Britain’s MI6 once considered using semen as invisible ink
“That ink was made out of what?”
During World War I, Britain’s intelligence agency MI6 apparently once briefly considered using semen as invisible ink. And to make the story even better, the idea for using man-juice as secret writing fluid came from a guy named Mansfield Cumming.
The then-deputy head of military intelligence at GHQ France, Walter Kirke, wrote in his diary that “C,” or Cummings, was “making enquiries for invisible inks at the London University.”
…he noted that he “heard from C that the best invisible ink is semen”, which did not react to the main methods of detection. Furthermore it had the advantage of being readily available. A member of staff close to “C”, Frank Stagg, said that he would never forget his bosses’ delight when… his staff had found out that “semen would not react to iodine vapour”.
Stagg noted that “we thought we had solved a great problem”.
However, the discovery also led to some further problems, with the agent who had identified the novel use having to be moved from his department after becoming the butt of jokes.
Too bad this idea never took hold, because that would have made for a really awkward scene in James Bond, where he’s down in the lab, being shown the newest technologies when all of a sudden Q starts jerking off on a sheet of paper…
