The Pigeon Navy That Almost Guided Missiles

In 1943, with World War II raging, a Harvard psychologist named B.F. Skinner walked into a government meeting with an idea that sounded like a joke. He wanted to put birds in missiles.

Skinner had been watching flocks of pigeons while riding a train, and he noticed how precisely they moved. Their eyesight and quick reflexes struck him as ideal for a guidance system, so he started experimenting.

The plan was called Project Pigeon, and it was funded by the U.S. National Defense Research Committee. Three pigeons would sit in the nose cone of a bomb, each facing a small screen showing the target ahead.

The birds were trained with grain rewards to peck at an image of the target. Each peck on the screen moved the bomb's steering controls, so if the target drifted off-center, the pecking corrected the course.

Skinner's pigeons tracked moving targets on test setups with impressive accuracy, and they kept pecking steadily even through simulated turbulence and loud noise. Using three birds meant the majority could outvote a single confused pigeon.

Even so, the military officials who saw the demonstration struggled to take it seriously. In 1944, the project lost its funding, and the National Defense Research Committee concluded that the idea, however clever, was too far-fetched to deploy.

Skinner never gave up on the concept, and the Navy later revived it under the name Project ORCON, short for organic control. It ran until electronic guidance systems improved enough to make the birds unnecessary in the early 1950s.