The US Air Force Once Tried to Build a “Gay Bomb” – Here’s How That Went

A 1994 Proposal Weaponized Attraction

In 1994, researchers at an Air Force laboratory in Ohio pitched one of the strangest weapon ideas in American military history.

They wanted to build a bomb that would release chemicals making enemy soldiers sexually attracted to each other. The Pentagon never funded it, but the documents eventually leaked.

What they reveal says a lot about how far military planners were willing to go in the search for non-lethal weapons, and how little they understood about the science they were trying to exploit.

Wright Laboratory Drafted the Proposal

The concept came from Wright Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.

The lab was a research and development organization operated by the Air Force Materiel Command, and it was eventually merged into the Air Force Research Laboratory in 1997.

The researchers put together a three-page proposal requesting $7. 5 million and six years to develop the weapon.

The project had an official title that sounded like it came from a college prank: “Harassing, Annoying and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals.

The Idea Was to Disrupt Unit Cohesion

The concept involved dispersing sex pheromones to induce mutual sexual attraction among enemy soldiers, with the intention of causing confusion and disrupting military cohesion.

The gay bomb would be a cloud of gas discharged over enemy camps.

The thinking was that soldiers overcome with attraction to each other would be too distracted to fight. The proposal described the concept as “distasteful” but argued it was “completely non-lethal.”

The Documents Stayed Hidden for Years

The Sunshine Project was an international nonprofit dedicated to monitoring biological weapons research, directed by Edward Hammond and based in Austin, Texas, and Hamburg, Germany.

The group filed a Freedom of Information Act request targeting records from Wright Laboratory, which resulted in the release of the three-page technical memorandum dated June 1994.

NBC News reported on the proposal in January 2005, and the Pentagon did not deny it happened.

The Timing Was Deeply Ironic

In 1993, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was instituted within the US military, permitting gays to serve but banning homosexual activity.

It wouldn’t be until 1994, only one year after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” came into effect, that the true potential of being gay became clear to the US military in the form of a bomb.

One part of the military was discharging service members for being gay while another part was trying to figure out how to weaponize it against enemies.

The Science Was Never There

No well-controlled scientific studies have ever been published suggesting the possibility of pheromones causing rapid behavioral changes in humans.

Researchers and fragrance companies have been hoping to find a human sex pheromone for decades, but so far the search has failed.

To date, no chemicals have been isolated in humans that meet the criteria for a pheromone with well-defined behavioral effects. The proposal even acknowledged this problem in a section titled “New Discoveries Needed.

LGBTQ Advocates Were Outraged

“Throughout history we have had many brave men and women who are gay and lesbian serving the military with distinction,” said Geoff Kors of Equality California.

“It’s just offensive that they think by turning people gay that the other military would be incapable of doing their job. And it’s absurd because there’s so much medical data that shows that sexual orientation is immutable and cannot be changed.”

Critics like Aaron Belkin, director of the University of California’s Michael Palm Center, called the idea “ludicrous.”

The Same Document Had Other Wild Ideas

The researchers also proposed a bomb that would cause “severe and lasting halitosis,” though it’s not entirely clear what they hoped to achieve by just giving their enemies bad breath.

Another idea was a bomb titled “Who? Me? ” which simulated flatulence among the ranks, hopefully distracting soldiers with terrible smells.

There was also a chemical that would make combatants’ skin so sensitive to sunlight that it would become unbearable, and one designed to attract swarms of angry insects.

Bizarre Weapons Have a Long History

The gay bomb was hardly the military’s first strange idea.

During World War II, the US explored bat bombs, attaching tiny incendiary devices to bats and releasing them over enemy targets. Psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed Project Pigeon, training birds to guide missiles by pecking at images of targets on a screen.

In the 1960s, the CIA tried to turn a live cat into a covert listening device in a project called “Acoustic Kitty. ” None of these succeeded either.

The 1990s Pushed Non-Lethal Research

The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 signaled not only the end of the Cold War but also the start of a new geopolitical order where America took on the role of guardian and peacekeeper.

Operations in Somalia between 1992 and 1995 brought tactical issues to the forefront, as US troops couldn’t effectively deal with resistance in environments where armed combatants mixed with civilian populations.

This prompted research into non-lethal weapons meant to incapacitate rather than kill.

Wright Laboratory Won a Satirical Award

The Air Force Wright Laboratory won the 2007 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for “instigating research and development of a chemical weapon, the ‘gay bomb,’ that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.”

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research and honor achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The awards were handed out by genuine Nobel laureates at Harvard University.

Nobody Claimed the Prize

Air Force personnel contacted were not willing to attend the award ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre to accept the award in person.

The levity of the event seemed lost on the gay bomb creators, who kept a straight face about the whole matter.

The proposal lives on as one of the strangest footnotes in military research history, a reminder that even serious institutions can produce profoundly absurd ideas when they stop asking whether they should before asking whether they could.

Explore Aviation History at the National Museum of the USAF

The National Museum of the United States Air Force sits on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the same installation where the gay bomb was proposed.

It’s the world’s largest military aviation museum, with more than 350 aircraft and missiles on display across four hangars. Admission is free.

The museum is open daily from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. and is located at 1100 Spaatz Street in Dayton, Ohio.

You can walk through a presidential aircraft collection, see experimental planes, and explore exhibits on everything from World War I biplanes to stealth bombers.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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