a dog's

(03:56):
head and underneath the chin of the other dogs, so
they were in fact chinna chin, and the other dog
was like going right. So you actually did this, and
I don't know if you want to say it worked
because the second head could only um lawl about. Yeah.
They said that there were some um, just normal um

(04:17):
reflex reactions and and sounds, but not dog type sounds. Yeah.
It couldn't fetch the paper or anything. Right. Yeah, so uh,
I guess you could make the case though, that that
was successful. At the very least, they got a pretty
cool picture out of it. Well, blood flowed from one
head to the other, through the brain and then back out.
So that's pretty cool. It worked in a way. You're

(04:37):
gonna post that pick on the blog. So that was
the first one. That's nineteen o eight. That's pretty old timey,
right indeed. And then we cut to nineteen fifty one
when the Soviets are saying, oh, the Americans are doing it, well,
well you gotta do it too. There was a lot
of that going on back then. There really was, UM
And actually before that, there was an experiment in the forties,

(05:00):
right right, This thing is on YouTube. If you type
in experiments in the Revival of Dead organisms, you're going
to find a nineteen forties UM instructional film esque film
like that UM that shows people killing dogs and reviving

(05:20):
them and apparently, well it's not very graphic. It's more like, here,
have some cyanide dog, and then they bring the dog back. UM.
Also supposedly, if you can just barely see it, that
it's a dog's head that's moving and like responding and everything,
but it's being kept alive externally through like an artificial

(05:40):
heart and lungs, pumping blood into the brain and back
out for circulation. I don't need to see that. They
don't show a good shot of it, so it's possible
it's a trick. But I was reading a post on
it that showed that this stuff was real. They actually
did kill this dog and revive. It was very scientific.
It wasn't a joke or a hoax. Um, so we
have been able to was that Vladimir was that someone else?

(06:03):
I think it was Vladimir because it was the Soviets.
He was a sick puppy. He was, yes, And speaking
of puppy, he did the same dog thing where he
would He transplanted twenty puppy heads with head, shoulders, lungs,
four limbs, and an esophagus that emptied outside of the dog,

(06:23):
transplanted them onto other dogs, and some of them live.
One lived as long as twenty nine days, and they
actually uh, there's some log notes here. Nine am Donor's
head eagerly drank water or milk and tugged as if
trying to separate itself from the recipient's body. And one
of them bit one of the staff members, which was

(06:44):
my favorite part. And one of them bit the other
dog on the ear, and the dog tried to shake
it off, so they were actual dog things happening. Yeah,
that's pretty puppy esque. Yeah, and awful, this six sickens.
I didn't eve want to talk about this really sick, yeah,
really dead on the other dolphins. It's like the cutest

(07:06):
horrific experiment ever. The only way it could be cuter
is if they transplanted unicorn heads. There were pictures of
this by that I couldn't even go there, well, chuck.
This horrible type of experimentation culminated in nineteen seventy when
an American nerves surgeon named Robert J. White transplanted the
living head of one monkey onto the headless body of another,

(07:28):
and it worked, and he was almost bitten by the monkey.
That's how they considered as a success. Apparently everybody in
the lab cheered when the monkey tried to bite the guy.
And then after a week they put it down. So
good for these crazy, crazy people. And meanwhile, um, of
course the Soviets and the Americans were shooting chimps into space.

(07:49):
They're gonna return again, and you know they're up there
still little chip bodies or bounds probably at this point
in some in space capsules. Well, you have to wonder,
I mean, what kind of process of physics called degradation
does a monkey undergo after death in space? I don't know,
Answer me, I don't know. All right, let's move on,
chuck to acoustic kitty. Yeah there animal abuse, Well it

(08:11):
actually is. And um this was courtesy once again of
the Cold War, the US and Soviet superpowers battling each
other for position, and the c i A spent maybe
as much as twenty million, at least ten millions. Yeah,
so let's just settle in fifteen and five years and
five years to implant uh listening devices into a cat,

(08:33):
complete with battery and an antenna in the tail. Little kitty,
Acoustic kitty is what they called it, and it was
a single cat. They were they were. They alternately surgically
outfitted it with UM eavesdropping devices and tried to train
it because think about it, the presence of a cat
is not the most you know, cats wander into places,

(08:53):
they kind of go wherever they want, so it makes
kind of it makes sense. The logic is there to
an extent. But apparently the cat was just a little
too willful for this. Um. They figured out that it
went off and just kind of left whenever it got hungry,
so they tried to um surgically manipulate um it's it's
sense of hunger so it wouldn't get hungry as often.

