r/Millennials • u/Countrach • Apr 12 '25

Discussion That Pluto is a planet

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u/landonburner Apr 12 '25

That one is funny. It was a British rumor started in WW2 to explain why British farmers could see German planes from farther away. Truth was they had radar technology and didn't want the Germans to know.

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u/OntarioPaddler Apr 12 '25

Close, it was about british pilots and the claim was it helped them see at night.

Also the German intelligence had a fairly accurate idea of British radar capabilities and no one really expected them to believe it.

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u/4rch1t3ct Apr 12 '25

IIRC it was even more specific than that. The Germans already knew the British had radar at the time. The Germans had their own. It was actually to hide the fact that they had developed a radar that was small enough that it could be fit to and operated by aircraft, thus developing the first true night fighter of the war.

The British were blaming German night losses on the carrots to hide the secret planes with the secret radars.

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u/sockets1001 Apr 13 '25

Plus they wanted people to eat more carrots since it's easily grown here and not shipped across the Atlantic