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Dec. 2, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:47
Edition 595 - Stephen Walker
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
I hope everything is going well for you.
The temperature has nosedived in London as I'm recording this.
I'm looking out at a very grey sky and there are forecasts for the coming weekend where I'm recording this of sleet and snow.
Whoopee, you know how much I love all of that and how much I look forward and it's almost like a kid with an Advent calendar counting off the days to the spring.
I just want it to be over.
And they're talking about new variants of COVID and all sorts of other stuff.
So there's a lot to be wanting to escape from it all for, I think.
And I'm hoping that the unexplained is one of those things that allows you at times to be able to look elsewhere and maybe have a look at the big picture.
You know, the overall picture of life, not just today, this week, next month, next year, but, you know, cosmically, if that's the word.
I don't know.
You can tell me.
Thank you very much for some lovely, supportive emails that have come in recently.
This has not been a good time.
I've been doing the setup on the podcast myself, and my radio producer has left to write a book.
So I'm having to get even more involved in the setting up of that.
It's been a stressor.
But I won't trouble you with all of that because a lot of people have much deeper and more intense problems in their lives to deal with.
But that might explain why sometimes things are going to be a little delayed now.
But I'm hoping that they won't be.
But that just kind of explains that.
That's what's going on with me anyway.
Thank you to my webmaster, Adam, for his hard work on the website, theunexplained.tv.
And thank you to you, as I say, for being part of this.
If you want to communicate with me, if you have a guest suggestion or any thoughts about the show, you can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
What you're about to hear is a conversation recorded around an anniversary that I knew nothing about.
It is the 60th anniversary of the first chimpanzee to go into space, a remarkably brave animal called Enos.
Now, we have to say right up front that this is not the kind of stuff that we would do today.
And I don't think it's the kind of stuff we should have done then.
There are ethical and other considerations, but at that time, people were not as enlightened about those things and the scientists held sway.
So we're going to be talking about another era.
And just to warn you that one or two of the things that you will hear discussed, some listeners might find a little distasteful, might find a little disturbing.
Some of it, I know that I will not like and I will say so when I hear it, just about the nature of experimentation as they did it.
But I think we should be celebrating the bravery of a remarkable creature who did something that helped to permit us to explore space in the way that we do today.
So that's why we do this on roughly the 60th anniversary of the flight of Enos the chimpanzee for NASA to check the effects of space travel on a creature not too distant from ourselves.
So that's the story.
We're going to tell the story of animals in space as well with Stephen Walker, author and documentary filmmaker.
Last time Stephen was on here, we were talking about Yuri Gagarin, and remember his amazing book, Beyond, which I thoroughly recommend is still available and would make a great Christmas present, in my honest opinion, as they say.
Okay, when you get in touch with me, by the way, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And I'd love to see your emails.
And if your email specifically requires a response, then please say so in the email.
Okay, let's get to the guest then.
This is from my radio show, slightly expanded version of my conversation with Stephen Walker about animals in space.
Stephen, I'm sorry for saying so many words and taking so long.
How are you?
I'm very well.
Thank you.
Thank you, Howard.
And thanks for having me on.
Now, I don't know.
Did I summarize that right?
Well, actually, one of the things you didn't summarize right is the fact that animal experiments, and I'm sure we'll get to this later on, still go on in space.
I mean, there is a menagerie up in the International Space Station as we speak.
I mean, there are all sorts of animals up there.
There are mice up there and there are other sorts of animals.
A squid went up there very, very recently.
In the most, back, I think in June, just a few months ago, one of the SpaceX crew dragons took some baby squid up there, which are being kind of tested.
There are zebrafish.
There are all sorts of animals up in drawers and in cages in the International Space Station, circling the world right now at 18,000 miles per hour above our heads.
And they're up there for months and months and months.
So this is, in some respects, an ongoing story.
But of course, we're dealing with fairly small animals that are up there now.
If we wind the clock back, we start looking at much bigger animals and animals much more like us as human beings.
Okay.
Now, that surprises me.
I knew that there were small microscopic creatures.
It had again escaped me that there were mice up on the International Space Station now.
I presume, and let's get to this question right at the start, things are done in a scientifically ethical way these days, in a way that they wouldn't have been done perhaps 60 years ago.
Yes.
I mean, things are very, very different now.
There have been tighter and tighter and tighter laws.
And we can talk a bit about why that actually started to happen.
And it became a really big issue in the mid-1990s.
So yes, absolutely there are.
But it is also fascinating that these experiments are still taking place.
I mean, there were a few years ago, there were two spiders, for example.
One was called Gladys and the other one was called Esmeralda.
And they were filmed building webs in the weightless conditions of orbit in the International Space Station.
And in fact, they had a very, very hard time building those webs at first.
But eventually they managed to get the webs working.
And they were even able to trap flies.
It all happened in weightlessness.
And then the wonderful part of that story is when they got a ride back on the space shuttle, it turned out that Gladys wasn't a female spider at all.
It was actually a male spider and had to be renamed Gladstone.
So there we go, from Gladys to Gladstone.
