Imagine this: you’re minding your own business at home when suddenly, you hear a loud bang. You run out to check on the sound, and all of a sudden you’re stuck, caught in the grip of some unfathomable snare. You’re lifted higher and higher, pulled up by an unseen force.

The next thing you know, you’re flying far above the Earth in some loud metallic craft, observed by looming giants, the light piercing through the small holes they permit you in your holding pen. Suddenly, you’re hoisted up again, only to be hurled from the craft into the empty sky. Now you’re descending back to the ground, not falling but somehow floating. You touch down, released from your chamber, and find you are in a strange new place, miles from home, unable to explain the bizarre, anomalous abduction you just experienced.

One crucial detail we probably should have mentioned here: in this scenario, you are a beaver in 1940s Idaho.

You may have actually heard this story before, especially if you’ve been a Popular Mechanics reader for over 75 years. It appeared in our April 1949 issue under the incredibly enticing headline “Moving Day for the Parabeavers.” Sandwiched somewhere between a testimonial proclaiming that the new Chrysler Plymouth has enough headroom to accommodate “a lady with a tall hat” (important information for postwar America) and coverage of a notable new travel innovation—rolling luggage—the “Parabeavers” story recounted a remarkably quirky plot by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to use airplanes and parachutes to move beavers into a new environment.

But why did the Idaho Department of Fish and Game decide to drop beavers out of airplanes? It was largely due to the unique thinking of one man, Elmo W. Heter, who found a very clever solution to a very real problem.

In the wake of World War II, America was expanding, and people were moving out of cities to build their own white-picket fence American dream on less-developed land. But as human settlements expanded into the lowlands of the Idaho southwest, conflict brewed between the new human residents and the industrious species that originally occupied the land, the beaver. To cite one example from the 1949 “Parabeavers” story:

“A farmer in the lowlands reported that the animals were continually damming his main irrigation ditch and cutting off his water. The farmer would tear down the dam in the morning and the beavers would build it up again overnight. The beavers and the farmer had been battling for weeks.”

In centuries past, the “solution” to this problem would have seemed obvious to the settlers; their actions would have been swift and lethal toward the poor beaver population. But by the 20th century, America had begun to recognize the folly of this shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach.

The decimation of the native beaver population on the east coast of America offered a cautionary tale. As Leila Philip notes in Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, an excess of hunting and fur trapping in the days of colonies meant that “by the late 1700s beavers were largely gone from Connecticut and the rest of the East, and they were declared officially extirpated in the state in 1842.”

But beavers proved to be a crucial part of the local ecology. As TIME summarized in an April 1939 article, “Beaver dams are useful to man. They catch fine silt that otherwise would wash down stream. Beaver ponds may provide water for livestock, and conserve moisture in dry areas.” In 1905, New York began a program to restore their beaver population, relocating five beavers from Canada to Adirondack Park, and in 1914 Connecticut followed suit, bringing over beavers from Oregon. That same TIME article estimated that while the cost of transplanting a beaver was $8 ($191.50 in 2026), the value of that beaver’s work in the local environment was $300 ($7,181.21 in 2026). So it stands to reason that the Idaho Department of Fish and Game would rather relocate the beavers than risk killing them.

That’s all well and good, the reader might think, but why the parachutes and airplanes?

That was Elmo W. Heter’s alternative to the existing, deeply-flawed beaver relocation system. As Heter would point out himself in a 1950 article for The Journal of Wildlife Management, Idaho’s previous beaver transplant process involved trappers capturing beavers and turning them over to a wildlife trooper or forest ranger, who would then transport them via car and then via horse or mule into the new territory. The process, in Heter’s words, was “arduous, prolonged, expensive, and resulted in high mortality among the beavers.” Many beavers died during these journeys, either from overheating or stress.

Heter believed that he could drastically reduce the risk of stress-related death by dropping the beavers into their new home via parachute.

And he was right.

The team tested a number of different containers for the beavers, including woven willow boxes that were rejected once it was clear the beavers could chew through them in mid-air. The planners settled on a crate that resembled suitcase, with a hinge on the base, that would open only after the beavers touched down safely in their new home.

One beaver served as the primary test subject for the endeavor, a rodent fittingly dubbed “Geronimo” in reference to the famous exclamation made by paratroopers during the Second World War (by the time of the beaver drop, the 501st and 509th Parachute Infantry Regiments had incorporated the phrase into their insignia).

“Satisfactory experiments with dummy weights having been completed,” Heter wrote, “one old male beaver, whom we fondly named ‘Geronimo,’ was dropped again and again on the flying field. Each time he scrambled out of the box, someone was on hand to pick him up. Poor fellow! He finally became resigned, and as soon as we approached him, would crawl back into his box ready to go aloft again.”

Starting in August of 1948, a total of 76 beavers were taken up into the air and then parachuted down across the Chamberlain Basin area of Central Idaho. Of those, a remarkable 75 survived the journey, with only a single mid-air beaver fatality. The beavers were paired two to a crate, with Heter determining that the ideal combination to start a beaver population in a particular area was “one male, three females.” They made sure that Geronimo was ultimately given that arrangement when it was time for his final skydive.

The endeavor might have stayed a curio in the margins of Pop Mech history had it not been for a fateful discovery in 2015. Historian Sharon Clark came across a mislabeled canister of 16mm film, and found it to be a 14-minute short entitled “Fur for the Future.” Amidst its crackling narration and grainy documentary footage, Clark found footage of the full beaver drop process (albeit, apparently, a recreation for the cameras, as was common for documentaries of the time). Though Heter and others had documented their process in writing, this was the first opportunity most people had to actually witness the parachutes gliding down, the crates opening, and the intrepid little beavers waddling away unscathed. The film was uploaded to YouTube by the Idaho State Historical Society, bringing the remarkable story of the parabeavers into the 21st century.