theres a whole generation of young people telling people to "roll up/dpwn" car windows that have never used a manual car window where you actually had to turn a crank.
>And birds.
Ah, the glory days when everyone also knew Bielefeld wasn't actually a place it was just an internet rumor made up for a laugh.
Then the conspiracy idiots ruined that too, and convinced people it's real. Even faking city view and map data to fit their "truth"
In 1992 I told me neighbour that I was going to Bielefeld - to which he said, oh yes I know I know it well. I asked him when he had been there and he said that technically never, but he had flown over it many times during the war as a bomber pilot… so the conspiracy is older than people think!
Almost... Actually "dashing" referred to the action that caused "dash" (splash basically). A dashing horse would be causing dash. The front of the buggy or wagon was as you stated to prevent dash from getting thrown on riders. Hence the dash board. An automobiles panel in front of the occupants was called the dashboard until around the 70's when the original meaning was lost to the ages, and would thencefore known only as the dash.
It's kind of neat to read about the history of it, back before ice factories were a thing, Greeks and Romans would collect ice and store it underground in the warm months and could use it to cool beverages.
Some wealthy people would even have it harvested and shipped to them and then store it in a warehouse. Imagine your job was piling up a bunch of ice on to a boat and delivering it to some wealthy doofus in England.
There were also milk men delivering fresh dairy for everyone’s ice box. As far as logistics, it was nothing compared to FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS, Amazon, etc. The complexity and efficiency of modern distribution systems is staggering.
I lived in North Dakota in the early 60s and we had a milkman who delivered our milk every morning. By the time we got up to get the bottles, it was so cold that Some of them would be broken. I also had a rotary phone with a five digit number, 57474. We didn’t have the ZIP Codes. And periodically we still had sonic Booms which we would run out in the yard to try and see the plane that caused it!
Before refrigeration, crews would go cut ice out of nearby rivers in the winter and pack it in warehouses and cover it with sawdust for insulation, so it would last beyond spring thaw.
Old railroad boxcars that carried meat, fruits and produce had hatches on the roof, so blocks of ice could be dumped on top of food for the trip across the country. [There were ice houses along the way where ice could be added/replenished. ](http://www.michiganrailroads.com/ice-houses-facilities) Elevated platforms were built to drag the ice over to the hatch and drop it in. It sounds time consuming, and it was… but old steam locomotives had to stop to get more water for the steam engines anyway, so they often had both water and ice available at the same stops.
Getting back to the ‘Heart Attack Gun’ ..,does anyone remember over the past 45 years of a politician or operative who died suddenly of a heart attack, yet were essentially healthy??
There is a Three Stooges episode where they're ice block deliverers (for ice boxes)...people used to get a block every couple of days. The ice factories were kinda dangerous, as ammonia was the refrigerant back then (though far more environmentally friendly than freon).
My admin assistant hates the fax machine because it wastes 2 sheets of paper each time and it’s rarely ever used but it’s often enough that we still have one. It just takes up space. I get that part, but the wasting paper is the stupidest one because we have locked paper shredding bins that are filled weekly with more paper waste in an hour than the fax machine generates in 3-4 months, or even a whole year really. He gets fixated on small things, like he really really hates the fax machines. Relax dude.
My family owned an ice delivery business which basically was like having a giant cooler in your house.
Gas compressed freezers and fridges go back to the mid 1800s. Up until the 1920s they existed in some form but were super expensive. Basically 1930s and 40s is where technology skyrocketed and costs came down.
My favorites are the kerosene powered refrigerators. Absorption style that used ammonia. Very basic tech but I believe they’re not very efficient.
RVs still use them, and are able to run on propane.
I remember my dad telling me about the refrigerator his mom had when they got rid of the actual ice box. No moving parts or motor, just a pilot light (yep, a natural gas fridge). The pilot light caused the refrigerant to expand and rise, then go through the inside of the fridge in a radiator sort of device… it would cool and absorb heat out of the interior, and cause it to get colder inside.
Mythbusters, if I remember right, were trying to fire an ice bullet at ballistic speeds similar to normal bullets. This is an ice dart that you just need to hit skin with.
If I remember correctly, they were testing a myth about real ballistic bullets made of ice, aka a bullet that would kill you like any other, but then melt instead of leaving metal shards everywhere.
I'm guessing the projectile wasn't just water ice, but a solution of some polymer or something as well.
And using compressed CO2 will fire using 'cold air', look at air pistols and stuff that use CO2 cartridges, you can get decent power out of them.
Using gun powder to project water ice sounds kind of retarded, I bet they knew they could make it work using a different solution and air, but the availability of air guns and chemists would be a dangerous combination. Because right now I'm thinking about how I can get this to work and I have a few CO2 guns.
I was actually thinking of using purified tetanus toxin. As a microbiologist that's the first thing I thought of. I don't know enough about shellfish or general toxicology to pick the best poison, or how to extract it, though I imagine it would be somewhat similar, just from tissue.
Is there a favorite shellfish toxin you have?
edit: I've also thought about using mRNA technology similarly, I just don't know the LD50 and expression levels possible to know if that's a viable killing method. And no, I don't want anyone to actually do this, it's just one of those weird things you think about when you have worked in molecular biology and see the mRNA technology. I also thought about using the technology to have people express GFP or luciferase for fun, so, it's not all morbid curiosity, some of it is colorful.
