Couffer's (1992) enjoyable book, "Bat Bomb," is a great story about an idea that wasn't. The following quote from McCracken's correspondence with R.A. von Doenhoff of the United States National Archive concerning Project X-Ray (McCracken, 1990) briefly summarizes this debacle. "Project X-Ray was an experiment undertaken by the Department of the Navy to determine if incendiary devices attached to bats would be useful if they were released form aircraft over major Japanese cities. The theory was that the bats would be released just before dawn with incendiary devices with timers attached to each bat. As daylight approached, the bats would head for dark recesses of wooden Japanese houses. When the bats were safely asleep, the incendiary devices would ignite, thus producing a conflagration of unprecedented proportions. A test run of this theory was carried out in the south western United States. However, the advent of the atomic bomb rendered this experiment moot."