We do have all these things going on, but yes, they are much more tightly controlled than they were.
And yes, you're right.
We're now just hitting the 60th anniversary of this absolutely extraordinary moment that is completely forgotten about in history, which is the moment when the first chimpanzee orbited the Earth on November the 29th, 1961.
So we're not talking about, we're not talking about flies, we're not talking about spiders, we're not talking about baby squid or mice.
We're talking about a chimpanzee and a very, very remarkable and very extraordinary chimpanzee called Enos.
And we'll get into the story of Enos in the next segment of our conversation here.
I want to set the scene, but just to say that Enos was not just sitting there as anything might be today in a remote control capsule.
Yes, a lot of it was that way.
But there were functions that Enos had to perform.
Enos did have to perform certain functions.
And one of the things that Enos had in front of him in his Mercury capsule, which was an exact replica of this capsule, it was exactly the same as the capsule that John Glenn, who you mentioned in your introduction, famously orbited the Earth in in February 1962, the first American to orbit the Earth.
The Russians already got there with both Yuri Gagarin and German Titov earlier in 1961.
But this was the first, this was a test flight, the first chimpanzee in orbit.
There had been a chimpanzee beforehand called Ham, who had performed a sub-orbital ballistic missile shot in advance of the first American to go in space at all, Alan Shepard.
This now was several months later.
This is the first orbital flight.
In front of Enos is a panel.
And on this panel, there are three levers.
This panel is called a psychomotor.
And what Enos has to do in the course of his flight is pull or push these leaders, these levers, in response to specific lights or light cues.
And if he gets it wrong, he gets an electric shock on the soles of his feet.
This is something that John Glenn did not have to do when he went around the world several times in 1962.
So he gets electrocuted on his feet.
And some of these cues are really quite complicated.
I mean, there's one of them, which is called an oddity program, where he has three symbols in front of him, two of which are the same, one of which is different, two triangles, one circle, for example, or one square.
And he has to pull the lever underneath the symbol, which is the odd man out.
And Enos was brilliant at this.
I mean, he was the best of the chimpanzee colony, the NASA chimpanzee colony at the Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory in New Mexico.
And he was an absolutely extraordinarily clever chimpanzee.
But on this flight, there was a system failure of the psychomotor.
And what happened was every time this chimpanzee Enos pulled the right lever under the right symbol, he got an electric shock.
I think we should complete that story when we talk specifically about Enos in the next bit, because there's a bit of a twist in this story.
But a remarkable, remarkable animal for a whole variety of reasons.
And if this animal were a human being, we would be celebrating him or her right now.
And we're not.
And that's sad.
And I think we need to rectify that.
Let's flip things back a little now.
Let's take things back to the 1940s, 1950s.
The war is over.
East is East and West is West.
What is happening in space research?
How are things as we come out of World War II?
I know that Werner von Braun, for example, as part of the denazification program, was taken across to the United States, became the man who masterminded America's rocket program.
And the Russians had similar people who'd been part of that.
So the scene was set.
The scene is set.
And at this point, they're building missiles.
So Werner von Braun's team, many of them who had been members of the SS and who built these V-2 missiles that had been raining down destruction on London and Antwerp at the end of the Second World War, have now been spirited away under a secret operation called Paperclip and are now working in the United States building missiles for their new masters, the Americans.
All their SS records, all their Nazi past, all those connections are completely erased.
They don't exist.
The files are hidden, essentially.
And these men, mostly, almost entirely men, not completely actually, but almost entirely men, are now working and they're building these missiles.
And at first, what they're doing is they're building V-2 missiles.
We're in the Cold War.
As you say, the Soviets are building their own missiles.
They've got some of these German scientists too, but not nearly as many, because frankly, going to the Soviet Union is not as attractive a proposition unless you're kidnapped to go there than actually working in the United States.
So they're building these missiles.
And these missiles are essentially exactly like the V-2 missile that was used on London at first.
And what happens in 1947, to begin with, is that there are discussions about starting to send live animals, tiny ones to begin with, fruit flies, up as high as these missiles will go, which is about 40 miles up.
So nearly to the edge of space, but not quite, at speeds of about 3,000 miles an hour.
And they're doing this because already there is that sense of the beginning of at least a missile race, a rocket race, and on the horizon, a decade down the line, a space race.
So we start with a fruit fly or a series of fruit flies in 1947.
No big deal there, you might say.
But in 1948, they start with monkeys, squirrel monkeys, rhesus monkeys, these little monkeys they have.
And they put these monkeys in a project called Albert into a sort of series of tests where they stick these monkeys into nose cones of V2 missiles and they blast them up into the sky at 3,000 miles an hour to see what's going to happen.
This Is a period where nobody knows what is going to happen when basically complex biological organisms are faced with all of the unknowns about acceleration forces, being on a rocket, being in space.
No one has a clue what's going to happen.
So these monkeys pave the way.
Right.
Can I just jump in here?
I don't expect that they did.
We know that these were different times.
Did anybody raise any ethical, any considerations of animal welfare?
Any of those considerations at the time?
