Golden Fleece Award - Award Winners

Award Winners

Winners of the Golden Fleece Award included governmental organizations, including the United States Department of Defense, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service; research projects have been particularly well represented. The National Science Foundation (NSF) won the first Golden Fleece Award, for spending $84,000 on a study on love. The Federal Aviation Administration was named for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the "length of the buttocks" and how their knees were arranged when they were seated. Proxmire gave the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a Golden Fleece Award for the Aspen Movie Map, a predecessor to Google Street View. He also gave the award to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for their Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) program, supporting the scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations. Proxmire later withdrew his opposition to the SETI program.

Other award winners included:

• Paul Ekman's research that led to the development of the Facial Action Coding System
• National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded project by psychologist Harris Rubin for $121,000, on developing "some objective evidence concerning marijuana's effect on sexual arousal by exposing groups of male pot-smokers to pornographic films and measuring their responses by means of sensors attached to their penises

• The NSF for spending $103,000 to compare aggressiveness in sun fish that drink tequila as opposed to gin
• National Institute for Mental Health for spending $97,000 to study, among other things, what went on in a Peruvian brothel; the researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy
• Office of Education for spending $219,592 in a “curriculum package” to teach college students how to watch television
• United States Department of the Army for a 1981 study on how to buy Worcestershire sauce
• United States Department of Defense for a $3,000 study to determine if people in the military should carry umbrellas in the rain
• United States Department of Justice for conducting a study on why prisoners want to escape
• United States Postal Service for spending over $4 million on an advertisement campaign to make Americans write more letters to one another
• Executive Office of the President of the United States, for spending $611,623 to restore a room in the Old Executive Office Building with gold trim
• Ronald Reagan's 1985 inaugural committee, for spending $15.5 million of taxpayer money on the Second inauguration of Ronald Reagan