A Scheme to Feminize the Fuhrer, and Other Strange Historic Plans

19. Stalin’s Half-Ape, Half-Man, Hybrids

Russian biologist Ilya Ivanov won considerable acclaim in the early twentieth century as an artificial insemination pioneer. He used his skills to improve the bloodstock of imperial Russia’s horses, inseminating mares with sperm from the best stallions. When the communists took over, Ivanov continued his work on behalf of new masters. One such was Stalin, who in 1926 expressed an interest in “a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat“. Ivanov was directed to see to it, and he figured that the best bet to meet such criterion would be a hybrid crossbreed of apes and humans. He came up with a scheme that approached the issue from both sides. Female humans would be inseminated with male chimpanzee sperm, and chimp females would be inseminated with male human sperm.

The first alternative was easier. A research center was established in Georgia, where female human volunteers were to be inseminated with male chimp sperm, and where the human-ape hybrid babies were to be raised. The second alternative was tougher, because female chimp volunteers were harder to come by in the Soviet Union. So Ivanov travelled to Guinea, French West Africa, to inseminate female chimps with human sperm. Unsurprisingly, the project was unsuccessful. Ivanov failed to impregnate a single female chimp with human sperm. When he returned to the USSR, his disappointment was doubled when he discovered that not a single human female in the Georgia research center had been impregnated with chimp sperm. A disgraced Ivanov was eventually sentenced to five years imprisonment, later commuted to five years internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he died in 1932.

19. Blowing Up an Airliner With Wife in it to Collect on Life Insurance

Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108, a DC-3 airplane, took off from Quebec on September 9^th, 1949. Headed to Seven Islands, a fishing village three hundred miles from Quebec, the flight route roughly paralleled the Saint Lawrence River. There were four crew members and nineteen passengers, including three children. En route, Flight 108 was to land at Baie Comeau, but it never got there. At 10:45AM, about forty miles northeast of Quebec, there was an explosion. The plane plummeted straight into a wooded hillside called Cap Tourmente, and all aboard perished. They included Rita Guay (nee Morel), the 29-year-old wife of a Quebec jewelry salesman named Joseph Albert Guay, who seemed devastated by his loss. In reality, Guay had blown up the plane to get rid of his wife and cash in on her life insurance, as a prelude to marrying his mistress.

French Canadian Guay, a slim and handsome small man, met and married Rita Morrel during WWII. The marriage soured when the couple had a baby, and Rita’s attentions turned from Guay to the child. Simultaneously, Guay’s jewelry and watch sales business began to fail, and he piled up debts. At the same time, Guay met and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old waitress named Marie-Ange Robitaille, and under the false name Roger Angers, began a torrid affair with her. Although drowning in debt, Guay bought Marie-Ange an apartment near his house, and asked her to marry him. When Rita, who was carrying on her own extramarital affairs, found out, she confronted the duo. Divorces back then in Catholic Quebec were next to impossible. So when Marie-Ange found out that her lover was a married father, she dumped him.

17. A Desperate Scheme to Lose a Wife and Win Back a Mistress

Guay figured he could win Marie-Ange back, but first he had to get out of the marriage. Divorce not being an option, he decided on murder. It would free him to remarry, and Rita’s life insurance would alleviate his debts. Guay tried poison at first, and offered somebody $500 to do the deed. That was rejected, so he decided on murder by plane. Guay enlisted the help of an associate named Genereaux Ruest to make a time bomb. Ruest in turn enlisted the help of his sister, Marguerite Pitre, who bought dynamite, fuses, and detonation caps at a hardware store – explosives were easily obtained back then. Ruest, who was owed money by Guay, made the bomb out of twenty sticks of dynamite, batteries, and an alarm clock. Guay then sent his wife off on Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108, to run an errand for him in Baie Comeau.