Nothing.
Nothing is being raised at the time.
I mean, really nothing.
I mean, most of this stuff is happening secretly.
It's happening in the quiet.
If anything, what you get is a sort of a rather kind of callous attitude towards the whole thing.
I mean, there's a sort of kind of a dark comedy about it.
So what you get on the very first Albert mission, every one of the monkeys was called Albert.
Albert one, two, three, four, five, six, and all six of them were killed, all six.
And the first one that went up, somebody had scrawled over the nose cone, alas poor Yorick, I knew him well.
Actually, there was that real sense of these animals are dead before they've even started.
So there was really no sense.
I mean, there was a period where they were testing pigs on these extraordinarily horrific acceleration runs, which we might talk about, on these rocket sleds to see what would happen to, you know, a complex biological organism when it was racing across at 600 miles an hour on a sled and suddenly stopped dead in the space of a second.
Sounds horrendous, Stephen.
Were these animals bred for this?
Yes, they were.
Well, the pigs certainly were, and they were eaten in some cases.
Actually, the project that was called, that was, for these particular acceleration experiments, was called Project Barbecue.
Can you believe it?
So that's the kind of attitude we're talking about.
And the pigs were sometimes eaten after they've been smashed up in some of these experiments.
And many of them were.
In the case of the monkeys, these were monkeys.
Sometimes they were bred, sometimes they were essentially kidnapped.
I mean, that's the wrong word to use, but by animal trappers in various parts of the world.
Chimpanzees later were kidnapped by animal trappers in Africa, and they were bought by NASA.
And these colonies got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Most of them were at this place called the Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory, which I mentioned earlier on.
And you ended up eventually with, you know, tens, scores of these animals waiting to take their turn either in space or in some cases on these kind of horrific acceleration, like crazy fairground rides with essentially only one ant, which was to be killed and killed in pretty horrific ways.
And did the scientists involved in these experiments at this time have a clear idea of what they were looking for, or did they just have the basic concept that we want to see what happens when you send something living into these conditions?
Essentially, the latter.
They really didn't know.
I mean, if we talk about rockets, you're talking about massive acceleration forces.
What happens to the human body under those conditions?
Nobody knew because nobody had flown at 3,000 miles an hour before until Albert does it, or the first Albert, up to the sixth Albert in 1948 onwards.
And then when you think about the further up you go in the atmosphere and into the conditions of weightlessness in space, really people had no idea.
And there were all sorts of things were talked about.
Would their heart stop beating?
Would they have some kind of cardiovascular problem?
Would they be able to breathe?
Would they be able to swallow?
Would they be able to move any muscles at all?
There were concerns about having uncontrollable nausea.
Would the radiation effects of space cause terrible cancers?
You know, what would happen under the conditions of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere where the temperatures would climb to thousands of degrees?
Would they just burn up?
They were literally, it was a great big unknown.
This was the new frontier.
And it was clear that in the context of the Cold War, which was really building at that time, this is the time when it was obvious that space was coming, the space race was coming, and that eventually human beings would end up in space.
Whether they'd be fighting in space or just competing to colonize space, nobody actually understood or knew at that point.
But what they did know was they had to understand what happened to organisms in this utterly new, utterly unknown frontier at an incredibly dangerous time in history.
And just one point.
Just one point, Stephen, to get to before we take some commercials here and then move to the story of Enos, the chimpanzee.
It's one thing to send an animal up into near-Earth orbit or up into the stratosphere, wherever you send it.
You have got to be sure that you can retrieve the animal.
In other words, you've got to get back the animal in order to be able to see what effects those conditions have had.
Were they good at doing that?
No, they were terrible at doing that.
I mean, everything would go wrong.
I mean, parachutes would shred up.
Nose cones containing monkeys would slam into the ground at hundreds of miles an hour.
I mean, to the point where you couldn't actually see any of the bits of the monkey, make any sense of what actually was there.
I mean, they were really bad.
The nose cones would get lost in the middle of the ocean.
I mean, it was really, really difficult.
I mean, really, it took until for the Americans, it took until 1959 for the Americans to be able to recover a monkey, two monkeys, one of whom subsequently died on the operating table when they were trying to remove an electrode.
They were called Miss Abel and Miss Baker, and they went up into space at 10,000 miles an hour, and they ended up in the water, and they did actually survive.
And that was a huge achievement.
And of course, famously, there was a Soviet dog called Laika who went up in 1957, just after the first Sputnik, but there was no technology at the time to get her back down again.
And she died in space.
She died in space.
And that was the first time that the world started to get, or some elements of the world, some were amazed by the achievement that the Soviets have made.
Others said, this is not right.
This is not right.
And there was indeed an extraordinary call by the National Canine Defense League in the United Kingdom for a minute's silence for dog lovers all over the world for this dog Laika that was orbiting the planet hundreds of miles above our planet and would never ever have an opportunity even to come back home.
Is this an incorrect memory?
Did the Soviet Union actually make Laika a hero of the Soviet Union?
That I don't know.
I actually don't know if they made her a hero of the Soviet Union.