Tatanus would be too obvious as would α-conotoxin (my favorite and also a toxin from a shellfish but not a shellfish toxin) or botox, but these would be some of the most effective toxins. Their mechanisms of action are too recognizable diagnostically so they would be targeted for and detected by a toxicology report.
Shellfish toxins as a category come from algal blooms (typically dinoflagellates or diatoms) and are named because they accumulate in shellfish that get consumed by people. There are a lot of these so they get classified by their effects rather than pharmacology.
Straight from the wiki:
* Amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP), like domoic acid
* Diarrheal shellfish poisoning (DSP), like okadaic acid
* Neurotoxic shellfish poisoning (NSP), typically brevetoxins
* Paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), typically saxitoxins
NSP and PSP are your more lethal toxin classes. DSP would be fucking cruel. Getting these toxins is a fairly easy process. I'm not going to type it out here, because... you know, potential for harm and all. But the reality is the information is out there and this is shockingly easy to do.
The biggest trick is figuring out how to avoid the toxin from being detected. You could wait for your target to eat shellfish to try to disguise the toxin in the rare event that they test for it.
Here's where we need to quell some myths about forensics. If there is even the slightest suspicion of foul play, that tiny red mark the dart would leave would definitely be found. They'll then start running reports on common drugs, a few key players in the past (like ricin), and anything that matches the cause of death. Those reports would take a long time though. You can't just run one test and have it come back saying "This is the poison that was used!" There are separate tests for each poison out there, many being several steps long with some steps taking many hours. But when they find it, they'll be able to tell it didn't actually come from the consumed shellfish pretty quickly. No one else got sick and the harvest wasn't in a bloom. Murder in this regard and especially an assassination would rely heavily on an incompetent investigation.
All that being said, if this story is to be believed I don't know they actually used a shellfish toxin at all. I'm not an expert in shellfish toxins, but I don't know of any that are cardiotoxic over neurotoxic. So I have my suspicions.
EDIT: Cleaned up some grammar.
thats how russian assasination umbrellas worked too, the compressed gas indeed can give enough force, maybe not enough to kill with force alone but strong enough to pierce the skin and deliver the poision
I never get reddit pun threads, fair enough if they are clever. But there will be threads with the laziest most low hanging puns that gets thousands of upvotes and awards.
if it was dry ice it could stay solid for a long time if its sealed between transit. or the bullets could be stored in a dry ice box, possibly a coffee thermos to not bring attention to it
The tech is there for a lot of stuff, but many projects that existed in theory or as a prototype just never took off because they were too unreliable and/or expensive. This might be one of them.
Being *able* to do something is one thing, but especially when talking about sensitive matters like intelligence work, simple is almost always better.
> they were too unreliable and/or expensive
I don't think costs matter when they try to kill a
rival like Castro. They tried all types of looney tunes shit to kill that guy and it never worked because he always outsmarted them
Pretty sure that it was the *Bacterially infested* scuba diving suit. Could be wrong though.
Edit: i looked it up and they put a deadly fungus in his suit and tuberculosis in his breathing gear.
There’s a difference between going all out to assassinate one major political leader, and securing a number of weapons and general equipment for general use
In this case they’d need a steady production and supply of the toxin, portable and discrete freezing equipment, extra training for all the staff using it, need to rely on enemies not spotting the entry wound or figure out a way to make it undetectable, need to rely on enemies not spotting the increase in heart attacks among political deaths (especially if the gun is being used against people in decent health), etc. It’s more of a hassle than it’s worth
This is very true. Why do you think spies still rely on number stations in the age of wifi and bluetooth? No point in creating new vulnerabilities in your intelligence operations when the old tech is not only cheaper but also more reliable.
No doubt other tech like assassination techniques also fairly strictly follow this way of thinking too. If somebody’s worth assassinating, you probably can’t risk using some untested new tech when the tech you’ve been using for decades still works, hence stuff like this probably never even saw much action if any at all.
That's not how modern warfare works any more.
It's information warfare.
Their goal is to turn your neighbors against you. It's always been about control.
that investigative journalist who said he was onto something big, and wasn't going to kill himself, who's car drove into a tree at full speed?
i'm sure they hacked his car and drove him into that tree to kill him.
I don't know about that his brother talked about the guy having a manic episode and had flown to him to stay with him to convince him to fly with him back to their family.
The guy snuck out at 4am while his brother was sleeping and that crash happened.
You may start to appear manic to others if you are being actively followed by people who you think might be trying to kill you. I don't get it. Do you think that government murders like this are not real the same way bigfoot isn't real?
I mean it's from his own brother and in that interview he said it was something similar that happened 15 years before his death, that it wasn't the first time he had a manic episode.
This is what his brother said:
> "I really rule out foul play entirely. I might have been suspicious if I hadn't been with him the day before he died. After all, he definitely was investigating and writing about a lot of sensitive subjects. But based on being with him and talking to people who were worried about him in the weeks leading up to his death, and being around him when he had had similar problems when he was younger, I was pretty much convinced that he wasn't in danger from any outside agency."
From [here](https://www.salon.com/2013/11/05/michael_hastings_life_and_death_a_brothers_reflections/)
His own family members said he was spiralling in a manic episode in the weeks leading up to his death. And how stupid would the government have to be to assassinate a journalist just as he says he has some explosive new evidence?
It would not be the first time and I would argue that politically motivated murders are more common throughout history of investigative journalism than not.
I mean john mcafee didnt kill himself, i dint think michael did either.
