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Dr. Jerry Pournelle:
A long time ago at a Human Factors lab on an Air Force base in Texas, a group of human factors space scientists and Air Force pilots were sitting in the O Club and got to talking about cats and zero gravity. How would a cat orient in micro gravity? Visually? They always land on their feet. But what if they couldn’t feel which way was down?
A few drinks later we realized that one of the pilots wasn’t having a drink because he had to do a proficiency flight later that afternoon. And we already had a camera rigged in the cockpit of a T Bird, and if a couple of us certified this as a human factors experiment it wouldn’t cost the government anything it wasn’t going to spend on the proficiency flight, and it would be an interesting experiment, and — Well, it seemed like a great idea at the time, and the captain who’d be flying thought it would be a good idea.
We rigged up the body sensors – he did have to insert the rectal thermometer thermistor, and we put on the face and hand temperature sensors and the other polygraph stuff and turned on the recorders. Then we captured the O Club cat, a calico, and he carried her along to the T Bird, and with the cat sitting comfortably in his lap he took off with a flight plan that included a long parabolic arc that would produce more than 15 seconds of essentially zero gravity.
All was well until he got into the parabolic flight, at which point he took the cat off his lap and released her in zero gravity. The camera recorded it all. The cat looked about wildly, realized it wasn’t moving, rotated itself so that its feet were straight out toward the pilot’s chest, and teleported – that’s the best description I could make from seeing that film run several times – toward the pilot. Claws extended. It anchored itself, finding the opening in the flight suit from which the physiological sensor wires protruded. Claws out. Firmly anchored.
The rest of the film shows the pilot frantically trying to fly while trying to peel the cat off his chest. It held fast until after landing. Then the cat allowed the pilot to carry it off the airplane and back to the club, whereupon it vanished and wouldn’t speak to any of us for a week.
But we did learn that in zero gravity a cat will orient toward the nearest human, latch on, and never let go. I suppose that film is still making the rounds of USAF, but maybe not. It was film long before digitizing film was easy or even possible, and eventually that wears out. I haven’t seen it for years.
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