It's a possibility.
Okay.
Yes, I don't know that.
I know they lied about what happened to Laika.
Laika went into space and she was supposed to last for seven days up there.
She had enough food and she had enough oxygen to last for seven days.
That's what she had.
But in fact, what happened was the capsule began overheating.
And on television images that were being back, secret images being back to the Soviets, she was clearly in distress.
She was barking.
She was trying to tear at her harnesses and her restraints because they were very, very restrained, these dogs, in these tiny little capsules, these little sort of sealed hermetic sealed compartments.
And she was clearly in distress.
And the temperature was building up inside her capsule.
And she probably died within the first five to seven hours of her flight.
That was not admitted by the Soviets ever, officially.
And it only became admitted by the Russians after the demise of the Soviet Union.
It only became admitted in 2002.
So that's 45 years later, did they acknowledge that actually this dog died horrifically of heat exhaustion, of this tremendously climbing temperature?
And from that point on, this capsule orbited the planet 2,500 times with a dead dog inside it.
What an awful thought, Stephen.
Just to say that some of the things that we will discuss, it is after midnight here on Talk Radio, are disturbing.
If you are disturbed by such conversations, I totally understand where you're coming from about that.
Looked at in the context of today, this seems to be barbaric.
In those days, they would have said it's science and we have to get into space.
That would have been their argument.
And as you can hear, some people objected to that, in my view, quite rightly.
We're going to continue with this story on the 60th anniversary, which it is today, of the spaceflight of Enos the chimpanzee.
Stephen, let's start this way with this.
Who decided that a chimpanzee would be best to be the trailblazer who goes beyond the bounds of the stratosphere?
That's a great question.
I mean, that's a number of different figures in NASA.
Let's just be very clear for the moment.
I mean, NASA came out of the military originally.
It was not a military organization.
It was a civilian organization.
But the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, but particularly the Air Force had all in America been kind of pushing.
They were the pioneers in the whole kind of space world.
And for some considerable time, the idea of a chimpanzee, originally monkeys, then chimpanzees going into space, made sense.
What makes sense?
Well, there's the obvious fact that chimpanzees are terribly like us.
And they have very, very, very highly kind of developed brains.
They coordinate a little bit like we do.
They have arms and hands that can do the sort of things that we do.
And the notion was that eventually what would be required in an astronaut, which is a very new term at that time, would be the ability to control a spacecraft.
I mean, we're very used to the idea of everything being automated.
But of course, in the rocket flying that was happening in the 1950s and 60s, the notion that you could actually have some control over your spacecraft, at least in the United States, was really very important.
So the idea that an animal could then be, like a human being in some respects, could manipulate certain controls and respond to certain cues without all the kind of effects of weightlessness, of zero gravity, of all of those things having an impact on them was very, very important.
So what you have in America is you have the chimpanzee, first the monkeys, then the chimpanzees become the prime animals that pave the way for the American space program.
I should briefly say in the Soviet Union, it's dogs.
And the reason why it's dogs is they have this tradition with Pavlov about reflexes.
They weren't so interested in controlling spacecraft.
What they were interested in is obedience.
You know, in a way, what you're looking at is two ideologies reflected in the kinds of animals they're using for space exploration.
On the American side, it's about independence.
It's about a certain level of freedom.
It's about a certain kind of control.
And in the Soviet Union, it's about obedience.
It's about doing what you're told.
It's about surviving.
It's about enduring.
I'd never thought of it that way, Stephen.
It's the two ideologies clashing.
You have a chimpanzee who has a certain amount of autonomy.
You can train it and you hope that it will do what you want it to do.
That's kind of democracy.
Not really, because the chimpanzee's not given a choice as to whether he goes up there.
But, you know, democracy of a sort.
There are many things we could say about that.
The Soviet Union, of course, about command.
It was a command economy.
It was a command political system.
Whatever elections there might have been wouldn't have been free and fair.
But it was about telling people what to do.
And a dog will do what you tell it.
I never thought of it in those terms.
As will a cosmonaut.
A cosmonaut will do the same thing.
So Yuri Gagarin did nothing in his spacecraft at all, except basically rewind his tape recorder.
That's all he did, because he didn't put enough tape in his machine.
So he had to rewind it, erase what he'd just spoken.
Essentially, they did nothing either.
Whereas the American astronauts, who were all test pilots, were all about, we are flyers.
You know, this is the Tom Wolf Wright stuff.
We are pilots first and foremost.
And so there is this thing reflected, I think it's quite fascinating, in the animals that are chosen for these experiments.
So as you rightly say, the chimpanzees had no control essentially over anything to do with the flying Of the spacecraft, but they were given the opportunity to manipulate machinery, as I said before, this psychomotor, which gave the scientists on the ground the opportunity to see whether or not their astronauts one day would be able to do the same things.
So the entire ideological distinction, difference, contrast between these two places, the Soviet Union, the America, the West, and the communist world, are entirely reflected in their animal choices for space exploration.
And before we talk about Enos, I've just checked here.
Apparently, I think I was wrong about being made a hero of the Soviet Union.
