Pigeons and Peculiar Projects...

"Just one year before the dawning of the 21st Century, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, released an extraordinary batch of documents. They told an equally extraordinary story. It was a story that dated back to the Second World War. As the British equivalent of the United States’ FBI, MI5 became deeply concerned when intelligence data gathered overseas suggested the Nazis were secretly training pigeons – in France, Holland, and elsewhere – for certain espionage operations. That’s right: feathery 007’s. Whether or not they had their very own equivalents of martinis shaken and not stirred remains unknown. Presumably, MI5 considers that to be a still-highly-classified matter.

"The plan was a complex one: the 'pigeon agents' would have coded messages strapped to their bodies and would make their way to specific locations in the UK. They were locations where German spies were hiding out and awaiting orders from Hitler’s cronies. Faced with the possibility of squadrons of winged secret-agents doing the work of Adolf Hitler, MI5 went one step better. They hit back in fine style by hiring falcon-breeders to turn the tables on the Nazis and have the falcons take out the pigeons."

That's how my latest Mysterious Universe article starts.

And for more of my pigeon-based research, see below...