On September 20, 1950, a US Navy ship just off the coast of San Francisco used a giant hose to spray a cloud of microbes into the air and into the city's famous fog. The military was testing how a biological weapon attack would affect the 800,000 residents of the city.
The people of San Francisco had no idea.
The Navy continued the tests for seven days, potentially causing at least one death. It was one of the first large-scale biological weapon trials that would be conducted under a "germ warfare testing program" that went on for 20 years, from 1949 to 1969. The goal "was to deter [the use of biological weapons] against the United States and its allies and to retaliate if deterrence failed," the government explained later. "Fundamental to the development of a deterrent strategy was the need for a thorough study and analysis of our vulnerability to overt and covert attack."
Of the 239 known tests in that program, San Francisco was notable for two reasons, according to Dr. Leonard Cole, who documented the episode in his book "Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas."
Cole, now the director of the Terror Medicine and Security Program at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, tells BusinessInsider that this incident was "notable: first, because it was really early in the program ... but also because of the extraordinary coincidence that took place at Stanford Hospital, beginning days after the Army's tests had taken place."
Hospital staff were so shocked at the appearance of a patient infected with a bacteria, Serratia marcescens, that had never been found in the hospital and was rare in the area, that they published an article about it in a medical journal. The patient, Edward Nevin, died after the infection spread to his heart.
Bacillus subtilis, then known as Bacillus globigii, was one pathogen that was used in testing. WMrapids/Wikimedia Commons
S. marcescens was one of the two types of bacteria the Navy ship had sprayed over the Bay Area.
It wasn't until the 1970s that Americans, as Cole wrote in the book, "learned that for decades they had been serving as experimental animals for agencies of their government."
San Francisco wasn't the first or the last experiment on citizens who hadn't given informed consent.
Other experiments involved testing mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting citizens. In one shocking, well-known incident, government researchers studied the effects of syphilis on black Americans without informing the men that they had the disease they were told they had "bad blood." Researchers withheld treatment after it became available so they could continue studying the illness, despite the devastating and life-threatening implications of doing so for the men and their families.
But it was the germ warfare tests that Cole focused on.
"All these other tests, while terrible, they affected people counted in the hundreds at most," he says. "But when you talk about exposing millions of people to potential harm, by spreading around certain chemicals or biological agents, the quantitative effect of that is just unbelievable."
"Every one of the [biological and chemical] agents the Army used had been challenged" by medical reports, he says, despite the Army's contention in public hearings that they'd selected "harmless simulants" of biological weapons.
"They're all considered pathogens now," Cole says.
Here are some of the other difficult-to-believe germ warfare experiments that occurred during this dark chapter in US history. These tests were documented in Cole's book and verified by Business Insider using congressional reports and archived news articles.
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US military released bacteria to test biological warfare ...
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- Shoemaker: Seeing a tragedy or a mere statistic? - Opinion ... - MetroWest Daily News - June 11th, 2017 [June 11th, 2017]
- LETTER: Process of forgetting simply facilitated - The Guardian - June 14th, 2017 [June 14th, 2017]
- 'New' way to look at smallpox - Fiji Times - June 16th, 2017 [June 16th, 2017]
- I meant every word - Fort Madison Daily Democrat - June 16th, 2017 [June 16th, 2017]
- What Do We Celebrate? - The Runner - June 17th, 2017 [June 17th, 2017]
- We'll pass on the Liberal Lollapalooza - Net Newsledger - June 18th, 2017 [June 18th, 2017]
- Whom Are You Fooling? - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com - June 23rd, 2017 [June 23rd, 2017]
- The case for keeping 'Langevin Block' - Macleans.ca - June 30th, 2017 [June 30th, 2017]
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- Area man wants Amherst to change town's name - The Recorder - August 25th, 2017 [August 25th, 2017]