But Laika the dog had a statue, a monument built to her.
So, you know, that I did not know.
Yes, she did.
She had a monument built to her because, of course, when she came back after 2,567 orbits into the Earth's atmosphere, she herself just burnt up.
So there was no light left.
The horror of it is omnipresent.
It's always there.
We have to kind of leave that to one side to tell the story, though.
And the story of Enos is a remarkable story.
And as you rightly said at the beginning of this, a story that is largely untold.
It is largely untold.
I mean, these chimpanzees, let me just give you a little context.
There are about 40 chimpanzees by the late 1950s, 1960 that are being trained for space flight.
And they all have these kind of funny names like Elvis, can you believe it?
And Dwayne and Bobby Joe and Little Jim and Tiger.
You know, they're all given these names and they've got, and they're all living in a place called the Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory in New Mexico in a thing called Vivarium.
And from the beginning, these are chimpanzees that are being essentially trapped in Central Africa or parts of Africa.
And then they're being shipped to America and NASA's buying them.
And they're spending between $400 and $500 to buy one of these chimpanzees.
And they're essentially very young.
Many of them are kidnapped from their mothers.
So they're like two years old, that kind of age, sometimes even younger.
And they live together in this colony.
And the man that's responsible for looking after them, their chief handler, is a man called Ed Dittmer, who died about three or four years ago.
I was very close to interviewing him.
And he died just before I got the opportunity to do so.
And this guy was a sort of, he called himself an aeromedical technician, whatever that means.
But what he did was he, basically the textbook was being written as they went along.
How do you train a chimpanzee for space?
The first thing they knew they were going to have to do was to get the chimpanzee used to spending very long periods, potentially very long periods, on its own in some kind of restraint device or in a box of some sort, which would essentially be the sealed capsule that it would finally be in if it went to space.
So to begin with, what Ditmer did was he put these chimpanzees into little metal chairs and he kept them approximately five feet apart and they were not allowed to play with each other.
And he kept them there for like five minutes to begin with.
And they got very upset after five minutes.
They were naturally quite sociable.
But he tried to iron out that sociability.
And eventually he got them used to sitting in these chairs for hours and hours and even days, if necessary at a time, without essentially moving.
And that's how it starts.
It starts with this idea called operant conditioning.
You condition out all the natural reflexes so that by the time they end up in a space capsule, they're used to it.
You start with that.
You then put them into restraint jackets, essentially little space suits.
You then put them into little space helmets or some sort of restraint condition on their head.
Eventually, what happens is they get very, very, very used to it.
And then you start to introduce them to this device we talked about earlier on called the psychomotor, the one with the levers you have to press, where you get an electric shock on your feet if you get it wrong.
I mean, all of this sounds horrible, you know, Stephen, I have to say, but again, I am looking at it through 2021's spectacles and I'm not looking at it through the eyes of somebody who's a scientist in the 1950s, 1960s.
It was a war, Howard.
They're fighting a war.
That's how they saw it.
I have exactly the same as you.
My book is, I think, very compassionate about this.
I feel quite angry about it, but I'm looking at it at a perspective which is quite different from that period.
I do think there was a terrible callousness sometimes.
And also a kind of a double think.
I mean, Ed Dittmer would talk about these chimpanzees loving him and having a great relationship with these chimpanzees.
He seems to have seen no issue with it at all.
Absolutely none whatsoever.
I mean, today we might call that a form of Stockholm syndrome, where a captive becomes cooperative.
Do you know, there was one guy, I think his name was Gray Beale.
He was a captain, a naval captain who had responsibility to some of these monkeys.
And he describes the monkeys as, these are his words, these are almost volunteers.
He kids himself into thinking that these animals have almost volunteered to be, you know, put into restraint suits and made to sit on their own for hours, if not days at a time, and finally face the real possibility of being blasted into space at tremendous speeds with very little possibility of coming back alive.
These are volunteers or almost volunteers.
I mean, it's absurd.
But they kind of kid themselves.
And that's partly the culture of the time and partly the sense that they're fighting a war and partly the sense of we are on a new frontier.
We are on a new horizon.
This is a new world.
I mean, you know, 50 million people had died in World War II, approximately.
I'm sure some of your listeners will come back and say that figure isn't quite correct, but something like 50 million people died.
This is just after the Second World War.
And so in other words, your attitude towards life, human life in some respects, is, I don't know what the word would be, blunted perhaps to a certain extent in a way that perhaps it isn't quite now, even though we're living in a pandemic.
And I think that when it then comes to animals, essentially what some then might have regarded as a lower form of life, it's almost like they're not, they are expendable.
Did any of the, and presumably they did, did any of the chimpanzees revolt, not behave as expected, refuse to be compliant?
But Enos was the one that revolted.
I mean, Enos, Enos glorified, I think we're after midnight, so we can say this, in masturbating in front of people.
He was somebody who on one occasion, when a visiting senator came to see him and the other chimpanzees, he actually flung his feces straight in the face of the senator.
I mean, he was an angry, he was a difficult, nobody dare get close to Enos.