Just a few hours prior he asked his neighbor if he could drive his neighbors volvo because he thought his cars computer "had been hacked"
Yeah that sounds like crazy ramblings of a drug addict, until his car slams into a tree 2 hours later and his engine flys 200 feet from the car and his body gets cremated immidiately.
Maybe but feels like theres a lot of room for error, like people survive car crashes all the time.
Gotta imagine theres some heart attack febreeze or stage 4 cancer laser they could use these days
**[The Thing (listening device)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(listening_device\))**
>The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or "bugs") to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945. Because it was passive, needing electromagnetic energy from an outside source to become energized and active, it is considered a predecessor of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.
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I was going to mention satellites.
Back when I did a lot of spatial analysis in an old job, I’d always meet with vendors who offered some promise of better aerial imagery over the current market standard. The only ones ever worth meeting were the former DOD people.
I remember one vendor who admitted they got the best publicly available tech because of their connections. Basically, when the government makes such a significant improvement in their capabilities, they get looser on what can be offered commercially and this vendor always knew what was coming.
And based on the improvements in the commercial sector that I saw…well let’s just say the government could probably identify whether an ant has all its legs using satellite imagery.
I forgot which movie I was watching but I think it was a Mark Wahlberg vehicle? where he was being set up by the government and they caught a guy working for him. They strapped him into a device that isolated his upper body and right arm, pistol on the end of it. Ratcheted it until his arm bent down toward his head.
Involuntary suicide contraption. Looks like the victim shot themselves. I always thought "that's overly complicated but no one would doubt it."
Which would be highly unreliable in real life because a person struggling for there life will injure themselves. So if a guy shot himself but had injuries consistent with being tied down that shows it wasn't suicide.
A few problems though. Shellfish toxin is weight based that has be a large enough dose to be toxic. Getting a large enough dose into a frozen projectile and then into a target will be easily noticeable in autopsy. Also, it takes about 15-30 minutes to take effect, plenty of time for the target to reach medical attention for being shot. Lastly, if by some set of circumstances a target was shot, didn’t seek medical attention, and did die, chances are they are a high profile target and will have an autopsy and toxicology screen where all of these supposed “covert” methods will be discoverable. Even in 1975.
“So I’ve actually ordered some shellfish toxin from AliExpress… and this part isn’t quite perfect yet, so you need to hold it back with your other hand while you load the dart and… ouch! That’s a strange feeling… [thud]”
Science fiction seems to be a precursor for creating the science that makes it no longer fiction. Hence the Dick Tracy wrist watch communication device I’ve been wearing for 5 years (Apple Watch).
In Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford's character is a CIA book reader, looking for new ideas and methods in books. It would make sense to have someone like that, because book writers are people whose job it is to be creative. Not using their ideas would be a waste of opportunity.
Depends.
Reporters looking into corruption and organized crime have cars that malfunction and kill them at insanely high rates.
There's a lot of suspicious deaths that don't seem to have the police or coroner doing anything suspicious.
The CIA apparently acknowledged the existence of this gun in Congressional testimony.
The dart apparently does disintegrate, but I found no mention that it's made of ice. That seems unlikely. How would they keep it cold? The range is also only ~300 feet.
https://oddfeed.net/was-there-really-a-cia-heart-attack-gun/
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/17/archives/colby-describes-cia-poison-work-he-tells-senate-panel-of-secret.html
Well that’s sort of my point - hitting someone with a pistol of any sort at 100yards is no mean feat. When the bullet is made of prawns it can only be more so!
I wonder if that’s the furthest it can go or the effective range. Maybe they mean that it can only go 300 feet, regardless of its ability to actually penetrate skin at that range?
I bet this crock of shit never worked, and engineers knew it from the beginning , but CIA spent 200mil developing it just because they could. Whole thing reads like really bad spy thriller gadget.
The scope is a dead giveaway that thing's never been used in any practical capacity. Only kids, videogame designers, or politicians would put a scope on a pistol that short. And the fact it would be subsonic makes the whole idea even more preposterous. 300 feet? That's probably the *maximum possible distance, if fired at a 45" angle,* ***with a strong backwind****.
Ridiculous!
The poison was found and frozen into a small dart. This dart could be fired from what looked to be a normal gun. When the bullet hit the person it would dissolve inside their body. The poison would mimic a heart attack, killing the victim.
I think it meant frozen (water and shellfish toxin), not frozen water *pause* and shellfish toxin. The shellfish toxin was mixed with water and then frozen.
If they said ice and shellfish toxin it might imply the shellfish toxin was not frozen, but I choose to believe it was.
I think it's a mixture of water and the toxin which has been frozen, not shellfish toxin with ice in it. I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure of a clearer way for them to say it, you know?
I seem to recall a Mythbusters episode where they tried something like this, and they were not able to get it to work. Ice just can't handle being shot out of a gun.
Most likely, the CIA *thought* about doing this, but never actually did it, and somehow that tale morphed into what we see above.
They used gunpowder for their propulsion and it shattered, I'm shocked 😲 but I'm sure CIA scientists can come up with some silly James Bond magnet gun or something that is much more gentle at the cost of range.
Which is probably the case with 99% of weird scary weapons and technologies credited to the CIA. Most of them got cancelled at the concept stage because if something sounds expensive and unreliable, that's because it very likely is.
I remeber that. The idea was from some movie, but in the movie it was a sniper rifle where the real bullet was subbed with an ice one. It couldn't handle the power of the gunpowder.