The scheme hit a last minute hitch. Guay and Rita argued at the airport, because she did not want to board the plane. He ultimately convinced her that it was necessary that she fly to Baie Comeau to retrieve some jewels he had purchased there. He had already paid for the ticket, and his business – and the family’s finances – would suffer otherwise. Reluctantly, Rita got on the plane. She should have listened to her instincts. At roughly 10:45AM, people on the ground near the small village of Sault au Cochon, forty miles northeast of Quebec, heard an explosion in the sky. Looking up, they saw an airplane, trailing smoke from its left wing root. The plane made a sharp turn to the north, then dove straight down into nearby Cap Tourmente, a tree-covered hill.

16. A Diabolical Scheme Falls Apart

Guay’s scheme swiftly unraveled. He had calculated time and distance, and set the timer to blow up the plane over the Saint Lawrence River, thus depriving forensics investigators an opportunity to investigate. However, the plane took off late, and the delay screwed up Guay’s calculations. Rather the plunge into the river, the plane crashed over land, and left plenty of debris for investigators to figure out that it was no accident. At his wife’s funeral, somebody mentioned reading in the news that the plane was downed by a bomb. A seemingly stunned Guay responded: “I can’t believe it! There’s nobody monstrous enough to blow a plane!” The cops soon zeroed in on him. He made it easier for them when he tried to cash in a $C 100,000 policy he had taken on his wife the day of the crash.

Then the identity of a woman that Guay had sent to the airport to ship on Flight 108 a parcel containing the bomb was revealed. She told the cops that Guay had given her the parcel, but denied knowing its contents. She tried to commit suicide, but was saved, at which point she confessed that Guay had told her the package contained a bomb. He was arrested and charged with murder. At the trial, all the sordid details came out. The rocky marriage, cheating, desperation to win back a mistress, the murder for life insurance scheme, and the fake tears. Guay was convicted, sentenced to hang, and was executed on January 12^th, 1951. His last words were: “At least I die famous“. His accomplices followed him on the gallows within a year.

15. The Nazi Scheme to Shower New York City With Radioactive Sand

Hitler inexplicably declared war against America on December 11^th, 1941. Soon after the US was thus brought into the war in Europe, American heavy bombers joined Britain’s RAF to rain devastation upon the Third Reich. The Germans wanted to return the favor, but lacked the aerial superiority necessary to go on the offensive. Not to mention that America, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from Nazi-occupied Europe, was too far away for German planes then in service. German scientists set about to solve that problem, and came up with a scheme to make New York City uninhabitable by sprinkling radioactive sand all over the Big Apple.

To reach America, German scientist Eugen Sanger proposed a Racketenflugzeug – a rocket airplane. Known as Silbervogel, or Silver Bird, the proposed aircraft was to be propelled at 1200 miles per hour off railroad tracks from a rocket-powered sled, then fly to a height of ninety miles. There, at the edge of space, the Silbervogel would use a series of roller-coaster-like “skips”, entering and exiting the upper atmosphere en route to the Big Apple. Once it reached its destination, the Silbervogel would detonate a bomb packed with radioactive sand, to devastate NYC with a radiation cloud. It sounds cartoonish, but the theory was actually sound, and the plan just might have worked. Luckily for the Big Apple, the Nazis were defeated before either the space plane or the villainous scheme became realities.

14. The CIA’s Scheme to Pimp for a King

In the 1950s, America was starting to get involved in the Middle East, and seeking friends. The youthful King Hussein of Jordan seemed like a potential ally. So when he visited America in 1959, officials tried to satisfy all his whims. When Hussein requested “female companionship”, the CIA turned to reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes’ right hand man, former FBI agent Robert Maheu. He came up with a scheme to hook up the visiting royal with an actress. A declassified CIA memo shows that Maheu arranged “female companionship” for the 23-year-old Hussein during a visit to Los Angeles. Referring to the king as a “foreign official”, the memo stated: “The foreign official was especially desirous of female companionship … and it was requested that appropriate arrangements be made through a controlled source of the [CIA’s] Office [of Security] in order to assure a satisfied visit“.

