The Cat Who Came In From The Cold - On The Cud

Here's something very, very fun: a brand new Welcome To Weirdsville piece I wrote on the infamous "Project Acoustic Kitty" just went up on the delightful Aussie Cud site.

Here's a tease:

"Good morning, Mister Phelps. Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to read the following without either shaking your head in absolute wonder or collapsing to the floor in hysterics. As always, should you or any of your IM force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck, Jim. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds..."

I mean, come on: it's bad enough that fun and weird history writers like myself can't just relax when people bring up ghosts or UFOs, ridiculous, conspiracy theories, or astrology without collapsing into hysterical giggles, gasping for air trying to get out, "You think that's strange? Wait until you hear this--" without that same bizarre universe throwing out yet another example of how truly, honestly, and totally surreal the planet really can be.

Okay, to be honest, the 1960s were a total benchmark for the odd ... especially in the world of already-far-too-odd world of espionage. It was, after all, when the CIA was drawing up plans to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out with hormone-tainted cigars or blow him up with booby-trapped seashells as they were dosing unsuspecting US citizens with acid – while on the other side of the world their opposite numbers were killing people with poisoned umbrellas and (by plan or their own stupidity) convincing the US that psychic remote viewing actually worked.

It should come as no surprise then that somewhere in this fuming cauldron of bizarre, someone, somewhere in Langley – the Directorate of Science And Technology to be precise – began to dream of a totally new information gathering technique.

What put this technique into the surreal, if not utterly insane, column were the recruits for this project. To be fair, animals had been used quite successfully by covert, as well as overt, operations for hundreds of years: horses have been used in combat since human beings first climbed on the back of one, birds – carrier pigeons to be precise – have been used for a very long time to get information from remote locations back to base, dogs have been trained for both combat as well as stealth assassinations, and -- adding to the crazy of the crazy the 1960s – trained dolphins were first imagined as Flipper with a suicide pill.

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