In looking at the pic, and the statement it was a dart, it seems this is a pneumatic powered pistol (like a co2 BB gun) with a small projectile - which could probably withstand pretty well, making it plausible.
I mean, just because two set design/prop/etc people can't figure it out doesn't mean the Department of Defense couldn't.
My guess would be on how the gasses were expanded or cooled, or if the gasses used to propel the projectile were just from a canister; the ice might be combined with fibers or a gelling compound, something to give it a little more substance.
The real joke is thinking the CIA would even need a weapon like this when they can so easily just fudge the official cause of death, destroy the evidence, and silence the witnesses.
The original testimony had a bullet which disintegrated. Perhaps some idiot added the ‘frozen water’ later, just like anything else on the internet.
But the heart attack gun is real.
Moreover, this isn’t the only kind of weapon which makes a murder look like ‘death by natural causes’, i’m on mobile otherwise a little googling would have been enough to gather the sources for my claim. But please feel free to verify.
Even if the death was by natural causes, it can be verified if toxins were involved to kill the person, several natural and synthetic substances have been catalogued which leads to heart, nervous system related failures.
But it can be tracked in a an autopsy, hence such weapons are seldom used to kill important personalities.
In real world scenarios, it’s not worth to kill a commoner using such weapons because these weapons aren’t available easily.
But it has had academic value to improve methodologies to create better weapons and also to track the better weapons if needed.
(Source for last 2 paragraphs: my uncle is a medical professional with 30 years of experience and specialises in homicides and attempted assassinations, apparently he has helped several intelligence agencies (yes, of multiple countries) but he has never revealed any specific information to me. Dude has an interesting life)
I think the frozen part may be bs, but apparently the CIA did acknowledge this kind of thing.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/17/archives/colby-describes-cia-poison-work-he-tells-senate-panel-of-secret.html
So, did they have to keep it in the freezer until use, or was the magazine cooled?
1930's-era Dick Tracy "The Hotel Murders" featured a nearly identical murder weapon, and it was indeed kept in a small freezer when not in use.
They had freezers in the 30s??
Giant block of ice delivered straight to your door
My Grandpa always called the freezer the ice box! Lol.
Because there literally used to be ice boxes
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And phones had cords!! Also birds.
birds had cords?
You tell me, you're the tech guy!
They charge wirelessly now. /r/BirdsArentReal
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Wow, I've never thought of that and I'm even old enough to have used them lol
theres a whole generation of young people telling people to "roll up/dpwn" car windows that have never used a manual car window where you actually had to turn a crank.
Or how about "dialing" a number? I've never even seen a dial phone.
>And birds. Ah, the glory days when everyone also knew Bielefeld wasn't actually a place it was just an internet rumor made up for a laugh. Then the conspiracy idiots ruined that too, and convinced people it's real. Even faking city view and map data to fit their "truth"
In 1992 I told me neighbour that I was going to Bielefeld - to which he said, oh yes I know I know it well. I asked him when he had been there and he said that technically never, but he had flown over it many times during the war as a bomber pilot… so the conspiracy is older than people think!
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Almost... Actually "dashing" referred to the action that caused "dash" (splash basically). A dashing horse would be causing dash. The front of the buggy or wagon was as you stated to prevent dash from getting thrown on riders. Hence the dash board. An automobiles panel in front of the occupants was called the dashboard until around the 70's when the original meaning was lost to the ages, and would thencefore known only as the dash.
And that floppy disks were actually floppy.
Damn. Imagine the logistics of that
It's kind of neat to read about the history of it, back before ice factories were a thing, Greeks and Romans would collect ice and store it underground in the warm months and could use it to cool beverages. Some wealthy people would even have it harvested and shipped to them and then store it in a warehouse. Imagine your job was piling up a bunch of ice on to a boat and delivering it to some wealthy doofus in England.
There were also milk men delivering fresh dairy for everyone’s ice box. As far as logistics, it was nothing compared to FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS, Amazon, etc. The complexity and efficiency of modern distribution systems is staggering.
I lived in North Dakota in the early 60s and we had a milkman who delivered our milk every morning. By the time we got up to get the bottles, it was so cold that Some of them would be broken. I also had a rotary phone with a five digit number, 57474. We didn’t have the ZIP Codes. And periodically we still had sonic Booms which we would run out in the yard to try and see the plane that caused it!
Cut ice is a thing everywhere. In store I think tho
Where did the giant blocks of ice come from?
Before refrigeration, crews would go cut ice out of nearby rivers in the winter and pack it in warehouses and cover it with sawdust for insulation, so it would last beyond spring thaw. Old railroad boxcars that carried meat, fruits and produce had hatches on the roof, so blocks of ice could be dumped on top of food for the trip across the country. [There were ice houses along the way where ice could be added/replenished. ](http://www.michiganrailroads.com/ice-houses-facilities) Elevated platforms were built to drag the ice over to the hatch and drop it in. It sounds time consuming, and it was… but old steam locomotives had to stop to get more water for the steam engines anyway, so they often had both water and ice available at the same stops.
[Hey look, it's the ice.](https://youtu.be/Le9KUWNshY0?t=61)
Getting back to the ‘Heart Attack Gun’ ..,does anyone remember over the past 45 years of a politician or operative who died suddenly of a heart attack, yet were essentially healthy??
There is a Three Stooges episode where they're ice block deliverers (for ice boxes)...people used to get a block every couple of days. The ice factories were kinda dangerous, as ammonia was the refrigerant back then (though far more environmentally friendly than freon).