Jordan’s monarchy was not A-list royalty, so Maheau could not get any A-list actresses to entertain King Hussein. With the Marilyn Monroe types unavailable, Maheau worked his way down to the B-list. He came up with Susan Cabot, a 1950s B-movie actress who had starred in low budget flicks such as The Wasp Woman, in which she transforms into a deadly wasp. Cabot was to meet King Hussein at a Los Angeles party thrown by wealthy oilman Edwin Pauley. Cabot was bluntly told in advance: “We want you to go to bed with him“. She initially declined, but finally agreed to go. There, the CIA memo continued: “She became quite taken with [King Hussein] and found him to be most charming“.

13. The King and the Wasp Woman

There were fears that the scheme might go awry because of Cabot’s Jewish heritage – she was born Harriet Shapiro. Such doubts were quickly dispelled: King Hussein was smitten. Per the CIA memo, when he left LA for the East Coast, Hussein: “wished to meet with her during his stay in New York City from 14 through 18 April“. So the CIA rented Hussein a house in Long Beach, Long Island, and registered Cabot in Manhattan’s Barclay Hotel “under an assumed name“. The scheme evolved into a star-crossed affair between the Muslim monarch and the Jewish actress. From the start, the CIA’s matchmaking was a sensitive matter. As hard as the duo tried to keep the relationship a secret, details leaked out. Per the declassified CIA memo:

“…[Cabot] discussed the publicity in the case at some length with the Security representatives … She speculated about the possible sources of certain personal information that she felt had been leaked to the press“. Hussein continued to meet in secret with Susan Cabot whenever he visited America, until the affair ended in the 1970s. By then, Cabot had given birth to her only child, Timothy. He was long rumored to be Hussein’s illegitimate son. The rumors about Timothy’s true father were buttressed by the fact that Hussein regularly paid Cabot what seems remarkably like child support. As one of Timothy’s lawyers put it in court papers in 1989: “For as long as I can discover, [Cabot] received a regular sum of $1,500 a month from the Keeper of the King’s Purse, Amman, Jordan. … For better or worse, it looks like child support“.

12. The Sad Aftermath of a Seedy Scheme

Unfortunately, the CIA’s scheme to play Cupid did not end happily. Susan Cabot grew mentally ill in the 1980s, and became a recluse. Her son, Timothy, who was born with dwarfism, inherited mental issues from both his mother and father – his paternal grandfather and King Hussein’s predecessor, King Talal, had been deposed because he was schizophrenic. Timothy’s problems were worsened by growing up in a dysfunctional home with a mother who raised him in squalor. The kid grew up in a decaying Encino estate, surrounded by rotting food and stacks of ancient newspapers, guarded by a semi-feral Akita. Things were further exacerbated by Cabot’s ill-advised decision to treat her son’s dwarfism with experimental hormones extracted from the pituitary glands of dead people.

The treatment, which was discontinued in the 1980s after it was discovered that it gave some patients a degenerative brain disease, did not cure Timothy’s dwarfism. Instead, it left him with lifelong severe mood swings. On December 10^th, 1986, Susan Cabot was found beaten to death with a dumbbell. Her son Timothy told police that a stranger in a ninja mask had broken into the house, knocked him unconscious, then murdered his mother. Police and the District Attorney disagreed, and charged Timothy with murder. He eventually pled not guilty by reason of insanity, raising his dysfunctional upbringing as a defense. In 1989, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Having already served two and a half years behind bars awaiting trial, he was sentenced to three years probation. He died of heart failure in 2003.

11. The Plan to Populate America With Elephants

Aside from in his home country, relatively few people these days know of King Mongkut, titled Rama IV of Siam – today’s Thailand. Of those who recognize the name, most probably recall it as that of a character in The King and I, a 1950s musical remade into a movie about a relationship with an English governess. Rama IV (1804 – 1868) was actually a real life nineteenth century monarch who ruled the kingdom of Siam from 1851 until his death in 1868.