If you look at photographs of handlers with Enos, including this guy, Ed Dittmer, there's always restraints on him.
And the expressions on the handlers' faces in these photographs from NASA are fascinating because they are wary.
Okay.
But he was very, very clever.
There was one experiment.
I mean, this is incredible.
There was one experiment which he would have to also perform in his spacecraft where he had to push one of these levers exactly 50 times.
And on the 50th or after the 50th push, he'd get a banana pellet, which he could eat.
And he got so good at this that in training, when he got to the 49th lever push, he would hold his hand out ready for the banana pellet on the 50th.
So he was counting.
He was counting.
That's astonishing.
So do you think, I just want to jump in with this.
Do you think, Stephen, that in a curious kind of way, through Enos and training the other chimpanzees, but Enos in particular, the people behind the space program learned about the kind of people you might be looking for?
Well, I think it's kind of interesting you should say that because Enos' name means man in Greek and in Hebrew.
I mean, that's what that word means.
There's already a sense of this is the precursor, if you like, of the man.
But we have to understand that the Mercury 7 astronauts who had already been, they'd already been selected in 1958.
These guys had already been chosen after this huge, these are the first astronauts who would go into space.
Of course, the very first was Alan Shepard and the first to go into orbit would be John Glenn in 1962.
These guys had already been selected, hotshot test pilots after this incredible, I mean, unbelievable series of tests that they had to go through, selected from the best pilots, the best test pilots in the country.
This had already happened.
The monkey flights had already taken place before then, or many of them were taking place around that time.
But when it came to the chimpanzees, in a sense, they weren't looking for a particular type they would then select.
They were just looking to see how a chimpanzee would cope in this incredibly hostile environment.
That's what they were looking for.
And when it came to this orbital flight that took place 60 years ago, when they were looking for that flight, they'd already sent one chimpanzee ham up on this suborbital flight back in January 1961.
The orbital flight was a much bigger deal.
It was traveling around the world at 18,000 miles an hour, 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet, around the world in 90 minutes and several times.
It was going to be a three-orbit flight.
They needed the best.
So they chose Enos, the guy that was the cleverest, the guy that held his hand out on the 49th lever push for his banana pellet, the guy that was the ace on the psycho motor, the guy that was just the best, but also the most difficult.
Also the one that you had to be careful of, the one you had to be wary of.
But he was the best of the bunch and the one best equipped to cope with whatever was going to be thrown at him once he was up there.
We know a lot about the process of training cosmonauts and astronauts in the months preceding a space mission.
What was the sort of preparation that was given to Enos in that time?
Well, apart from a huge numbers of hours on the psychomotor, I think three or 400 hours he had on the psychomotor by the time he went into space.
So he became really that good at it.
He was also literally put through exactly what he would be put through on the day.
So in other words, on several occasions, it's fascinating reading the early NASA literature on this, on several occasions, he would have all the electrodes inserted, the rectal thermometer would be inserted, the restraint suits would be put on.
He'd be put in his little sealed capsule, which would then be taken out on a bus to the gantry, and he'd be put up to the top of the Atlas rocket and put into the Mercury capsule and shut down inside with a rehearsal countdown.
I mean, he went through that procedure several times and so did his backup.
He had a backup too.
In fact, there were two backups for this flight, just in case something went wrong.
So all of this, all of these procedures were rehearsed.
And this is what I mean by that word, this is the technical term, standard operant conditioning.
It basically means conditioning the fear out of it.
If you get used to something, and we all know this from our daily lives, if you do, if you had never been in a car before and you went on a car on a motorway for the first time, it would be terrifying.
But we're used to it.
We know what it looks like.
It's something we're comfortable with.
And so we've been, the fear has been conditioned out of it, out of us.
And it's exactly the same thing with the chimpanzees and with Enos.
So he went through this over and over again.
So that on the day itself, on November the 29th, 1961, it was a day like a lot of other days for him.
He didn't know he was going to be blasted into space this time.
Everything else would have felt the same.
And when he was blasted into space, how did he react?
Well, he had a rough ride, Howard.
He really did.
So he's blasted into space at this terrific speed.
I mean, you have to reach orbital velocity.
You have to reach just under 18,000 miles an hour.
Otherwise, like a cannonball, you're just going to go up and then you're going to come back down again.
And in this case, you've got to get fast enough so you can actually get the velocity you need to remain in orbit.
He goes up into space.
He's being watched and tracked from the ground.
His blood pressure has always been a problem.
He's always had very high blood pressure.
And I think Tom Wolfe memorably says in his book, The Right Stuff, he says he'd swallowed all his rage and it came out as unbelievably high blood pressure.
But they were watching to see how high it went and it was high.
So he could have died.
He could have died at that stage.
He could have died at that stage.
And what happened also with him, like Laika the dog, can you believe this?
It's the same thing.
The temperature started to climb inside his capsule.
He got into a thermal situation, as they say.
And he really, it really starts to climb in quite a bad way.
And the temperature was climbing to the point where they were getting very worried that he would not necessarily survive it.