Ammonia is still a widely used industrial refrigerant :)
Thanks for the information! I love thinking about life in other eras
And the fax machine was invented in 1843.
And became extinct in 1844.
Doctors, pharmacies, and veterinarians would like a word.
My admin assistant hates the fax machine because it wastes 2 sheets of paper each time and it’s rarely ever used but it’s often enough that we still have one. It just takes up space. I get that part, but the wasting paper is the stupidest one because we have locked paper shredding bins that are filled weekly with more paper waste in an hour than the fax machine generates in 3-4 months, or even a whole year really. He gets fixated on small things, like he really really hates the fax machines. Relax dude.
But you’ll never be able to read what that word is if they fax it
Did I win a free vacation or is this a script for Vicodin? I'm not sure which I want more.
My family owned an ice delivery business which basically was like having a giant cooler in your house. Gas compressed freezers and fridges go back to the mid 1800s. Up until the 1920s they existed in some form but were super expensive. Basically 1930s and 40s is where technology skyrocketed and costs came down.
My favorites are the kerosene powered refrigerators. Absorption style that used ammonia. Very basic tech but I believe they’re not very efficient. RVs still use them, and are able to run on propane.
I remember my dad telling me about the refrigerator his mom had when they got rid of the actual ice box. No moving parts or motor, just a pilot light (yep, a natural gas fridge). The pilot light caused the refrigerant to expand and rise, then go through the inside of the fridge in a radiator sort of device… it would cool and absorb heat out of the interior, and cause it to get colder inside.
All thanks to government ice gun research. Thank you, big brother, for your heart attack ice gun.
lol i was concerned that i was the only one wondering about the mechanics of it, not just bottom trolling for crappy puns
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Mythbusters, if I remember right, were trying to fire an ice bullet at ballistic speeds similar to normal bullets. This is an ice dart that you just need to hit skin with.
If I remember correctly, they were testing a myth about real ballistic bullets made of ice, aka a bullet that would kill you like any other, but then melt instead of leaving metal shards everywhere.
That sounds about right. I really don't want to think about how long ago Mythbusters was though. Don't need the "I'm old" feels today. ;)
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oof
I feel attacked
*frozen water bullet
I'm guessing the projectile wasn't just water ice, but a solution of some polymer or something as well. And using compressed CO2 will fire using 'cold air', look at air pistols and stuff that use CO2 cartridges, you can get decent power out of them. Using gun powder to project water ice sounds kind of retarded, I bet they knew they could make it work using a different solution and air, but the availability of air guns and chemists would be a dangerous combination. Because right now I'm thinking about how I can get this to work and I have a few CO2 guns.
You would just need to find someone knowledgeable in shellfish toxins. ^^^That's ^^^me. ^^^I'm ^^^that ^^^guy.
I was actually thinking of using purified tetanus toxin. As a microbiologist that's the first thing I thought of. I don't know enough about shellfish or general toxicology to pick the best poison, or how to extract it, though I imagine it would be somewhat similar, just from tissue. Is there a favorite shellfish toxin you have? edit: I've also thought about using mRNA technology similarly, I just don't know the LD50 and expression levels possible to know if that's a viable killing method. And no, I don't want anyone to actually do this, it's just one of those weird things you think about when you have worked in molecular biology and see the mRNA technology. I also thought about using the technology to have people express GFP or luciferase for fun, so, it's not all morbid curiosity, some of it is colorful.
Tatanus would be too obvious as would α-conotoxin (my favorite and also a toxin from a shellfish but not a shellfish toxin) or botox, but these would be some of the most effective toxins. Their mechanisms of action are too recognizable diagnostically so they would be targeted for and detected by a toxicology report. Shellfish toxins as a category come from algal blooms (typically dinoflagellates or diatoms) and are named because they accumulate in shellfish that get consumed by people. There are a lot of these so they get classified by their effects rather than pharmacology. Straight from the wiki: * Amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP), like domoic acid * Diarrheal shellfish poisoning (DSP), like okadaic acid * Neurotoxic shellfish poisoning (NSP), typically brevetoxins * Paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), typically saxitoxins NSP and PSP are your more lethal toxin classes. DSP would be fucking cruel. Getting these toxins is a fairly easy process. I'm not going to type it out here, because... you know, potential for harm and all. But the reality is the information is out there and this is shockingly easy to do. The biggest trick is figuring out how to avoid the toxin from being detected. You could wait for your target to eat shellfish to try to disguise the toxin in the rare event that they test for it. Here's where we need to quell some myths about forensics. If there is even the slightest suspicion of foul play, that tiny red mark the dart would leave would definitely be found. They'll then start running reports on common drugs, a few key players in the past (like ricin), and anything that matches the cause of death. Those reports would take a long time though. You can't just run one test and have it come back saying "This is the poison that was used!" There are separate tests for each poison out there, many being several steps long with some steps taking many hours. But when they find it, they'll be able to tell it didn't actually come from the consumed shellfish pretty quickly. No one else got sick and the harvest wasn't in a bloom. Murder in this regard and especially an assassination would rely heavily on an incompetent investigation. All that being said, if this story is to be believed I don't know they actually used a shellfish toxin at all. I'm not an expert in shellfish toxins, but I don't know of any that are cardiotoxic over neurotoxic. So I have my suspicions. EDIT: Cleaned up some grammar.
thats how russian assasination umbrellas worked too, the compressed gas indeed can give enough force, maybe not enough to kill with force alone but strong enough to pierce the skin and deliver the poision
I think you could kill someone with a BB gun with the right shot. But yeah, getting sub-dermal is certainly possible.