Rama IV was a modernizer. He opened his kingdom to Western influences, and initiated the cultural and technological modernization of Siam. So much so that he became known as his country’s “Father of Science and Technology”. Rama’s modernization held off Western encroachments – at least temporarily. He sought recognition as an equal among the world’s rulers, and corresponded with many of them. As seen below, in one of those correspondences with an American president, he offered to populate the US with elephants.

10. Abraham Lincoln and the King of Siam’s Gift

Diplomatic congratulations and gifts are routinely sent to new US presidents. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln received an offer from Siam’s King Rama IV to populate America with wild Asian elephants. The offer came as part of a package that included huge elephant tusks, an expensive handmade sword, and photos of the Siamese monarch and his daughter. The gifts, sent before the results of the 1860 US presidential election were known in Siam, were not meant specifically for Lincoln, but were sent to “whomsoever the people have elected anew as chief ruler in place of President Buchanan“. Elephants were and remain valuable beasts of burden in Asia. King Rama offered to send young male and female pachyderms, who could be turned loose to breed in America’s wilderness. As he put it:

“[A]fter a while they will increase till there be large herds as there are here on the continent of Asia until the inhabitants of America will be able to catch them and tame and use them as beasts of burden making them of benefit to the country“. Lincoln wrote back to politely decline the offer: “This Government would not hesitate to avail itself of so generous an offer if the object were one which could be made practically useful in the present condition of the United States. Our political jurisdiction, however, does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce“. If not for that refusal, America today might have elephant herds roaming in its wilderness.

9. The Nazi Scheme to Bombard NYC With Rockets

During WWII, German scientists invented the V-1 Flying Bomb, the world’s first cruise missile, and the V-2, the first ballistic missile. They terrorized and killed thousands of Londoners, and if the Nazis had their way, they would have done the same to New Yorkers. The missiles had relatively short ranges: a few dozen miles from launch sites on land in German-controlled territory. In 1941, brothers Friedrich Steinhoff, commander of U-511, a Type IXC U-boat, and his brother, Dr. Erich Steinhoff, of the secret rocket research program at Peenemunde, thought up a scheme. Why not bring more enemy territory within reach of Nazi rockets, by marrying rockets to U-boats? U-boats equipped with rockets would become mobile launch platforms. With the high seas as their highways, they could launch missiles at targets anywhere in the world that lay within a few dozen miles of a sea coast.

In 1942, the Steinhoff brothers began to test their scheme, and a rack for 30 cm rocket launchers was mounted on the U-511‘s upper deck. Testing was successful, and the U-511 launched rockets both from the surface, and when submerged up to a depth of 40 feet. However, the German navy envisioned the rockets as anti-ship weapons. In that capacity, they were useless because they lacked an accurate guidance system. The idea was revived in 1943, with the advent of the V-1 Flying Bomb. A V-1 launched from a U-boat could to strike targets far beyond the Flying Bomb’s 150 mile radius from land-based sites. Inter-service rivalry sank the proposal, however: the V-1 was a Luftwaffe project, and Germany’s airmen were reluctant to share with the navy.

8. The Marriage of Submarines and Rockets to Wreck the Big Apple

Lack of cooperation from the Luftwaffe delayed the marriage of U-boats and V-1s. However, consideration was also given to firing V-2 rockets from U-boats. In 1943, American bombers were starting to devastate German cities, so the Nazis desperately wanted to retaliate against American cities. However, the V-2 was too big to mount in U-boats then in service. So a submersible vessel to transport and launch the V-2 was designed. Known as the Prufstand XII (“Test Stand XII”), the submersible transport displaced about 500 tons. It would get towed by a U-boat – the forward motion keeping the container submerged – to within range of its target. Three Prufstands were ordered in December, 1944. The Nazis planned to use Type XXI U-boats to tow them, each carrying a V-2 rocket, across the Atlantic to within range of New York.

