This Halloween-themed bomb was as dumb as it sounds

At the height of the second World War, the U.S. military was devising a means to fire bomb Japan (and Japan was doing the same for the U.S.). Still a few years out from the Manhattan Project being completed, the First Lady's dentist friend, Lytle S. Adams, came up with a disastrous and inhumane plan — attach tiny napalm bombs to a million Mexican free-tailed bats.

It was called the "bat bomb."

The Mexican free-tailed bat is one of the most abundant mammals in North America. Known for having the fastest horizontal speed of any animal, the species was also considered because female bats could carry much more weight than themselves (because they need carry their babies until they can fly.)

They can also be induced into hibernation, making them easy to handle. And instinctively, bats seek out dark places during the daytime. So without a cave, they'll take shelter in buildings.

"This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into," a President Roosevelt's memorandum concluded. So Project X-Ray was given a cautious green-light.

The idea was to strap timer-detonated napalm packets onto the bat, fill a case with around forty bats, drop the bomb over a Japanese village at night, and by the time morning arrived, the bats would detonate the mostly paper and wood buildings.

At first, it didn't work. The lightest they could make an incendiary device was two pounds. Still thirty times the weight of the bat. They would fall like rocks.

Louis Fieser, the inventor of napalm, was then attached to the project. With his new weapon, he could shrink the individual capsule of napalm down to half an ounce. Since napalm is a liquid, it would also be more devastating when it seeped into the cracks. So testing began again.

Related: 5 insane military projects that almost happened

With the new light-weight devices, it still didn't work. Explosive-carrying bats burnt down much of Carlsbad Army Airfield. They broke free of their handlers and incinerated the test range when they roosted under a fuel tank and the General's car. This didn't stop them from testing the bat bomb. It was just further proof that it could work.

The project was then tossed to the Marine Corps; and it still didn't work. Millions of dollars were tossed into the project and over 30 demonstrations later, the atomic bomb was finished. There was no more need for the bat bombs.

Bats: 3

Mad scientist dentists: 0

(KingCitaldo125, YouTube)

Also read: These animals fought like animals on the battlefield