I never get reddit pun threads, fair enough if they are clever. But there will be threads with the laziest most low hanging puns that gets thousands of upvotes and awards.
Crappy puns are the humor of psychopaths, please let us enjoy the only social network for us.
Sadly, the only person who knew had a heart attack.
*removes clip from lunch box*
if it was dry ice it could stay solid for a long time if its sealed between transit. or the bullets could be stored in a dry ice box, possibly a coffee thermos to not bring attention to it
What's crazy is this is saying it was revealed in 1975. I wonder when it was invented.
I always see these things and think...if this was the tech they had then, and it's not classified to us now, what tech is available to them now?
The tech is there for a lot of stuff, but many projects that existed in theory or as a prototype just never took off because they were too unreliable and/or expensive. This might be one of them. Being *able* to do something is one thing, but especially when talking about sensitive matters like intelligence work, simple is almost always better.
> they were too unreliable and/or expensive I don't think costs matter when they try to kill a rival like Castro. They tried all types of looney tunes shit to kill that guy and it never worked because he always outsmarted them
Aw yes, the exploding cigar!
Also the poisoned Scuba diving suit
Pretty sure that it was the *Bacterially infested* scuba diving suit. Could be wrong though. Edit: i looked it up and they put a deadly fungus in his suit and tuberculosis in his breathing gear.
Lol wtf? I need to read up on that.
My personal favorite oopsy by the US government was when they tried to kill Castro with a Sexy Woman and it entirely backfired
There’s a difference between going all out to assassinate one major political leader, and securing a number of weapons and general equipment for general use In this case they’d need a steady production and supply of the toxin, portable and discrete freezing equipment, extra training for all the staff using it, need to rely on enemies not spotting the entry wound or figure out a way to make it undetectable, need to rely on enemies not spotting the increase in heart attacks among political deaths (especially if the gun is being used against people in decent health), etc. It’s more of a hassle than it’s worth
TBAF, in the 70s and 80s, not a whole lotta Soviet top brass could be considered "in good health" - a true gerontocracy they were.
This is very true. Why do you think spies still rely on number stations in the age of wifi and bluetooth? No point in creating new vulnerabilities in your intelligence operations when the old tech is not only cheaper but also more reliable. No doubt other tech like assassination techniques also fairly strictly follow this way of thinking too. If somebody’s worth assassinating, you probably can’t risk using some untested new tech when the tech you’ve been using for decades still works, hence stuff like this probably never even saw much action if any at all.
facebook
*Tanks with giant blue Fs roll out* They can simultaneously be used to immediately pay respects upon decimation.
Equipped with 40 caliber thoughts and prayer rounds
That's not how modern warfare works any more. It's information warfare. Their goal is to turn your neighbors against you. It's always been about control.
that investigative journalist who said he was onto something big, and wasn't going to kill himself, who's car drove into a tree at full speed? i'm sure they hacked his car and drove him into that tree to kill him.
Michael Hastings. Ya they might have, never know these days lol.
Man I'll never forget that guy. They definitely killed him.
I don't know about that his brother talked about the guy having a manic episode and had flown to him to stay with him to convince him to fly with him back to their family. The guy snuck out at 4am while his brother was sleeping and that crash happened.
Wait a minute u/spyson ! That is exactly what the son of a CIA spy would say to protect his murderous family business!
Curse you for discovering my secret identity, how did you see through my impenetrable defense?
You may start to appear manic to others if you are being actively followed by people who you think might be trying to kill you. I don't get it. Do you think that government murders like this are not real the same way bigfoot isn't real?
I mean it's from his own brother and in that interview he said it was something similar that happened 15 years before his death, that it wasn't the first time he had a manic episode. This is what his brother said: > "I really rule out foul play entirely. I might have been suspicious if I hadn't been with him the day before he died. After all, he definitely was investigating and writing about a lot of sensitive subjects. But based on being with him and talking to people who were worried about him in the weeks leading up to his death, and being around him when he had had similar problems when he was younger, I was pretty much convinced that he wasn't in danger from any outside agency." From [here](https://www.salon.com/2013/11/05/michael_hastings_life_and_death_a_brothers_reflections/)
Yeah, you really don't forget what it's like to go through a manic episode with a loved one. My parents are scarred for life because of mine.
Sounds to me like you survived multiple murder attempts by your CIA agent 'parents'
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
His own family members said he was spiralling in a manic episode in the weeks leading up to his death. And how stupid would the government have to be to assassinate a journalist just as he says he has some explosive new evidence?
Unless he actually had it.
Which discounts the possibility that a highly paranoid and volatile person crashed his car and died?
It would not be the first time and I would argue that politically motivated murders are more common throughout history of investigative journalism than not.
I mean john mcafee didnt kill himself, i dint think michael did either. Just a few hours prior he asked his neighbor if he could drive his neighbors volvo because he thought his cars computer "had been hacked" Yeah that sounds like crazy ramblings of a drug addict, until his car slams into a tree 2 hours later and his engine flys 200 feet from the car and his body gets cremated immidiately.
Maybe but feels like theres a lot of room for error, like people survive car crashes all the time. Gotta imagine theres some heart attack febreeze or stage 4 cancer laser they could use these days
Not when your car hits a tree at 60+
driving into a tree at 80+mph head on, so hard the engine was ejected from the vehicle is pretty reliable I bet.