The submersible transports, which also carried a reserve of diesel fuel to supply the towing U-boat en route, would get set up upon arrival at the launch site. The container’s ballast tanks would get flooded, bringing the Prufstand and the V-2 within to a vertical position. The rocket’s guidance system would then be set, aimed at the Big Apple, and remotely launched from within the U-boat. Leaving its container, the rocket would soar to the edge of space, then plunge down upon NYC with a ton of high explosives contained within its nose-mounted warhead. In late 1944, Allied intelligence learned of the German scheme. So they prepared Operation Teardrop, a US Navy plan to sink U-boats approaching America’s Eastern Seaboard.

7. A Scheme That Birthed Modern Ballistic Missile Submarines

Two large anti-submarine task forces were set up, and in April, 1945, Operation Teardrop was executed when word arrived that several U-boats had left Norway, bound for North America. Of seven U-boats that approached the US, five were sunk. Survivors were abusively interrogated for any information about missile scheme. As it turned out, the U-boats had not been fitted out with missile-launching equipment, and the plan to attack American cities with rockets had not yet been ordered. The war ended before the Nazis tried to carry it out. Of the three Prufstand XII rocket containers ordered in 1944, only one was actually delivered. Luckily, by the time this particular Nazi scheme went into high gear, time was running out for the Nazis.

By late 1944, the Third Reich was crumbling under heavy blows from enemies advancing from east and west. That was fortunate for the Big Apple, considering just how badly Hitler and his goons wanted to reach out and touch it. The Nazis put a lot of thought into how to wreck New York. In addition to the Prufstand, the ad-hoc submersible V-2 transport, the Germans had also been busy with plans for a dedicated ballistic missile U-boat that could carry multiple rockets and launch them at inland targets. Separately, in a project codenamed Ursel, the Germans had figured out a guidance system that allowed the targeting of surface ships with rockets fired from submerged U-boats. The rockets, however, were still under development when the war ended. After the war, both the US and Soviet navies drew on Project Ursel to develop ballistic missile submarines in the 1950s.

6. A Scheme to Stop the Earth’s Spinning

The Cold War was terrifying at times, as two jittery superpowers glared at each other while armed with enough nukes to exterminate humanity many times over. People living in fear sometimes come up with, let us say, “creative” ideas. As with most ideas, some of them turn out to be brilliant brainstorms, but most are not. Of the latter, few ideas were loonier than a scheme to stop the Earth’s rotation in order to foil Soviet nukes. As pure logic, it was sound. To launch an ICBM to nuke a target thousands of miles away involves intricate calculations that include planetary rotation. Tinkering with Earth’s rotation would screw up those intricate calculations, and cause ballistic missiles to miss their targets.

Thus was born PROJECT RETRO, an early-1960s research effort into what it would take to pause the planet’s spin. It was like a Wile E. Coyote plan in that the science actually works in theory. Once launched, early ballistic missiles could not be redirected. Because of Earth’s rotation, hitting something with a ballistic missile is like shooting an arrow at a moving target. You have to aim not at where the target is, but at where the target will be in the time it takes the missile or arrow to get there. E.g.; say it takes an ICBM thirty minutes to fly from the USSR to Washington, DC. The Soviets will aim it not at where Washington is at the time of launch, but at where Washington will be, because of the Earth’s rotation, in half an hour. But what if Washington was not where it was expected to be?

5. A Solution Worse Than the Problem

If a projectile is aimed at where a moving target will be, but the target stops after the projectile is launched, the projectile will miss. So the US Air Force floated a scheme to use “a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas [rocket] engines” – to stop the Earth’s rotation. Theoretically, that could foil Soviet ICBMs. In 1960, the Air Force asked the RAND Corporation to evaluate the possibility of using giant stationary rocket engines to pause Earth’s rotation in case of nuclear attack. There was something to the theory, but to go from theory to practice was problematic. The Air Force’s guesstimate that a thousand rocket engines would be needed to pause the Earth’s rotation turned out to be too low. As Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation planner who crunched the numbers concluded, it required not a thousand Atlas rockets, but “one million billion” of them.

