Pentagon plans cyber-insect army
By Gary Kitchener
BBC News
Thursday, 16 March 2006, 15:01 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4808342.stm

The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.

The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later.

Experts told the BBC some ideas were feasible but others seemed "ludicrous".

A similar scheme aimed at manipulating wasps failed when they flew off to feed and mate.

The new scheme is a brainwave of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is tasked with maintaining the technological superiority of the US military.

It has asked for "innovative" bids on the insect project from interested parties.

'Assembly-line'

Darpa believes scientists can take advantage of the evolution of insects, such as dragonflies and moths, in the pupa stage.

"Through each metamorphic stage, the insect body goes through a renewal process that can heal wounds and reposition internal organs around foreign objects," its proposal document reads.

DARPA SCHEMES
Arpanet information processing system - a precursor to the internet
Self Healing Minefield - the mines reconfigure themselves to fill gaps when one or more are stepped on.

Brain Interface Programme to wire soldiers directly into their machines
Mechanical Elephant to penetrate dense Vietnam War jungle. Unused
Policy Analysis Market - online futures market where "traders" wager on future terrorism and assassinations.

Computer game, Tactical Iraqi, to teach troops how to decipher Iraqi body language.

The foreign objects it suggests to be implanted are specific micro-systems - Mems - which, when the insect is fully developed, could allow it to be remotely controlled or sense certain chemicals, including those in explosives.

The invasive surgery could "enable assembly-line like fabrication of hybrid insect-Mems interfaces", Darpa says.

A winning bidder would have to deliver "an insect within five metres of a specific target located 100 metres away".

The "insect-cyborg" must also "be able to transmit data from relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc."

'Fiction'

Scientists who spoke to the BBC news website were unconvinced.

Entomology expert Dr George McGavin of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History said the idea appeared "ludicrous".

"Not all wacky ideas are without value. Some do produce the goods. My feeling is this will probably not produce the goods," he said.

ANIMALS IN WARFARE
WWII: Attach a bomb to a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships. The cat, hating water, will "wrangle" itself on to enemy ship's deck. In tests cats became unconscious in mid-air.

WWII: Attach incendiaries to bats. Induce hibernation and drop them from planes. They wake up, fly into factories etc and blow up. Failed to wake from hibernation and fell to death.

Vietnam War: Dolphins trained to tear off diving gear of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation, sources linked to the programme say. Syringes later placed on dolphin flippers to inject carbon dioxide into divers, who explode. US Navy has always denied using mammals to harm humans

"What adult insects want to do is basically reproduce and lay eggs. You would have to rewire the entire brain patterns."

Dr McGavin said it appeared impossible to connect the technology to the right places during the metamorphic phase, particularly with regard to flight.

Prof Andrew Parker, research leader at the Natural History Museum's zoology department and a specialist in bio-mimetics, said the concept was not too far fetched but had its limits.

Technology could help direct an insect to chemicals such as in roadside bombs, he said, but controlling full flight was "a long way off".

Entomology expert at the museum, Stuart Hine, agreed it was plausible to use insects to detect explosives.

But he added: "I feel that the reality of such cyborg fusion between insect and machine lies squarely in the realms of fiction."

To receive micro-signals from the insects would require a dish "quite close and several feet in diameter, rendering it a less than covert operation".

Darpa's previous experiments to get bees and wasps to detect the smell of explosives foundered when their "instinctive behaviours for feeding and mating... prevented them from performing reliably", it said.

Darpa was founded in 1958 to keep US military technology ahead of Cold War rivals.

Its website says it has around 240 personnel and a $2bn (£1.1bn) budget. Supporters say much of its work has been successful, but it has also drawn criticism for unusable "blue-sky" projects.

A former director said in 1975: "When we fail, we fail big."

   

Picture of Haarp project's Antenna grid

"Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations...It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counter terrorism] efforts." - Defense Secretary William Cohen, 1997
Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/cohen-ecoweapons.htm

Here is the Dept. of Defense link to the transcript.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr1997 ... 28coh.html


Well there you have it…..ARTIFICIAL TERROR...…by way of ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES…Said by….Sec Def William Cohen Himself!!!!


“Today, six rows of six large, super-powerful radio antennas point toward the sky in Gakona, Alaska. This project, known as the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, is the most powerful radio transmitter ever built in the world. HAARP is managed jointly by the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy, along with the University of Alaska. This advanced scientific research center is experimenting with the earth’s atmosphere. These powerful antennas are sending out radio signals into the ionosphere. These powerful antennas are sending out radio signals into the ionosphere causing electromagnetic waves to bounce back toward earth (Begich 1996).”
---Nick Begich ‘The Very Real Dangers of HAARP’ 1996

http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/


A list of some of their projects: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Technolog ... ?ArtNum=59

Darpa's Explination page for HAARP: http://www.darpa.mil/tto/programs/haarp.htm