But amazingly, the temperature sort of topped out, still very high.
I think it was about 38 degrees centigrade.
I mean, it's really, really hot.
But he was able to kind of just about cope with that.
And at that point, we get to the problem with the psychomotor.
The story of Enos, the chimpanzee, and the other animals who went into space and those who are still there now.
So Enos is in space.
The temperature is rising.
So is Enos' blood pressure.
What happens then?
So next thing that goes wrong with poor Enos as he's traveling around the world is the psychomotor machine that's in front of him where he's pulling all his levers in order to avoid these electric shocks and doing all the right things.
Something goes wrong with it.
And every time he presses the lever correctly, he gets an electric shock.
So he gets a punishment when he's doing the right thing.
Exactly.
He does the right thing and he gets punished for doing the right thing.
Now, this is, remember, this is the ace on this machine.
This is a chimpanzee who never gets it wrong.
And what's extraordinary is he starts getting these electric shocks.
And, you know, you're in the most horrendous conditions.
You've got a temperature which is about 38 to 40 degrees centigrade.
It is incredibly hot in there.
You're traveling at 18,000 miles an hour.
You are weightless.
And now you're doing the right thing and you're getting electric shocks on the soles of your feet.
You know, John Glenn did not have to cope with this when he went up in February 1962.
Enos did.
But what is really fascinating, Howard, is that there is some evidence when you read the original NASA literature, which is quite hard to get hold of, which I managed to get hold of when I was researching this story.
There is some evidence that Enos was trying to game the system.
He actually realized that there was something wrong here.
And he was trying to work out a different combination of lever pulls that would prevent these electric shocks from happening.
So he was sometimes deliberately pulling the wrong lever.
He would have known that was the wrong lever.
He was deliberately pulling the wrong lever in different combinations in order to prevent the electric shocks from happening, which of course didn't happen.
They were just coming.
The whole machine had got upset and he was just getting these electric shocks.
Are you saying that Enos was trying to, as they did on the moon surface on Apollo 11, was Enos trying to come up with workarounds?
He was trying to come up with a workaround, yeah.
Wow.
I mean, it is really extraordinary.
This is one clever animal.
He was trying to work out how to stop these electric shocks from happening.
I mean, it's there in the bald print in the 1963 Effects of These Chimpanzee Flights NASA document.
It has an official name, which I'm not going to give you because it's rather long, but it is a NASA document.
And buried there, somewhere in this vast document, which I've looked at, is a paragraph which says almost, well, it says exactly that, essentially.
I mean, I'm using slightly different words, but it's saying there is evidence to believe that Enos was actually trying to work out what was wrong, some consciousness here, and find a solution to the problem so that he wouldn't get these electric shocks by deliberately choosing the wrong levers, even though he knows what the right levers are.
He's done it for hundreds of hours.
He never gets it wrong.
So he was selecting wrong responses in order to see if that might stop the punishments from happening.
In other words, he understood what was going on.
And if you or I were there, that's exactly what we would do.
What a clever animal he was.
What happened to him?
Well, when he came down, there was a, I mean, everything went wrong here.
Very briefly, because I know we haven't got very much time.
There was a problem with the attitude thrusters.
It meant that they couldn't basically get the spacecraft home safely after three orbits.
They brought him back after two.
He gets down into the sea.
He's off course.
It takes an hour and a half for anybody to get to him.
And guess what?
Inside that space capsule, as it's bobbing around on the sea, he rips off his restraint suit.
He tears off all of his electros and he rips out his balloon-inflated catheter with the balloon still inflated.
He rips it out of his penis when he's in there.
I mean, that's the level of rage and anger that we're dealing with, this chimpanzee that's bobbing around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near Hawaii, waiting for these damn humans to come and catch him again.
It's his only moment of freedom, really, there on the sea.
What becomes of him afterwards?
It's sad.
In 1962, he died about a year later of some disease, and no one knows what's happened to his remains.
Were they used, were his body parts used for experiments?
Were they just chucked away?
Nobody knows.
I mean, the first chimpanzee, there were only two that went into space.
The first that went on the suborbital flight, Ham, his skeleton was donated to a medical museum in Maryland, and he was actually buried.
And Alan Shepard, the first human in space who went after Ham, was invited to attend the funeral, and he declined.
That's sad.
And look, everything you've told me about Enos suggests that here is a hero that we should be celebrating.
And I'm glad that we're doing this on the 60th anniversary because it seems to me that Enos had as much of the right stuff as any of the wonderful Astronauts, Alan Shepard, John Glenn, you know, Ed Mitchell, all of those people, just as much of the right stuff as they had.
I mean, you know, you look at the incredible parades that were put on for John Glenn after his exactly the same orbital flight in 1962.
I mean, essentially, it was exactly the same.
He had his own problems too.
But, you know, it was, I mean, he, it's enormous.
You know, the whole thing is quite extraordinary.
The pictures are incredible.
The footage is amazing.
And there's Kennedy putting medals on him and everything else.
And Enos, you know, his body parts get chucked away a year later.
Same, basically faced all that.
