Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Yet something was missing. Well, maybe not missing . Maybe there was just a better way to do it. Wouldn’t a more direct approach make more sense? Why go to the trouble of designing and manufacturing fox-shaped balloons when you can just use the real thing?

Real foxes. Sprayed with glow-in-the-dark paint. Set loose on the beaches of Japan. What could go wrong?

According to the final plans for Project Fantasia, the operation would consist of several phases. First, pamphlets would be distributed to the Japanese population, warning them of the coming doom. Some of these could be airdropped, while others were intended to be passed along by the same sleeper agents we talked about before (who would still be charged with tooting their fox whistles and acting possessed). This time, however, the OSS planners decided to add a special touch to the musician agents. Apparently, someone at OSS contacted a chemist at one of the top American government contractors—who was already doing secret war work—and asked him if he could help the operation. The idea was for the chemist to create “fox odors” that the agents could smear on their bodies to make it more convincing that they were possessed. These came in both powder and paste form. It’s the little things that count. We all need to feel as though we have control of our options before we go behind enemy lines, pretend we are possessed by animal spirits (while slathered with stinky animal smell), and play our fox whistles in tune.

With the difficult parts of the operation taken care of, all that remained was procuring the foxes and covering them with phosphorescent paint for some obligatory field testing. This was about the time that the OSS decided it needed to brief General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of all Allied forces in the Pacific, on Project Fantasia. It was, after all, his operation that Fantasia was supporting. MacArthur had always had a deep appreciation of the utility of psychological operations (he understood their power as a force multiplier), and he was certainly willing to listen to any idea that might make his war against the Japanese go a little easier.

It didn’t take long for MacArthur to notice a glaring weakness in the plan: Perhaps the key word in the phrase “island-hopping campaign” is “island.” You know, the landmass surrounded by water? Unless the foxes were going to be parachuted onto the islands (they weren’t, although that would have been awesome), they would have to swim ashore like the rest of the troops. It was one thing for 1940s technology to master glow-in-the-dark paint; it was another thing to ask engineers to invent waterproof glow-in-the-dark paint. The terrifying fox ghosts would just be normal foxes by the time they got to dry land.

But OSS wasn’t deterred. Or they were incredibly stubborn. Or maybe both.

To prove MacArthur wrong, OSS set up a controlled test. They took a couple of painted foxes and dumped them into the Chesapeake Bay. That would show him.

Or not. When the foxes reached shore, most of the paint was gone—but not all! There’s no record of the reaction of the OSS personnel on the beach, yet we can imagine that after all of this they were holding on to whatever positive news they could. If there was still some paint left, the foxes might still glow… a little? Faintly glowing foxes could still be scary.

Alas, no. Within minutes, the foxes had licked off the remaining paint.

We (and they) probably should have seen this coming from a mile away. Foxes are in the same family as dogs, and, while not as obsessive as my cat Elwood in her grooming standard, my dog Scout can spend twenty minutes licking an imaginary speck of God knows what off her paw. Granted, Scout will also roll around outside for hours in all kinds of grossness, but this is all-natural grossness. Not some kind of laboratory-created, glow-in-the-dark grossness. The paint didn’t stand a chance.

But the operation still did! One minor setback wasn’t going to stand in the way of a vaguely promising idea for which countless hours of research and funds had already been committed. In all seriousness, ignoring for a second how silly and offensive this plan was, these were patriotic American scientists trying to figure out ways to save lives. So they tried another test. This time with less water. And more New Yorkers.

For test number two, the OSS collected thirty foxes, painted them appropriately, and let them loose in Central Park during a busy weekend evening. And as you might expect, this scared the living crap out of the unsuspecting residents of the Big Apple. Meaning, the test… actually worked. As one newspaper described, no one expected to see dozens of foxes racing at them “painted with a radiant chemical which glowed in the dark.” The article continued, “Horrified citizens, shocked by sudden sight of the leaping ghostlike animals, fled from the dark recesses of the park with the ‘screaming jeemies.’”

Now, I don’t know what the hell a “screaming jeemie” is, but if New Yorkers, who are used to seeing sewer rats the size of small children on an average Tuesday afternoon, were terrified by these phosphorescent foxes, then OSS had a winner on their hands. They’d just have to figure out the whole don’t-get-them-wet thing later. Like in Gremlins .

With testing complete, OSS planners were ready to scale up from the laboratory to the battlefield. Thirty foxes was plenty for Central Park, but they would need hundreds for an Allied invasion of the Japanese main islands. Fortunately, Australia and China had sufficient animals to meet the operation’s needs, and the fox roundup began in earnest. Soon the OSS would have all of the animals they needed to implement their mischievous plan. Let’s do this!

So… you might have noticed I haven’t been all that specific when it comes to dates/months/years for this project. I wanted you to keep reading, and not stop the minute you realized that all this planning and testing was taking place just weeks before the equivalent of 25,000 tons of TNT vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Project Fantasia never fully got the chance to get off the ground due to the success of the atomic bombs in bringing about the end of the war. We will never know if glowing foxes could have been the deciding factor in the Pacific War.

I’m kidding. Of course we know. There’s no way this would have worked. The entire plan was based on a perceived sense of cultural superiority that was utter nonsense. American contempt for Japanese society blinded us to the fact that this was the nation that had kicked our butts at Pearl Harbor—using ideas and technology we hadn’t even thought of yet. We would have never tried this against the Germans. The Germans were urbane, they were cosmopolitan, they were European, they were white.

The Japanese were Asian, they were superstitious, they were gullible, they were primitive. They would be easy to dupe.

Sadly, we learned the truth the hard way.

AND THEN WHAT?

Psychological Operations have continued to be a mainstay of intelligence and military missions worldwide. Just about every country tries to use PsyOps as a force multiplier, whether in peace or war, regardless of whether they are squaring off against another major power or against an asymmetrical threat. Since the United States has fought mostly asymmetrical opponents (insurgencies, guerrillas, terrorists) in the last sixty years, the use of PsyOps to “win the hearts and minds” of local populations has been a priority.

Not that it’s always worked well, but there have been some wins for the United States along the way. Now, these are not necessarily strategic wins—Vietnam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can’t really be notched in the victory column—but these conflicts certainly included tactical successes in the realm of psychological operations. These include convincing villagers in southern Vietnam to resist the lure of false promises of the Viet Cong, and recruiting locals in Afghanistan and Iraq to take up the fight against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or ISIS. Anytime you can convince someone not to fight you—or better yet, to fight with you? Call it what you want, but that’s a win in my book.