Episode 582: Bird Penetration System

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Last year, the Peace Prize was awarded to BF. Skinner, one of the most prominent psychologists in the field, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide flight paths.

This was a real study, published in the paper, Pigeons in the Pelican. And these are actual videos from the study. It seemed that Skinner knew how outlandish the idea was because he starts the paper by calling it a crackpot idea.

Young Chomsky (0:21)

I think he was preparing his reader for the fact that you're not going to find a real academic paper coming up. So he probably called it a crackpot for that reason.

Brace Belden (0:55)

Hello, hello, hello. Hello. I'm Liz.

Young Chomsky (0:57)

And I'm producer Young Chomsky.

Brace Belden (0:59)

And this is True Anon. Hello.

Young Chomsky (1:01)

Hello.

Brace Belden (1:02)

We are getting into some weird stuff today. Some weird stuff, but some familiar weird stuff, I think, to our... Familiar and unfamiliar, how about that? Yeah.

We're talking birds, we're talking kitties, we're talking raccoons.

SPEAKER_1 (1:18)

Insects.

Brace Belden (1:19)

Insects and mind control experimentation.

SPEAKER_1 (1:25)

We're talking BF Skinner, and I had a question related to him.

Brace Belden (1:28)

Okay. Is there a GF Skinner?

Oh, I didn't get that. I was just like, I don't know who his siblings are. Yeah. But they could be. Yes, we are talking BF Skinner. We're talking behaviorism, mind control, body control.

SPEAKER_1 (1:47)

The two genders.

Brace Belden (1:49)

Yes. And so much more with our old friend, Robert Skvarla.

SPEAKER_1 (1:55)

Wow.

Robert Skvarla (1:56)

You pronounced that so well.

Brace Belden (1:59)

It's so great to have him here in the studio. It is.

He's so great. He's got a new sub stack, neither confirm nor deny, and a bunch of new articles up on all of this and more.

SPEAKER_1 (2:08)

I don't understand if he can't confirm or deny that he has a sub stack, how are we supposed to read it?

Brace Belden (2:13)

Very well.

SPEAKER_1 (2:16)

Okay.

Brace Belden (2:18)

So we're going to get into it right now.

Robert Skvarla, writer, independent journalist, of the neither confirm nor deny sub stack, which we will link to here, you've got two new pieces that I'm so excited to talk to you about. We're talking MKUltra, we're talking pigeons, we're talking Discordianism, we're talking the bell curve, animal behavioral control. So many fun histories to get into, and what they all have to do with each other. Here's my question. When did you get into pigeons?

Robert Skvarla (3:02)

It was not something I directly sought out. So this project has been in Genesis for probably three or four years. I think some of your listeners will remember that my first episode here was on COINTELPRO. And that's where my research started, but because of issues with FOIA backlogs and how long it takes to get documents, that has been put on hold at least temporarily. So I believe in around 2022, 2023, I started taking trips to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

And in the course of doing research on that and other projects on mind control more generally, because I'm interested in the social history of brainwashing, I started just pulling whatever I could find from the history of DARPA, its predecessor organization ARPA, and various military offices. In one of the boxes, I saw something that had not been labeled in the online catalog for NARA labeled Bird Penetration System. Okay, stop, pause. Pause on that.

Brace Belden (4:02)

For a lot of reasons.

Robert Skvarla (4:03)

Yeah, so, I mean, seeing that, my mind instantly is like, okay, I see these words individually, and all of them would probably cause me to pull this file. But I had to pull it because of the combination.

Brace Belden (4:14)

I'm surprised no one else did.

Robert Skvarla (4:15)

I'm actually shocked by it, yeah. So we'll get into it later, the person behind it. But when I pulled it out, it was exactly everything I thought and more, because it was a project budget for an ARPA program.

Brace Belden (4:26)

What was it everything you thought?

Robert Skvarla (4:27)

I mean, so when I see Bird Penetration System, I'm thinking like, I don't think birds are being, you know, penetrated.

Brace Belden (4:33)

Well, you had to open the folder to find out.

Robert Skvarla (4:34)

Sure.

But like in the military context, penetration usually means like breaking through a system or something along those lines. So when I saw it and I pulled the folder, and I saw the project budget and the phrase transponder, beacon package and all that stuff, immediately my mind went to all of these different places.