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1943, the U.S. military had identified a suitable population of bats, having located a series of caves in Texas that were home to millions of the flying critters. For the next year or so, at the expense of $2 million ($25 million in today’s dollars), they tested Adams’s theory. Except for one major problem—at one point, some bats got loose resulting in a major fire at the base—the military believed that the bat bombs could actually work. One report placed their effectiveness at ten to thirty times more effective (measured by the number of fires they would start) than conventional incendiary devices.
    But the final report on the bat bombs issued in mid-1944, though positive, noted that they would not be ready for combat for another year. Due to the slow timetable, the military canceled the project before it could be fully developed.
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    BONUS FACT
    Bats eat insects (among other things), including malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In the 1920s, a researcher named Charles Campbell proposed building “bat towers” that would provide a roost for bats during the day so they could feast on the mosquitoes at night. An active one exists at the University of Florida, but the most famous one is probably the Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower in the Florida Keys. A fish lodge owner named Richard Perky built the Sugarloaf tower in 1928 with much fanfare—and one big problem. According to Atlas Obscura, when Perky put the bats into the tower, they flew off to find some bugs to eat—and never came back.
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BEATING THE BOMB
THE MAN WHO SURVIVED HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
    Twenty-nine-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima, Japan, about to return home from a business trip, when he realized that he’d left his
hanko
—a personal seal used for endorsing documents—back at the office. His return trip was interrupted by history. The U.S. bomber
Enola Gay
dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; its center of impact was fewer than two miles from where Yamaguchi’s walk took him. Nearly 140,000 people died in the explosion but Yamaguchi survived. The force of the blast knocked him to the ground, permanently destroyed his left eardrum, temporarily blinded him, and caused severe burns across part of his body. Nevertheless, after seeking shelter, he managed to return to his hometown for treatment the next day.
    Two days later, Yamaguchi—still bandaged and deaf in his left ear—returned to work. He was recounting the events of the Hiroshima bombing with a supervisor when the images he saw just a few days earlier began to appear before him again. But Yamaguchi was not suffering from a flashback. He worked in Nagasaki, and he was, again, fewer than two miles from the point of impact of an atomic bomb.
    And again, he survived. This time, he did so with no new injuries, although the explosion ruined his bandages from the first blast and caused him to run a fever.
    Yamaguchi is the only person recognized by the Japanese government to be a double
hibakusha
, the term given to survivors of the atomic bomb drops.
(Hibakushas
are entitled to a specific kind of government support.) Probably, in total, between 100 and 300 people survived both blasts, but only Yamaguchi has thus far earned the distinction.
    His health, after the blasts and radiation exposures, was decidedly mixed. He wore bandages for most of his young adult life, lost hearing in his left ear (as noted above), and went bald. His children all believe that they, too, inherited health problems caused by the radiation. However, Yamaguchi was (after a long recovery) able to return to work and live a relatively normal life—and a long one at that. He passed away in January 2013 at age ninety-three.
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    BONUS FACT
    Some call Yamaguchi the world’s luckiest person for having survived both bombs. If so, what does that make Kathleen Caronna? During the 1997 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, a
Cat in the Hat
balloon escaped its handlers, knocking over a lamppost. According to an