The 'Plane Truth (What Goes Up...)

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Bawk bawk bawk, foosh, splat

Documented: Airforce/manufacturers tests planes by firing chickens from special cannon.

Chicken cannons exist, and are used by airplane and engine manufacturers to pass certification tests. The military uses them as well.

The referenced URL is pretty thorough documentation.

The variants are pretty much impossible - a frozen chicken isn't that much harder or stronger than a fresh one, and they don't leave the cannons just sitting around loaded for hours with nobody watching them.

Impossible: Chicken cannon causes massive damage because chicken was frozen.

A common UL is that somebody was using a chicken cannon to test an airplane or high speed train, and is suprised when the chicken does massive damage to the object under test. An investigation proves that the damage was due to them using a frozen chicken.

The canonical version of this usually involves some cross-atlantic or at least cross-service rivalry between the cannon owners and the people who borrowed it for testing.

Impossible: Chicken cannon causes massive damage due to a cat that crawled in looking for chicken.

A less common variant that has the chicken cannon doing lots of damage to the object under test, and when they review the high speed film of the test they see two objects hitting the test subject - the chicken and a cat that crawled into the cannon looking to eat the chicken.

The major problem with this is that the chicken is launched in a "sabot", often an ordinary plastic bucket. There is no room in the bucket for the chicken plus a cat. And just how many testing labs have cats just wandering around?

References:

• Andrew Warriner's pretty authoritative web page on chicken cannons.