Pigeons are often colloquially known as “flying rats.” Might this be because they are actually secretly spies, trained by intelligence services to flap around “ratting” on people like feathered Stasi and KGB informers? In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, this appears to be the plan.

Recent Western reports imply that, under a demented Russian cyber-engineering program codenamed PJN-1, small GPS-linked cameras are being strapped to birds’ chests, powered by a miniature solar panel. Then, neural chips are implanted into the birds’ brains, rendering them a form of novel “bio-drone,” far easier to manufacture than metallic ones are, birdseed being much cheaper and more plentiful than jet fuel and lithium-ion batteries. Then they can be sent out to spy on unsuspecting enemies outdoors like literal stool-pigeons, steered from afar by chairbound Russian airmen armed with nothing but reengineered PlayStation pads and live birdcam feeds on their laptops.

The pigeon-drones are being publicly marketed as designed purely for peaceful civilian use (in which case they really should be using doves), such as monitoring crop fields, providing handlers with a literal bird’s-eye view. However, just as with ordinary commercial drones in Ukraine, some warn that the cyborg birds could very easily be modified and used to deliver explosives or maybe even deadly diseases. If they were crows, they could drop Corvid-19. 

Actually, this pun isn’t too far from the (alleged) truth. “Currently, the solution works with pigeons, but any bird could be used as a carrier,” explained Alexander Panov, chief executive of Neiry, the Russian biotech firm behind the scheme. “To carry more payload, we plan to use ravens. For monitoring coastal facilities, seagulls, and for larger offshore areas, albatrosses.” If the Ancient Mariner ever shot one of those, it would just explode.      

I Smell a Rat

This all sounds like a joke, but it isn’t—although, as we shall see, certain aspects of the scheme are quite literally Pythonesque. Despite the whole idea’s strong similarity to TV comedy sketches like this one from the 1990s UK spoof news show The Day Today about the use of deadly “IRA bomb-dogs,” there is actual video footage of Neiry performing simple experiments in the neurological control of pigeons’ flight paths within its laboratories. Electrical impulses in their brains, delivered from a distance, appear capable of making them turn left or right by flapping their wings in the direction instructed. 

On its website, Neiry already boasts of having created a “rat that is smarter than most people” in the shape of a rodent named Pythia, christened after the ancient Greek priestesses of prophecy who would go into trances and ask the Delphic Oracle to provide answers to visitors’ every question. The rat in question is supposedly able to perform a similar function by virtue of having its brain linked directly to an online Russian chatbot service. In this fashion, the clever creature has purportedly been able to answer questions about “quasars, myelin shells, the Python [computer programming] language, and Albert Einstein's birthday.”

“Thus, the rodent has been ‘upgraded’, and can now answer questions using AI,” Neiry claims, although quite how the rat is capable of understanding human questions and then transmitting them directly into the internet is not really explained, although it is helpfully said that “the rat knows how to answer any questions using the keyboard.” 

Also unclear is why precisely a human may wish to do any of this in the first place, it being far easier to just type your queries into ChatGPT personally. You may as well train an ocelot to manage your emails. What is clear, however, is why Neiry’s founder Alexander Panov wishes to perform this bizarre act of bioengineering which he aptly calls “a bit hooligan from a scientific point of view”: He wants to use it as a mere stepping-stone to controlling human minds. 

Human Cattle

Working in collaboration with Moscow State University—i.e., the Russian state itself—Neiry promises, “The goal of this project is to develop invasive neural interfaces. In the future it is planned to create a user product that will help connect the human brain with the knowledge of all mankind.” Panov describes the way this will work as follows:

[BLOCK]The results of the Pythia experiment are one of the stages of the “AIntuition Project.” For example, the user will be able to feel the truth or falsity of any statement or intuitively understand which answer in the test is correct. All this will increase the efficiency of human activity. And given that the entire evolution of humanity is moving towards increasing efficiency, our project is carefully moving humans to the next step, where AI will be their faithful and reliable symbiote assistant.[/BLOCK]

But who controls what the AI thinks and knows in the first place? Why, the Kremlin, of course! 

I previously wrote in The American Conservative about the Russian regime’s attempts to mentally reprogram its citizens by systematically rewriting national dictionaries, adding and deleting words so that, for example, no such country as Ukraine appeared to exist at all; pulling the same kind of trick with online databanks and deliberately making all mental access to such knowledge dependent upon online censors would be a great way to intellectually enslave humans too.  

An admiring profile of Neiry Biotech in the Russian version of Forbes magazine, in which a business journalist visits Pythia’s lab and observes “rats with USB-C [cables] coming out of their heads,” explains how the company began with a new form of videogaming VR helmet in which users controlled on-screen actions with only the power of their minds. Then, it transformed this into a VR educational product for schools, before building variant headphone-based mini helmets to detect bioelectrical brain activity for health-tracking purposes, and a vocational unit designed to somehow map the brain and thereby “determine a person’s professional predisposition.” These proved commercially successful, being sold today in America under some unspecified different brand—which is alarming, as Neiry’s CEO says he subsequently used the profits from these gadgets to create outright mind-control devices.

From tiny critters like rats and pigeons, Alexander Panov moved on to mentally abusing far larger fauna like cows. He is now selling a brand of bovine brain implant dubbed Neuroroga, which purportedly causes cows to begin lactating uncontrollably upon the farmer’s command, increasing their milk yields by 25 percent. Panov’s business goal for 2026 is to have Neuroroga implanted into 6,666 cows, this number carefully chosen “so that no one doubts that we are controlled by the Devil.”

Brain Drain

Of course, Panov is only joking here. The Devil does not control his company at all. Instead, matters are far worse: Vladimir Putin does.  

One major investor in Neiry Biotech is the National Technology Initiative (NTI), which pumped in nearly $5 million in 2021, the NTI being a military-industrial seed-funding outlet established on the direct orders of Putin, whilst Neiry also operates in conjunction with the Moscow State University Institute of Artificial Intelligence, which is headed up by the prominent female scientist Katerina Tikhonova—better known as Putin’s second daughter (she also used to be an acrobat).

To Russian Forbes, Panov painted his scheme as nothing more than a philanthropic quest to push mankind up onto the next intellectual level, as he had already done for rat-kind with Pythia. “We will become Homo superior, an improved person,” he said, demonstrating clear familiarity with 1970s David Bowie lyrics. He also claimed to be very big on something called “neuroethics.” and to have support in everything he does from the Russian Orthodox Church; but then, so does Vladimir Putin himself. He also joked that he planned to “enslave the world, of course,” but then backtracked, saying this was just a joke, and that “only a sense of humor” enabled him to keep on working in his very strange cow-bothering business.

On social media, though, Panov expressed one ambition which was no joke, but a serious nightmare:

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[BLOCK]One of my next projects that I have been thinking about for a long time involves selling people to the state. I will share details after a pilot, but right away I warn you that everything there will be eco-friendly, socially oriented, Orthodox, and humane—no clones! The basic thesis of this startup is simple: due to declining birth rates, any state needs people. Ours especially. Different ones will do, but those who carry the basic culture will be valued more… In turn, there are Ukrainians who are, of course, Russians in terms of cultural code, just intoxicated by delusions [of being Western]… And even if only 5–7 million of the useful ones remain there, they can be reprogrammed, just like most other people, and it is much cheaper than creating and raising a person of our own culture.[/BLOCK]

However plausible you may think Panov’s plans may be (not very, probably), the key point here is not so much that he is lunatic enough to wish to pursue them, but that the Russian state is lunatic enough to actually fund them. What on earth can be motivating them to act in this wasteful and insane manner? 

Maybe they’re having their minds controlled.