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Military researchers have poured blood, sweat, tears and taxpayer dollars into all sorts of wacky experiments. There are plenty of reasons that they are willing to take a take a chance on just about anything. Some may feel that we need to invest in risky projects to keep an edge over our adversaries. Others may view unusual projects as a way of raising money for their own personal crusades.

Bat Bombs

Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.

According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

After that accident, the project was turned over to the Navy, which continued it for more than a year. During that time, the Marines conducted a successful proof of concept at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where they released bats over a mock-up of a Japanese city. The critters were able to start quite a few fires.

Alaskan Area 51

A few years ago, Todd Pedersen, an Air Force physicist, sat in the snow and watched as auroras — similar to the famous northern lights — began to glow above his base in the Alaska wilderness. But these luminous forms weren’t created by nature. Pedersen had made them himself, with the help of an enormous array of antennas that can hurl several megawatts of radio waves into the upper atmosphere, creating brilliant light shows in the sky.

The facility is known as HAARP, or the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, and it is meant to answer some intriguing questions about the ionosphere. But it has raised even more questions among conspiracy theorists. Over the years, it’s been called a weather-control machine, a superweapon and the ultimate underground spying machine. As if creating artificial aurora borealis wasn’t freaky enough.

Nuke Test, Too Close for Comfort

When a nuclear warhead detonates, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby. And you definitely don’t want to be taking cover just a couple of miles away. But during the Cold War, a handful of soldiers were ready to start a nuke fight, right up-close and personal, using portable launchers and low-yield bombs.

In the 1960s, the Army had more than two thousand guns meant for launching small nukes, each with a maximum range of only 2.5 miles. The Army lit one of those firecrackers in the Nevada desert during the summer of 1962 while Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy watched. It exploded only 1.7 miles from where it was launched, and was the last above-ground nuclear explosion conducted by the United States.

Extreme Skydiving

In 1960, Captain Joe Kittinger rode a balloon up into the stratosphere — 20 miles above the Earth — and then jumped out of it. He hurled toward the ground at 714 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound, and landed safely in the sands of the New Mexico desert.

His daring leap was part of Project Excelsior, an attempt to explore the safety issues that pilots would face while handling high-flying aircraft. Kittinger’s test proved that an experimental parachute, designed by Francis Beaupre, would hold up under the most extreme conditions.

To date, nobody has broken Kittinger’s altitude record. But a privately funded team, backed by the makers of Red Bull, is trying to do it.

Deadly Dolphins

In the early 1990s, a Russian military officer allegedly trained several dolphins to attack enemy ships. He conducted tests to show that they could recognize different vessels by the sounds of their propellers. In theory, the mammals could be used to drag explosives up to enemy ships, while leaving friendly boats unharmed.

Years later, when he could not afford to care for the animals, he sold them to Iran. Their fate is still unlearned. And rumors persist of even-wilder military dolphin programs — marine mammals taught to kill enemy swimmers.