The U.S. Government Sent A Chimp To Space To Create A Super-Soldier
You read that header correctly. We didn’t call this list the strangest theories from the space race era for no reason. This specific issue stems from the fact that NASA actually did send a chimpanzee into space. On November 29, 1961, a chimpanzee called Enos became the first chimp to orbit the Earth. He was also one of only two primates to reach this territory. He flew on NASA’s Mercury-Atlas 5 or MA-5 mission. NASA, being relatively new at the time, was being put to work and wanted to get astronauts into space. As Russia sent the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in April of that very same year. They wanted to get to the moon before Russia, and Enos was their way of testing how primates would handle it. Yet he did not come back as a super-soldier, but he did at least come back safe.