The propellant necessary would have been “500 times the mass of Earth’s atmosphere“. That was beyond even the Pentagon’s budget. Moreover, even if the Pentagon could afford it and even if the plan was feasible, it would be better to just let all the Soviet nukes hit their targets than to pause the planet’s spin. Assume a thirty minute ICBM flight time from the USSR to Washington, DC, and a twenty minute warning. For the missile to miss by ten miles, Earth’s rotation would have to be slowed by about thirty miles for twenty minutes. If that happened, every structure, grain of sand, drop of water, and living thing on Earth would experience that deceleration. The result would be catastrophic earthquakes, massive tsunamis, and super hurricanes that would wreck the planet. A nuclear Armageddon would actually be mild compared to that.

4. The Scheme to Populate America With Hippos

In the early twentieth century, America faced a meat shortage. Beef prices skyrocketed, as industry struggled to meet rising demand from a growing population. Between natural increase and new immigrants, America had many more mouths to feed, and many of those mouths wanted meat. While that was going on, cattle ranges had been ruined by decades of overgrazing. Herds shrank, and the number of America’s cows dropped by millions every year. The “Meat Question” was a serious issue back then. What to do about it was never far from the minds of American consumers, pundits, and politicians. Things seemed so dire, that there were even serious fears of a potential famine unless a solution was found.

Then somebody thought up a seemingly brilliant scheme: hippos. Why not import hippopotamuses from Africa, set them loose in the Gulf Coast’s swamplands and deltas, and raise them for food? Hippos were full of blubbery goodness, so why not ranch them in America? To many, that seemed like a great answer to the Meat Question. A US Department of Agriculture researcher figured that the solution to the country’s meat shortage was to exploit unproductive lands to produce food. The Gulf Coast’s swamps were unproductive, but that could change with the introduction of hippos. Free range hippopotamuses set loose in the bayous, especially those of Louisiana, could easily yield a million tons of meat per year.

3. We Came That Close to Ranching Hippos in the US

Ranching hippos in America sounded crazy, but many thought it was necessary. As a Washington Post editorial noted, eating crabs and raw oysters was no less weird than eating hippo meat, but people still did it. It added: “Proposals which at first may look odd and chimerical to the mass of our readers will be seen to be matter-of-fact propositions when they become familiar“. Another publication wrote in endorsement of the plan: “This animal, homely as a steam-roller, [is] the embodiment of salvation … Peace, plenty, and contentment lie before us; and a new life, with new experiences, new opportunities, new vigor, new romance, folded in that golden future when the meadows and the bayous of our Southern lands shall swarm with herds of hippopotami“. Many prominent Americans, including former president Teddy Roosevelt, endorsed the hippo ranching scheme.

In 1910, a Louisiana congressman introduced HR 23261, which came to be known as “The Hippo Bill”. Louisiana seemed particularly suitable. Its waterways were clogged by invasive hyacinths, and hippos would gorge on them. They would thus clear the waterways, and simultaneously supply Americans with millions of tons of meat. Gulf Coast hippos would also end Chicago’s meat packing monopoly, a desirable outcome for much of the rest of America. Unfortunately – or fortunately – the Hippo Bill languished in committee. Then World War I broke out a few years later, and took attention away from the scheme. The Meat Question was eventually answered in a less spectacular way. The Department of Agriculture simply expanded pastures, and cattle ranchers stocked them with boring cows.

2. A Parade in the Middle of a Pandemic

Late summer, 1918, was a depressing time. WWI had raged for four years, millions had been killed, and millions more had been wounded. Many more around the world, even those far away from the battlefields, suffered from the disruptions and hardships caused by history’s greatest war to date. By then, America had joined the war, and Doughboy deaths and injuries had steadily increased from a trickle to a torrent. Against that grim backdrop, the authorities in Philadelphia decided that the public could do with a morale boost.

