Project Pigeon: WWII’s Pigeon-Guided Missiles
This is the history of a crackpot idea, born on the wrong side of the tracks intellectually speaking, but eventually vindicated in a sort of middle-class respectability. It is the story of a proposal to use living organisms to guide missiles — of a research program during World War II called “Project Pigeon”
— B.F. Skinner
B.F. Skinner was a prominent 20th-century psychologist and inventor whose work saw major contributions to the theory of behaviorism.¹
During WWII, the US Navy ran into a problem, one Skinner believed he could solve. The missile guidance systems of the day weren’t advanced enough to be effective against the enemy. They were too large and primitive to work, so the Navy had to look at other options.
Before the war, Skinner had developed something called operant conditioning, which is a way to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others through rewards and punishments. Having learned of the search for an effective missile guidance system, Skinner realized that he may be able to use operant conditioning to help.
This was his solution: train pigeons to guide missiles to their targets.² ³
The Experiments Begin
In 1940, B.F. Skinner began to test whether this was a feasible idea. He found that he could train a pigeon to track a target by reinforcing the behavior of pecking at pieces of grain.
A brief description of these early tests is provided in Skinner’s paper published in American Psychologist under the title “Pigeons in a Pelican”:
At the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1940 the capacity of the pigeon to steer toward a target was tested with a moving hoist. The pigeon, held in a lacket and harnessed to a block, was immobilized except for its neck and head.
Movement of the head operated the motors of the hoist. The bird could ascend by lifting its head, descend by lowering it, and travel from side to side by moving appropriately. The whole system, mounted on wheels, was pushed across a room toward a bull’s-eye on the far wall.
During the approach the pigeon raised or lowered itself and moved from side to side in such a way as to reach the wall in position to eat grain from the center of the bull’s-eye.⁴
By 1941, Skinner had successfully used this technique to train pigeons to steer towards small model ships. Though he had hope for the usefulness of this project, he wasn’t initially able to get funding. The project was shelved, with Skinner having been told that the proposal “did not warrant further development at this time.”⁵
It took several more months, but by the time 1942 came around, Project Pigeon finally got off the ground.
The Project is Saved
In the summer of 1942, Project Pigeon was saved by a young man named Victor.
Victor had a crackpot idea of his own, he wanted to train dogs to steer anti-submarine torpedoes.⁶ Before putting this plan into action, he decided to run it by an animal psychologist. This led him to the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where he met B.F. Skinner.
When Skinner told him about the recent pigeon experiments, Victor “seized upon [the idea] eagerly.” Just like that, a hero was born.
Victor went to a number of companies in Minneapolis and pitched his torpedo dog idea. He cited the pigeon experiments to support his plan, but every company rejected him.
General Mills, however, asked for more information about the pigeon experiments. As B.F. Skinner relates in his paper:
We described the project and presented the available data to Arthur D. Hyde, Vice-President in Charge of Research. The company was not looking for new products, but Hyde thought that it might, as a public service, develop the pigeon system to the point at which a governmental agency could be persuaded to take over.
Thus, Skinner, along with two of his students, moved into “the top floor of a flour mill in Minneapolis” and began further research on Project Pigeon.⁷
Improvements are Made
During these experiments at General Mills, Skinner designed a new system of missile guidance using the pigeons.
The old way, using the pigeons’ head movements to control the motors of a moving hoist, was deemed ineffective. The researchers found it “difficult to induce the pigeon to respond to the small angular displacement of a distant target.” Because of this, a new plan had to be developed.
These were the basic steps of that plan:
- Show the pigeon a screen with a target on it
- Reinforce the pigeon’s behavior each time it pecks at the target
- Take the guiding signal from the point of contact between the screen and the beak
After some tinkering with the details of how to put this into practice, the pigeon training began.
As B.F. Skinner recounts:
We trained pigeons to follow a variety of land and sea targets, to neglect large patches intended to represent clouds or flak, to concentrate on one target while another was in view, and so on. We found that a pigeon could hold the missile on a particular street intersection in an aerial map of a city.
The pigeons were eventually trained to be able to “maintain longer uninterrupted runs than could conceivably be required by a missile.” With this accomplishment secured, the researchers began to add new variables to the experiments.
We ascertained optimal conditions of deprivation, investigated other kinds of deprivations, studied the effect of special reinforcements (for example, pigeons were said to find hemp seed particularly delectable), tested the effects of energizing drugs and increased oxygen pressures, and so on.