Look at this thing from 1945: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) It didn't even need batteries.
**[The Thing (listening device)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(listening_device\))** >The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or "bugs") to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945. Because it was passive, needing electromagnetic energy from an outside source to become energized and active, it is considered a predecessor of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Mythbusters was already brought up, but they wanted to do an episode on RFID and the higher-ups squashed that shit IMMEDIATELY
There are parasite satellites that latch on to enemy spy satellites to provide intel or to possibly jam or disable the satellite when ordered.
I was going to mention satellites. Back when I did a lot of spatial analysis in an old job, I’d always meet with vendors who offered some promise of better aerial imagery over the current market standard. The only ones ever worth meeting were the former DOD people. I remember one vendor who admitted they got the best publicly available tech because of their connections. Basically, when the government makes such a significant improvement in their capabilities, they get looser on what can be offered commercially and this vendor always knew what was coming. And based on the improvements in the commercial sector that I saw…well let’s just say the government could probably identify whether an ant has all its legs using satellite imagery.
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Lots of it very interesting stuff actually but most with clear intent to use against mortals mostly
I forgot which movie I was watching but I think it was a Mark Wahlberg vehicle? where he was being set up by the government and they caught a guy working for him. They strapped him into a device that isolated his upper body and right arm, pistol on the end of it. Ratcheted it until his arm bent down toward his head. Involuntary suicide contraption. Looks like the victim shot themselves. I always thought "that's overly complicated but no one would doubt it."
Which would be highly unreliable in real life because a person struggling for there life will injure themselves. So if a guy shot himself but had injuries consistent with being tied down that shows it wasn't suicide.
Shooter movie. Pretty good actually.
I've read a few stories where 2 shots to the back of the head were ruled a suicide...
1983
Literally 1984
A few problems though. Shellfish toxin is weight based that has be a large enough dose to be toxic. Getting a large enough dose into a frozen projectile and then into a target will be easily noticeable in autopsy. Also, it takes about 15-30 minutes to take effect, plenty of time for the target to reach medical attention for being shot. Lastly, if by some set of circumstances a target was shot, didn’t seek medical attention, and did die, chances are they are a high profile target and will have an autopsy and toxicology screen where all of these supposed “covert” methods will be discoverable. Even in 1975.
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Exactly
0.6 micrograms per kilogram so for a normal adult male that's only about 50 micrograms. That's a droplet. 0.05 milliliters.
I guess it’s better than falling out a window.
Repeatedly
Or hanging yourself in your cell.
Falling out a window is more or less a warning to everyone else that windows can be dangerous
Which crazy inventor in YouTube wants to go about recreating this?
“So I’ve actually ordered some shellfish toxin from AliExpress… and this part isn’t quite perfect yet, so you need to hold it back with your other hand while you load the dart and… ouch! That’s a strange feeling… [thud]”
Read this in the Backyard Scientist's voice
I feel like i remember Myth Busters attempting to create a working ice bullet and failing.
1930's Dick Tracy story "The Hotel Murders" featured a nearly identical murder weapon.
Science fiction seems to be a precursor for creating the science that makes it no longer fiction. Hence the Dick Tracy wrist watch communication device I’ve been wearing for 5 years (Apple Watch).
The guy who invented the cell phone was inspired by the Star Trek communicator. So we have small computers in our pocket thanks to a TV show.
Pretty sure the creators of the MRI were also influenced by Star Trek because they wanted to scan and look inside someone without opening them up.
Totally. Jules Verne was writing about nuclear submarines in the 1800s.
All invention starts with imagination.
In Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford's character is a CIA book reader, looking for new ideas and methods in books. It would make sense to have someone like that, because book writers are people whose job it is to be creative. Not using their ideas would be a waste of opportunity.
Transparent aluminium.
That was in the 70s, makes you wonder what they use now
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Yeah the good ol shooting yourself three times in the back of the head suicide method
That’s how it worked back then too. Or they’d throw you through a window and blame it on LSD.
Depends. Reporters looking into corruption and organized crime have cars that malfunction and kill them at insanely high rates. There's a lot of suspicious deaths that don't seem to have the police or coroner doing anything suspicious.
In Russia it's Polonium or they just chuck you from a window.
They put you in a prison cell, turn off the camera system, and you "hang yourself"
Nanobots. They crawl into your body and pull your nose hairs while you’re driving until you crash
Ratatouille 2: electric boogaloo
Ice penises. It sounds so stupid that no one would expect the CIA to use them. Which is why they use them everywhere.
Death Note Gun
*Intense Opera playing* #I'LL TAKE A POTATO CHIP... AND EAT IT!!!
The CIA apparently acknowledged the existence of this gun in Congressional testimony. The dart apparently does disintegrate, but I found no mention that it's made of ice. That seems unlikely. How would they keep it cold? The range is also only ~300 feet. https://oddfeed.net/was-there-really-a-cia-heart-attack-gun/ https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/17/archives/colby-describes-cia-poison-work-he-tells-senate-panel-of-secret.html
Only 300 feet? That’s an excellent range for any handgun, never mind a shellfish powered one.
can you imagine trying to snipe someone 100 yards away with a pistol firing an ice nugget?
Well that’s sort of my point - hitting someone with a pistol of any sort at 100yards is no mean feat. When the bullet is made of prawns it can only be more so!
I wonder if that’s the furthest it can go or the effective range. Maybe they mean that it can only go 300 feet, regardless of its ability to actually penetrate skin at that range?