(09:15):
And then finally chuck it threw itself under a cab.
Well you know why why it was It was the
Kitty Acoustic Kitties first test mission. They they sent the
little kitty on its first eavesdropping mission to eaves drop
on these two Russian men in a park, really in
a public park, and so they dropped the cat off
and then that's when the cat ran from the cab
and got killed, which is not funny at all. It's

(09:38):
been to watch a cat get hit by a car,
but imagine a ten million dollar cat that you spent
five years training get hit by a car and its
first mission. That's the part that I think was funny.
It was the egg on the face of the US government,
and there was egga plenty, and they kept it under
wraps until two thousand one when that stuff was declassified
but still partially censored. I read part of it. It's
you know, all the fun words are blanked over right,

(10:00):
you know, like who was doing it? Actually, there was
one part left in their CIA officer Victor Marcetti. He
addressed the hunger thing. He said, they put in a
wire to thwart the hunger. I don't even know what
that means. Yeah, I don't. I read that as well,
and I don't know how you would do that, I mean,
keeping grilling out. I have no idea. Probably so also

(10:22):
awful because it involves animals, Chuck, Josh, have you ever
heard of zero point energy? I have had you before today. No,
I hadn't either. What is that, Josh? So from what
I can gather, it's a it's a something that comes
out of quantum mechanics. It's not supposed to happen under

(10:42):
classical physics, but in quantum physics it does apparently innate
energy that a particle has, even after all other external
energies are removed right saying in a vacuum um. So
they figured out that this means that particles have innate energy.
But one of the um I guess more surprising aspects

(11:03):
of reducing a particle to zero point energy is that
they kind of come in and out of existence randomly,
which is not supposed to happen, but apparently this is.
It is especially susceptible to it when you completely remove gravity. Right,
And this pursuit, the pursuit of figuring out how to

(11:23):
use zero gravity machines to wink things in and out
of existence was supposedly a Nazi experiment, huh. Right, And
the Nazis were famous for many many odd, unproven, unsubstantiated
experiments that they may or may not have conducted. Yeah,
this one was real. The Nazi Bell, that's what they
called it. Yeah, that's what Dr Cook called it. Yeah.
And Dr Cook is Nick Cook, right, the Jane's Defense

(11:47):
Weekly editor who kind of went off the deep end.
I wrote a book review on Salon of his book,
and it's you know, he's he's a very very respected journalist. Um,
but he really got into conspiratorial world with this one. Yeah.
He wrote the book The Hunt for Zero Point, where
he broke it all down basically and alleged that this

(12:08):
all happened. And he's not some crackpot, or he wasn't
at the time, right, No, So he was, he was,
you know, a respected, respected dude. What he believes is
that an s S officer in charge of the V
two rocket program, which eventually got the U S to
the Moon, because don't forget we under operation or Project
paper Clip, we UM drafted tons of Nazi scientists, including

(12:30):
Werner von Brown who got us to the Moon. Yeah. Yeah,
and uh, apparently the guy who was running the V
two rocket program UM traded this information about zero gravity
or zero point energy to the US. And uh, Cook's
hole point is that some guy comes up with this

(12:50):
real method of using an anti gravity machine, uh for
military application, and he, I guess came up with a
file from UM someone in the Defense department saying there's
no real scientific or there's no military application here. So
Cook's premise was there. Totally was, and they wouldn't have

(13:11):
said that if they didn't already know how to do it,
of course, So he was saying that we knew how
to do that, and that the whole Foo fighter phenomenon,
UFOs sightings, all that is evidence of us having figured
out zero point gravity? How about that? And I did
a little extra digging around and I found out there's
this guy named Tim tim Bentura and he runs something

(13:32):
called American Anti Gravity and he claims this is five
years ago. And as usual, when you when you can't
find follow up info, it's usually not a good sign.
But he claims five years ago that a fellow named
John Dearing of s A r A, the Scientific Applications
and Research Associates, who actually have a lot of government contracts,

(13:53):
are not crack pops either. They supposedly replicated key elements
of the Nazi bell technology anti gravity propulsion, and they
supposedly recreated this like five years ago, and they were
looking for funding and uh, we're too secretive to get
the funding that they needed, and it's it was kind
of up in the air. Last I checked from from

