Butterfly's Navigation Secret Revealed in Flight SimulatorNot that most people even give a shit, but someone got paid a lot of money to take a look at that.
The monarch butterfly is known to use the angle of sunlight as a navigational guide on its annual fall migration from across North America to Mexico. But how it processes the information has been a mystery.
Anyway, the air force was testing/developing this sort of navigational system back during or soon after WWII. From KLAS-tv Las Vegas:
[...]The entire crew survived and whichever ones wanted to cooperate were later interviewed. I forget which channel I saw the documentary on, either the History Channel or Discovery, but the long and short of it was that the plane wasn't just doing atmospheric research. They were conducting tests on solar navigation systems. I.e., navigation by using the angle of the sun.
It was July 1948, three years after the end of World War II, a B-29 bomber conducting classified atmospheric research was returning from the Grand Canyon, heading toward California, when it experienced engine trouble over Lake Mead.
"According to reports, the lake was glassy," says Rosie Potito of the National Park Service. "They felt they were 100 feet above the surface. Little did they know they were a lot lower. They hit the water; the number 2, 3, and 4 engines were ripped off from the crash."
[...]
Them monarchs ain't got nothing on the air force.
Shee-it.
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