POTD: Undetectable Except for The Bite – OSS SAC-46 “Flying Dragon”
Sam.S 04.18.23
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have another funky product that came about from the OSS. This is the OSS SAC-46 “Flying Dragon”. For those of you who are unfamiliar on what the OSS is they were basically a haphazard group of rich kids and adventurers that wanted to help the War effort in Worl War Two. They were “spys” to put it extremely plainly. They were trying for a long time to develop weapons that would be silent, one-hit kill, flashless weapons that would kill a man at 100 yards. On trial was the Flying Dragon dart gun. Pretty needless to say these were not the best tool for the job.
“Originally discussed in 1943, the Office of Strategic Services conceived that a carbon dioxide powered dart gun could be used to deliver a fatal injury to a target at range without the flash or report of a conventional pistol. The applications of such a weapon for a special operations force would be quite broad; termination of sentries or guard dogs during an infiltration, eliminating patrollers in an escape and evasion scenario, or good old fashioned assassination all spring readily to mind. Evaluating the concept, OSS R&D concluded the only way to get the right balance of lethality to stealth was for the projectile to be “sensitized” with an “impregnated compound” (read: covered in deadly poison), comparable to the use of similar compounds by blowgun-using cultures to take down large game. In February of 1945 a specific mission finally came down that called for a batch of combat dart guns, and a contract was cut for the Long Engineering and Research Corporation to actually build the weapons dubbed “Flying Dragon”. Shipped out to the OSS in late June, Flying Dragon was put up against a number of other clandestine weapons; the Flying Dragon could deliver a poison dart while only producing a 66 decibel report (comparable to a casual conversation), beating out all the tested firearms and falling just short of the “William Tell” crossbow in overall noise level. Following the tests the Flying Dragon would be set aside in favor of a new concept, which called for mounting a sharp tip and a set of tailfins on a CO2 cartridge to turn it into a tiny gas-powered missile, inviting comparisons to the later Gyro-Jet line of weapons. In the Cold War era, the Flying Dragon was effectively abandoned in favor of more exotic devices, like the reported CIA “heart attack gun”, leaving only the original batch of about 12 as examples.”
Lot 1766: Oss ‘Flying Dragon’ Prototype Dart Gun – Extremely Rare Sac-46 “Flying Dragon” Oss Clandestine Dart Gun with Dart. (n.d.). Rock Island Auction Company. photograph. Retrieved April 16, 2023, from https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/73/1766/oss-flying-dragon-prototype-dart-gun.