(14:14):
what I understand, and I don't know if it's necessarily
zero point gravity, but using quantum mechanics, people have figured
out how to get discs to levitate. So I mean,
it's not without it's not outside of the realm possibility.
He's got stuff on the YouTube, does he? Yeah? But
so does David Blaine. He's a big phony. What No, Josh,

(14:35):
he doesn't levitate. It's a trick. What let's talk about sex,
baby in space? Yeah, sex in space. They have researched
this um behind closed doors, obviously, although NASA says that
they've never done such a thing, but clearly they have
because they want to colonize the Moon in space one day,

(14:55):
and you know you gotta know everything. Remember we talked
about well the doom state, lunar doomsday ark safe humanity,
that they were going to have their sexy business up
there if they had to wait a century. Stephen Hawking said,
it's essential for human survival. It depends on being able
to appropriate in space. Okay, in space. I was gonna say,
you don't have to be Stephen Hawking to realize that
you gotta reproduce or else the species dies out right,

(15:16):
no matter whether we're here in orbit or on the
Moon or on Mars or wherever. Right. So, yes, of
course NASA would engage in this kind of stuff. Specifically,
there was a guy named Pierre Kohler. He was a
French astronomer. Uh. And he wrote a book in two
thousand called The Last Mission, and he said that four
years earlier NASA um checked out ten different zero gravity

(15:39):
um sexual positions on a mission. NASA says no, and
and Pierre Cohler was like and pretty, yeah, you're on Earth.
I'll tell you some pictures later. Uh. And obviously, like
everything else's, Soviets have done the same with her cosmonauts supposedly, uh, cosmonauts.

(16:04):
No the uh what the research into sex with the
type of sexual positions? Oh, I don't know. Human docking procedures.
Well that's what Robert called it. I think he put
it in quotes. I thought that Many is just making
a ride joke. We'll have to ask him. Yeah, but
I love that human docking procedure. Uh. Russia Russian cosmonaut

(16:25):
Valentia Valentina Tereshkova got pregnant nineteen seventy four by another cosmonaut,
So there were some that said this was probably a
maybe not done in space, but done just to see,
like set up to see what would happen, like has
his sperm been affected, has her uterus been affected? Whatever?
But it all turned out fine. Their baby was completely normal, right,

(16:49):
So that's a good sign. And some wonder if possibly
that union was in a science experiment in and of
itself just to find out. Um. But yeah, we have
such a little grasp on what the effects of zero
gravity have on the human body exactly that I mean,
it's a worthwhile look, it could be a sperm killer,
who knows, it could do all sorts of crazy stuff

(17:10):
like remember the uh Sarcopenia episode where the neurons, the
type of neurons that die off and are replaced or
taken over by the other type of neurons happens the
opposite the astronauts who have been in zero gram and
it does here on Earth. Who would expect that? Sure,
so you got it tested out. Have you heard of
the two suit? No, it's a number two suit. This

(17:33):
I don't know why it was invented by an actress
and poet, but it was. Her name is Vana Bonta,
and she invented the suit that basically keeps two people attached.
You can put two suits together, if you know what
I'm saying, to make one suit, and there's zippers and
there's velcro, and there's openings and there's places to go

(17:57):
cool within this suit, and each one has this sigrette
tucked into like exactly the arm. And the idea is
to stabilize human proximity so you can stay attached without
much effort, so you can save your effort for coitus.
Are they I don't know if you can buy them,
and I don't know if the government said, hey and
give me some of those two suits, But I mean

(18:17):
it sounds like they gave us tang. Yeah exactly. So
let's get get the two suits out there, and let's
get to the last one, shall we, Buddy the Psychic
Cold War? Yeah, did you see Men Who Stic Goats?
I love that movie. I didn't see it. I loved it.
It got like a forty seven percent pretty much across
the board, like half and half. It was a good movie.
Was it based on this or was it just fanciful

(18:39):
goings on of George Clooney? No, there was your I'm
writing a blog post on this today. There really was
a programs that this thing was kind of based on.
The characters were based on real life people. Um. Yeah,
I'll show it to you. So we're talking about his
psychic spies, right, Yeah, one, they're they're both the Soviets
and the Americans were engaged in paranormal research. Um. This

(19:05):
the Soviets since the twenties, um, and then the US
and the forties or fifties was like, oh, we better
catch up with this, and never did. They're reading our minds,
so we need to read their minds exactly. Um. And
there's a ton of applications for this. For the military lecture,
for example, if you're manning a submarine and you can't surface,
why don't you just send whatever information you need using
your mind and the mind of somebody else, or why

