The psychologist who trained pigeons for the World War II project called Project Pigeon was B. F. Skinner.
Skinner, an American behaviorist, proposed using pigeons to guide a bomb toward a target. The birds were trained through operant conditioning to peck at an image of the target projected onto a screen inside the weapon's nose. Sensors detected movements of the screen and translated the pigeons' pecks into steering commands.
The idea sounded eccentric, but Skinner demonstrated that pigeons could respond rapidly and reliably to visual targets. One bird reportedly pecked more than 10,000 times in 45 minutes. The program received financial support from the National Defense Research Committee, yet military officials ultimately preferred developing electronic guidance systems.
Project Pigeon was canceled in 1944. The Navy briefly revived the concept in 1948 under the name Project Orcon, short for “organic control,” but that effort was canceled in 1953 as electronic systems proved more practical. The project is commonly confused with Skinner's broader work on conditioning, but this was a specific wartime engineering experiment applying those principles to missile guidance.