We investigated the effects of extremes of temperature, of changes in atmospheric pressure, of accelerations produced by an improvised centrifuge, of increased carbon dioxide pressure, of increased and prolonged vibration, and of noises such as pistol shots.
These experiments proved that pigeons were able to keep track of their targets even under intense conditions. Once again, Project Pigeon was showing promise.⁸
Funding is Secured
A film demonstrating the findings of the experiments was created and the researchers “were given an opportunity to present our case in Washington in February, 1943.”
Soon after, the US government sent observers to Minneapolis to see the pigeons for themselves. Impressed by the pigeons’ performance, the observers returned to Washington and two weeks later asked for more data concerning the project.
Specifically, the government wanted to know about two things:
- The population of pigeons in the United States
- The accuracy with which pigeons struck their targets on the screen
After some further tests, the researchers supplied the government with the necessary information. A few months later, the US government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development provided a modest amount of funding and the go-ahead for further research.⁹
Now that they had funding, Skinner and his team began work on a prototype of the pigeon-guided missile.
A Prototype is Born
After awarding the funding, the US government gave Skinner information about the missile they intended to use, known as the Pelican.
Despite being cleared for funding, Skinner was still having trouble reassuring the authorities about the ability of a pigeon to guide a missile. The solution was, of course, to up the pigeon count per missile.
Skinner explains:
We therefore multiplied the probability of success by designing a multiple-bird unit. There was adequate space in the nose of the Pelican for three pigeons, each with its own lens and plate. A net signal could easily be generated.
This seemed like a great idea, but the researchers ran into a small problem. What if there are two enemy ships in sight and the pigeons don’t all agree on which one to target?
The solution? Pigeon democracy.
The majority vote of three pigeons offered an excellent guarantee against momentary pauses and aberrations.
When a missile is falling toward two ships at sea, for example, there is no guarantee that all three pigeons will steer toward the same ship. But at least two must agree, and the third can then be punished for his minority opinion. Under proper contingencies of reinforcement a punished bird will shift immediately to the majority view.
While designing this new system, the researchers thought about what to do when the pigeons finally get used in combat.
They developed “methods for the mass production of trained birds” and even considered “train[ing] certain birds for certain classes of targets.” In fact, they wanted to create special squads which would be trained not just for a certain class of target, but for a specific target itself using images taken through reconnaissance.
In under six months, the researchers were ready to report their findings to the US government. Observers were sent to the laboratory for a demonstration and to review the tracking data.
Unfortunately for Skinner, the government declined to renew their funding in January of 1944. This was due to some issues with their data collection, leaving Project Pigeon in limbo once again.¹⁰
A Swing and a Miss
After losing his funding, Skinner had one more chance to prove that Project Pigeon was worth pursuing. He and his team were given the opportunity to present their case to a committee of the best scientists in the country.
Skinner decided to bring a live demonstration to prove the feasibility of pigeon-guided missiles. The pigeon he brought was harnessed inside a small black box that had a translucent window for the images to be projected onto. According to Skinner, the pigeon behaved perfectly despite less-than-ideal conditions.
Unfortunately, the demonstration had the opposite effect of what was intended. Scientists were more open to green-lighting such a strange project when it was in the abstract. Now that they actually saw the pigeon with their own eyes, they were able to fully comprehend how fanciful the project was.
Years later, Skinner summed up that meeting with the following words:
I will not say that the meeting was marked by unrestrained merriment, for the merriment was restrained. But it was there, and it was obvious that our case was lost.¹¹
Project ORCON
Although Project Pigeon was canceled in 1944, it was briefly revived a few years later in 1948 under the name Project ORCON.
Short for Organic Control, Project ORCON made a small change to B.F. Skinner’s original plan. This time, gold electrodes were attached to the pigeons’ beaks. The plates they used were semi-conductive, so when the beaks hit them, they sent signals to the controlling mechanism showing where the target was.
Project ORCON was undertaken at the US Naval Research Laboratory. There, tests were conducted to find in-depth measurements of the pigeons. This included “[a]verage peck rate, average error rate, average hit rate, and so on.”¹²
In 1953, Project ORCON met the same fate as its predecessor. Missile guidance technology had advanced past the need for pigeon alternatives, shutting down the project for good.¹³
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