The US Air Force's 'Gay Bomb' Won an Ig Nobel Prize

In 1994, the Wright Laboratory in Ohio—a precursor to the modern US Air Force Research Laboratory—drafted a three-page proposal that sounds more like a rejected sitcom plot than serious military research. The document, formally titled "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," proposed several nonlethal chemical weapons. But one concept stood out: a bomb that would release powerful aphrodisiac pheromones over enemy troops, making them sexually irresistible to each other.

The idea was simple in theory. Deploy the weapon, flood the battlefield with love chemicals, and watch enemy cohesion collapse as soldiers became more interested in each other than combat. The lab requested $7.5 million over six years to develop this and other "harassing" weapons. They were dead serious.

The Science (Or Lack Thereof)

Here's the problem: human pheromones don't work like that. While pheromones play a role in animal behavior, no controlled scientific studies have ever shown they can cause rapid behavioral changes in humans—especially nothing as dramatic as spontaneous sexual attraction on a battlefield.

The proposal itself acknowledged this minor flaw. One section, titled "New Discoveries Needed," admitted that such chemicals hadn't actually been found to exist. Essentially, they were asking for millions to research something they knew they hadn't discovered yet.

How We Know About It

The proposal might have stayed classified forever, but the Sunshine Project—a nonprofit that monitors biological weapons research—obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. When the story broke, the Pentagon didn't deny it had been considered. They simply noted their commitment to researching nonlethal weapons and confirmed that none of the systems from that 1994 proposal were ever developed.

To Wright Laboratory's credit (or shame, depending on your perspective), they never actually built the gay bomb. The project never moved beyond the proposal stage.

The Ig Nobel Legacy

Fast-forward to 2007. The Ig Nobel Prizes—satirical awards for research that "first makes you laugh, then makes you think"—honored Wright Laboratory with the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. The citation recognized them for "instigating research & development on a chemical weapon—the so-called 'gay bomb'—that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other."

The creators declined to attend the ceremony to accept their prize.

The gay bomb stands as a peculiar artifact of 1990s military thinking—a time when the Cold War had ended but creative weapons proposals clearly hadn't. It's a reminder that even serious institutions can float ideas that seem ridiculous in hindsight, and sometimes the best response is an award that celebrates the absurdity.