(19:27):
I get out of bed. Yeah, that's what I would
do if it's a great one to just beat my
messages everywhere. UM a man machine interface where we could
UM basically psychically link ourselves to a computer to interact
with it, uploaded download data. So does this stuff work though, Josh,
I don't know. Is it real? It's real that they
did the research. They definitely did do the research, and

(19:48):
in nineteen seventy three, the Rain Corporation was asked to
create a brief study on who was doing better at it,
and the Rain Corporation said the Soviets big time. The
Soviets were much more UM investigatory with the biological, the
physiological aspects of this the basis of it, whereas with

(20:09):
Americans it was UM psychology. All psychological based UM theory
and practice were kept separate with America. In in UM
the Soviet study, they came up with theories and then
tested them like it was really scientific. So if anybody
was going to get anywhere with it, the Rancorporation concluded
that it was definitely going to be the Soviets. Well,

(20:30):
good for the riskies. Yeah, they they still are. Yeah,
and you know we had Operation or Project Stargate going
until n so that was it. Well that's remote viewing basically.
And at one point, Operation Stargate had twenty two active
military and or private remote viewers on staff. That's pretty cool.

(20:51):
I wonder how much that pays remote viewing a bit.
It pays pretty good. Especially, I'll bet you can pretty
much demand whatever salary you want. It's like, oh yeah,
we'll go higher somebody else. Boy got downother home depot.
Those guys hanging up front, see if they can remote
view for you. Well that's about it for crazy government experiments.
I think there's probably a ton more on the site though.

(21:11):
You know obviously the c i A experimented with LSD. Buddy. Yeah,
well that's number one on our list. That's why I
got a whole podcast that one. Um. All you have
to do is type maybe government and experiments in the
handy search bar at how stuff works dot com, and
that leads us to listener mail. Josh got a couple

(21:32):
of quick ones today. Okay, this one is from Sasha
a k a. Sparky and Sasha Sparky says a recent
podcast mentioned pika and that's when you eat things that
aren't food, and it reminded me of my own five
year old cravings. As a young girl, I had an
insatiable craving from match heads. Huh. Yeah, sulfur huh. I
guess so I would bite down on the matches and

(21:54):
scrape off the heads and eat them. And I kept
a secret stash of Pilford matches under my pillow. I
just think remember the salty sulfurus flavor and chalky texture.
I'm not sure anyone of my family caught on, and
I apparently outgrew it eventually. I'm not sure if this
is a unique pike of craving or not. I just
thought i'd share it from Sasha Sparky a k a.
The match eater. Maybe that's why she's sparky. Either that

(22:18):
or her love of sulfur just developed into a love
of arson. And this one is from Tony and you're
gonna like this one. Don't know if you actually read this?
Uh one? Am Tony Rhotas. He's a business director for
Gamma Vacuum, and he says guys, just thought you might
like to know that I am sending an email from
a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, and have a couple of
meetings tomorrow. It's cern awesome trying to sell them our

(22:40):
vacuum pumps. Basically, the large had drink a lighter. Guys.
He's a traveling vacuum salesman and he just said he
wanted to know that one of he has a traveling
vacuum salman. He said, he just wanted to let us
know that one of the stuff you should know, Army
foot soldiers is on the premises conducting business. Good for him,
Thank you tone me, and then he sent back a

(23:01):
follow up email after emailed him and said that he
wants Jerry to say hi, and she refuses, but he
requests it is it against religion? I would respect that,
but out of my own self interest and not to
look like a jackass. I'm not sure what that means.
And uh, that's pretty much it. Maybe a horse whinny
a sound effect. Just to know that she's there, is

(23:23):
what he says. Jerry's going with the against her religion thing.
It looks like okay, se remains mute. That coupled with
a good horse whinny will get your places. Nay? Is
that a good horse whinny? Yes, and it's actually amish
for no. Are there questions that should not be asked,
experiments that should not be performed, doors that should remain

(23:47):
forever closed. Sometimes science goes too far. Join me for
this new series that explodes real life stories of the
dark side of science. Dog Matters Twisted but True Wednesday's
attend on Science Wow. If you have ever seen the

(24:11):
movie The Thing with Two Heads and want to tell
us what you thought about it, you just go ahead
and send that in an email. Um. Also, if you're
going Toscern, we definitely want to hear about that as well.
You can email with that stuff podcast at how stuff
works dot com For more on this and thousands of

(24:32):
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