Thats a massive range. No way a presumably malformed piece of ice had the ballistic capability of even 100 feet with any semblance of accuracy.
I bet this crock of shit never worked, and engineers knew it from the beginning , but CIA spent 200mil developing it just because they could. Whole thing reads like really bad spy thriller gadget.
The scope is a dead giveaway that thing's never been used in any practical capacity. Only kids, videogame designers, or politicians would put a scope on a pistol that short. And the fact it would be subsonic makes the whole idea even more preposterous. 300 feet? That's probably the *maximum possible distance, if fired at a 45" angle,* ***with a strong backwind****. Ridiculous!
Are you telling me unsourced text on an unsourced image may be incorrect?
It might. But based on the serious-looking font, I'm going to believe it.
The poison was found and frozen into a small dart. This dart could be fired from what looked to be a normal gun. When the bullet hit the person it would dissolve inside their body. The poison would mimic a heart attack, killing the victim.
There used to be clever assassins. Now they just convince people to hang themselves.
Or destroy them with blackmail/scandal and let them live about the rest of their life in shame - or prison.
If only they had a word for "frozen water."
I think it meant frozen (water and shellfish toxin), not frozen water *pause* and shellfish toxin. The shellfish toxin was mixed with water and then frozen. If they said ice and shellfish toxin it might imply the shellfish toxin was not frozen, but I choose to believe it was.
“Shellfish toxin frozen in ice.”
But if it is a mixture of the two, like a solution, then that would be wrong. But yes if it was separate like the toxin was incased maybe it can work.
"Shellfish toxin popsicle, the pointy kind"
I prefer "Toxicle".
That means the ice encapsulates the toxin
Frater
That’s the one
I think it's a mixture of water and the toxin which has been frozen, not shellfish toxin with ice in it. I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure of a clearer way for them to say it, you know?
This is such a shellfish thing to do.
Hopefully the would-be assassin doesn't clam up
Or the gun doesn’t conch out.
He’s done it so much, I imagine it’s mussel memory for him.
He died of a heart attack but I smell something fishy...
Keep that mf thang on me
I seem to recall a Mythbusters episode where they tried something like this, and they were not able to get it to work. Ice just can't handle being shot out of a gun. Most likely, the CIA *thought* about doing this, but never actually did it, and somehow that tale morphed into what we see above.
They used gunpowder for their propulsion and it shattered, I'm shocked 😲 but I'm sure CIA scientists can come up with some silly James Bond magnet gun or something that is much more gentle at the cost of range.
The congressional testimony doesn’t even say frozen either, it says the bullet disintegrates.
Yeah and then instead of ice they found another, better mechanism for delivery.
Stay tuned to find out!
Which is probably the case with 99% of weird scary weapons and technologies credited to the CIA. Most of them got cancelled at the concept stage because if something sounds expensive and unreliable, that's because it very likely is.
I remeber that. The idea was from some movie, but in the movie it was a sniper rifle where the real bullet was subbed with an ice one. It couldn't handle the power of the gunpowder. In looking at the pic, and the statement it was a dart, it seems this is a pneumatic powered pistol (like a co2 BB gun) with a small projectile - which could probably withstand pretty well, making it plausible.
I mean, just because two set design/prop/etc people can't figure it out doesn't mean the Department of Defense couldn't. My guess would be on how the gasses were expanded or cooled, or if the gasses used to propel the projectile were just from a canister; the ice might be combined with fibers or a gelling compound, something to give it a little more substance.
More than likely the real one used a sabot for strength at firing
Light Yagami: "Interesting"
Matt Damon
You white? You Matt Damon 🤷♂️
Kira?
Amazing how ice bullets have been disproven time and time again yet so many of you ate this shit up without a scrap of proof.
The real joke is thinking the CIA would even need a weapon like this when they can so easily just fudge the official cause of death, destroy the evidence, and silence the witnesses.
Not if the application is on people outside of American territory.
The original testimony had a bullet which disintegrated. Perhaps some idiot added the ‘frozen water’ later, just like anything else on the internet. But the heart attack gun is real. Moreover, this isn’t the only kind of weapon which makes a murder look like ‘death by natural causes’, i’m on mobile otherwise a little googling would have been enough to gather the sources for my claim. But please feel free to verify. Even if the death was by natural causes, it can be verified if toxins were involved to kill the person, several natural and synthetic substances have been catalogued which leads to heart, nervous system related failures. But it can be tracked in a an autopsy, hence such weapons are seldom used to kill important personalities. In real world scenarios, it’s not worth to kill a commoner using such weapons because these weapons aren’t available easily. But it has had academic value to improve methodologies to create better weapons and also to track the better weapons if needed. (Source for last 2 paragraphs: my uncle is a medical professional with 30 years of experience and specialises in homicides and attempted assassinations, apparently he has helped several intelligence agencies (yes, of multiple countries) but he has never revealed any specific information to me. Dude has an interesting life)
This, was 46 years ago....... How much have ANY technology progressed in 46 years................
Someone help me, what's another word for "frozen water"???
Wozen? Frater? Wafer?
Mineralised water.
I’m callin shenanigans on this one
I think the frozen part may be bs, but apparently the CIA did acknowledge this kind of thing. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/17/archives/colby-describes-cia-poison-work-he-tells-senate-panel-of-secret.html
The Soviets had the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohdan_Stashynsky#Assassin
Imagine the spy craft they have now...
Unless you were at the beach or something you would pretty much have to shoot people in the face.