Imagine: a quiet, tense night in the middle of wartime. A plane rips through the air above your city, rupturing the stillness. The bay doors open, and out whistles a bomb. It drops and drops. Everyone braces. But when it explodes, the city is filled not with the flash of impact, but with hundreds and hundreds of tiny, whirling bats.

This ridiculous vision — in which Japanese cities were destroyed by a giant bomb full of bats that were themselves carrying tinier bombs — was called Project X-Ray, and it was but a claw’s breadth from becoming a reality.

Read the article “The Almost Perfect World War II Plot to Bomb Japan with Bats” on atlasobscura.com.