So a huge parade was organized to raise spirits, and simultaneously support the troops by selling Liberty Loans – government-issued bonds that paid for the war. The parade would feature uniformed soldiers, Boy Scouts, women’s groups, Boy Scouts, and many marching bands. All would be capped by a concert headlined by the “March King” himself, composer and conductor John Philip Sousa. There was a hiccup, however, that the authorities overlooked, or more accurately, ignored: the Spanish Flu, the modern era’s deadliest pandemic.

1. Philly’s Deadliest Parade

Despite its name, the first reported “Spanish” Flu case actually occurred in a US Army training camp in Kansas in spring, 1918. Within days, the virus reached New York City, and within a month, it was a pandemic that raged across the world. It was lethal, but compared to what followed, the initial outbreak was relatively mild. A second and significantly deadlier wave hit in the summer of 1918, and mortality rates skyrocketed. Philadelphia’s public health director, Wilmer Kursen, protested that it was a bad time for a parade, but was ignored. On September 28^th, 1918, at least two hundred thousand spectators jammed Broad Street to watch a miles-long procession. They cheered as bands blared brassy tunes and floats passed by, with the latest additions to America’s arsenal, such as airplanes built in Philly.

Spectators were packed like sardines in a can, and the Spanish Flu’s virus could not have dreamt of a more hospitable environment to spread. Within two days, cheers turned to fear, as Kursen announced that the pandemic had taken hold in the city. Philadelphia was unprepared. 72 hours after the parade, every single bed in its 31 hospitals was filled, as the Spanish Flu raged. Too late, the authorities tried to curb the pandemic, and shut down all public spaces. That shut the barn door after the horses had already escaped. Within a week of the parade, 2600 Philadelphians had died of the flu, and within two weeks, that figure had spiked to 4500. It was Philly’s deadliest, and most misguided parade, ever.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

American Battlefield Trust – Lincoln Rejects the King of Siam’s Offer of Elephants

Atavist – American Hippopotamus: A Bracing and Eccentric Epic of Espionage and Hippos

Bentley, Matthew A. – Spaceplanes: From Airport to Spaceport (2009)

Blair, Clay Jr. – Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942  (1996)

Blair, Clay Jr. – Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945  (1996)

Boing Boing – US Air Force Proposal: Pause the Earth’s Rotation So Nukes Would Miss Targets

Cracked – 13 WWII-Era Plans That Sound Like Bond Supervillain Schemes

Emerging Civil War – Reality vs Myth Regarding Abraham Lincoln’s War Elephants

Ford, Brian J. – Secret Weapons: Technology, Science and the Race to Win World War II (2013)

History Collection – Thomas Fitzpatrick Landed a Plane on the Streets of New York While Drunk

Los Angeles Times, June 7^th, 1987 – Bizarre Lives Bared of Star, Son Accused of Her Murder

Mental Floss – The Time the Allies Tried to Disarm Hitler With Female Sex Hormones

Miller, David – U-Boats (2000)

Mysteries of Canada – Joseph Guay, the Worst Mass Murder in North America

New Scientist, August 20^th, 2008 – The Soviet Ape-Man Scandal

New Yorker, November 7^th, 1953 – It Has No Name

Pennsylvania Gazette, November 1^st, 1998 – The Flu of 1918

Scotsman, The, December 20^th, 2005 – Stalin’s Half-Man, Half-Ape Super Warriors

Smithsonian Magazine, September 21^st, 2018 – Philadelphia Threw a WWI Parade That Gave Thousands of Onlookers the Flu

Times, The, January 18^th, 2018 – JFK Files Reveal That CIA Urged Hollywood Actress to Sleep With King Hussein of Jordan

U-Boat Aces – Rocket U-Boat Program

Vice – She Was the Last Woman Executed in Canada

We Are the Mighty – America Wanted to Stop Earth’s Rotation During Cold War

Wired – The Crazy, Ingenious Plan to Bring Hippopotamus Ranching to America