And Glenn didn't have to face having electrocuted feet in the same way that Enos did.
But he's uncelebrated.
And I'm delighted that we're having an opportunity today, in a sense, to pay some respect and homage to Enos for this flight, but actually, frankly, for all, because hundreds of them died in one form or another in this experimentation.
Not hundreds of them necessarily went into space, but hundreds died.
And they are the great forgotten.
And without these animals, I mean, all sorts of animals, cats and all kinds of things, you know, not just dogs and chimpanzees and squirrel monkeys and mice and so forth, but without them, we would not necessarily be where we are in space today.
And as you said, there were many different kinds of animals that went into space.
The French, we seem to forget these days that the French had a space program.
They still are very big in aerospace, of course, and very adept at it.
The French sent a cat into space.
They had to be different.
They had to be different.
They sent a cat called Félicette, who was sort of, I think, black and white cat, actually, called Felicette in October 1963.
She was sent into space from a rocket in Algeria.
She went up to about 100 miles in space, experienced about nine and a half, nearly 10 Gs, that's 10 times her normal weight, right up to space, came back down again.
It was a 13-minute flight.
I mean, quite extraordinary.
She was known in the press as the Astro cat.
And of course, that was massively celebrated by some people, others horrified because this was building now these complaints and this feeling that there's something, you know, we shouldn't be doing these things.
The sad truth of that is, is that she was then euthanized later, including the other, I think there were 14 cats that were being trained for space by the French at the time.
One of them died in a subsequent rocket explosion and all the others were euthanized.
That was it.
There was a statue that was put up to Félicette, I think in 2020 in Strasbourg at the International Space University.
Finally, Félicette gets her moment.
She gets a little statue, you know, but it's 60 years later.
But the second cat, the one that died when the rocket exploded, I think it was about a week later, her name has never been released.
We still don't know what her name was.
The mystery cat.
I'm sure there's a French way of saying that.
I can't think of it.
Look, we stopped using rightly.
We stopped using chimpanzees.
We stopped sending dogs and cats into space rightly.
But similar experiments continued, didn't they?
There were tortoises and insects who circled the moon in 1968.
In 1972, as recently as that, there were five mice, Fi Fi Fo, Fum, and Fui.
They orbited the moon 75 times, I think.
So, you know, this kind of stuff, not on the same scale, but this kind of stuff did not stop.
No, no, it went, no, no, but the monkeys and the monkeys went on.
I mean, the Americans last put a monkey in a NASA mission into space aboard the space shuttle in 1985.
Really?
Absolutely.
And the last monkeys to go into space, well, from the Soviet side or the Russian side, as it become, was actually in 1996.
Quite incredibly, the Americans were part of that program.
It was a series of biological satellites called Bion, which the Americans were very much part of, working with the Russians at that time.
And there was this huge protest.
Two monkeys were going to go up on, I think it was Bion 11 in December 1996.
The protest was so successful that the funding from the American side was stopped.
And John Glenn, who was a very powerful political figure at that time, managed to get that overturned.
And as a result of that, the monkeys went up into space.
So these were NASA funded in 1996.
And they went up into space in this Russian beyond satellite, along with a number of other animals as well, sort of biological satellite, if you like.
And one of the monkeys died when he came back to Earth.
And that was the turning point, Howard.
That was when the protests really, really built.
And it built to the point where people said, enough is enough.
And the law was then tightened at that point.
So that was it for Russia and for the Americans.
But other, quite sort of, you know, other countries also got involved in the act.
I mean, the Iranians almost certainly put at least one monkey up, I think as recently as 2013.
So it doesn't end all of this.
I mean, there are still, and we're not talking about, you know, 1960s height of the Cold War stuff.
Some of this stuff goes much, much later since the demise of the Soviet Union.
You know, the best conversations that you have on radio, you know this, Stephen, with your work for television, but the best conversations you have are the ones where you learn things you never knew, that you never knew.
And I think I've just done that and proved it too.
What a fascinating story.
Thank you so much for suggesting it.
I'm glad that you came back on.
It is nearly Christmas.
You have a wonderful book, mainly about Yuri Gagarin's story out.
It's called Beyond.
We did a whole interview about it.
It is a podcast at the moment at my website, theunexplained.tv, but we've had a conversation about that.
Talk to me briefly about the book.
The book is called Beyond, The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet.
It's basically the story of the race to put the first human being in space.
And it's a sort of a non-fiction thriller.
I mean, it's completely true.
It's non-fiction.
But it's an incredible nail-biting race that takes place in early months of 1961 over a very tight chronological period to get the First, human being in space, absolutely in the heart of the Cold War.
I mean, I think it's, I hope it's an exciting read.
And if there are people out there that are interested in adventures and space or Cold War history, then have a look at it because it might interest you.
I hope it does.
My thanks to Stephen Walker for being a remarkable guest who is able to put together a terrific narrative, I think.
Remember, his book Beyond is available.
And I think it's one of a number of books that I have spoken with the authors of this year that would make a very, very good Christmas present.
We are totally out of time.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
Above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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