Thursday, December 01, 2005

Who Me? was a top secret sulfurous stench weapon developed by the American Office of Strategic Services during WWII to be used by the French Resistance against German officers. Who Me? smelled strongly of fecal matter, and was issued in pocket atomizers intended to be unobtrusively sprayed on a German officer, humiliating him and, by extension, demoralizing the occupying German forces.

The experiment was very short-lived however. Who me? had a high concentration of extremely volatile sulfur compounds that were extremely difficult to control: more often than not the person who does the spraying ended up smelling as bad as the sprayee. After only two weeks it was concluded that Who Me? was a dismal failure. It remains unclear whether there was ever a successful Who Me? attack.

Pam Dalton, a psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia decribes the smell of Who Me? as resembling "the worst garbage dumpster left in the street for a long time in the middle of the hottest summer ever".

A recipe for a kilogram of the same or equivalent substance in circulation on the Internet consists of 919 grams of white mineral oil as inert carrier, and 20g of skatole, 20g of n-butanoic acid, 20g of n-pentanoic acid, 20g of n-hexanoic acid, and 1g of pentanethiol as the active principles.