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- Belchertown man wants Amherst's town name banished - Amherst Bulletin - August 25th, 2017 [August 25th, 2017]
- Shir Ishii - Wikipedia - February 27th, 2018 [February 27th, 2018]
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- The Long Read: The Germ Warfare Island Abandoned by the ... - May 12th, 2018 [May 12th, 2018]
- Conspiracy Theory? US Army Has Admitted to Conducting 100s ... - May 30th, 2018 [May 30th, 2018]
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- GERM WARFARE - Carpet Cleaning and Upholstery Cleaning - July 10th, 2018 [July 10th, 2018]
- Coconut Oil: Germ Warfare! | Underground Wellness - July 15th, 2018 [July 15th, 2018]
- Germ Warfare | Recess Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia - July 16th, 2018 [July 16th, 2018]
- History of cancer chemotherapy - Wikipedia - October 16th, 2018 [October 16th, 2018]
- International Military Tribunal for the Far East - Wikipedia - October 16th, 2018 [October 16th, 2018]
- Recess Season 4 Episode 38 | Germ Warfare | Recess Full Episodes TV Series - November 30th, 2018 [November 30th, 2018]
- U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits - The New ... - December 4th, 2018 [December 4th, 2018]
- Germ Warfare | Dexter's Laboratory Wiki | FANDOM powered ... - December 4th, 2018 [December 4th, 2018]
- Colonial Germ Warfare : The Colonial Williamsburg Official ... - December 30th, 2018 [December 30th, 2018]
- America's Secret War: Germs & Biological Weapons - Spies, Scientists (2001) - December 30th, 2018 [December 30th, 2018]
- UNIT 731 Japan's Biological Warfare Project - March 29th, 2019 [March 29th, 2019]
- Korean War - Air warfare | Britannica.com - March 29th, 2019 [March 29th, 2019]
- "M*A*S*H" Germ Warfare (TV Episode 1972) - IMDb - April 14th, 2019 [April 14th, 2019]
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- The Concern for the Secretive Bio-Geopolitics - FXStreet - October 16th, 2019 [October 16th, 2019]
- Depression Quest: Bad Brains, Good Friends and Night in the Woods - HeadStuff.org - November 25th, 2019 [November 25th, 2019]
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service: This Never Happened to the Other Fellow - Ricochet.com - November 25th, 2019 [November 25th, 2019]
- The Fall or Dive of Sydney Gottlieb and Company - CounterPunch - January 9th, 2020 [January 9th, 2020]
- As China death toll rises, do we need a vaccine for the virus of State secrecy - The Conservative Woman - January 30th, 2020 [January 30th, 2020]
- DC Hero's Most Disgusting Power Was Popular With The President - Screen Rant - January 30th, 2020 [January 30th, 2020]
- Lord Jeffery Amherst, the town namesake who attempted a Native American genocide - Buffalo News - January 30th, 2020 [January 30th, 2020]
- Clean Buildings Expo To Offer Expanded Education Sessions - CleanLink - February 12th, 2020 [February 12th, 2020]
- What If Donald Got the Bug? - LA Progressive - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- Letter to the editor: Don't get your coronavirus information from Rush - The Winchester Star - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- Herbs That Fight Viruses - Newsmax - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- Don't Touch Anything: The Unintended Consequences of Environmental Ecosystems - The Good Men Project - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- COVID-19 and Us OrissaPOST - Wink Report - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- STERAMIST IS MOBILIZED TO AID IN THE CONTROL SARS-CoV-2 IN DAEGU-KYUNGBUK PROVINCE, SOUTH KOREA - Yahoo Finance - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- We clean freaks will stand and scrub together | Sam Venable - Knoxville News Sentinel - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Corbella: Don't spread the virus or fake news - Calgary Sun - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
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- Exasperating Farrago of Distortions! Coronavirus and the Pandemic of Conspiracy Theories - News18 - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Rab McNeil: Stocks wiped out as germ warfare sees panic buyers rolling in the aisles - HeraldScotland - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Is biological warfare raising its ugly head? - citytoday - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- REVEALED: Millions of Brits were in SECRET germ war tests between 1940 and 1979 - Politicalite - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- Coronavirus: How Orania has been affected by the disease - The South African - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- The Plague and the Long War - Inkstick - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- Historically Speaking: The flu epidemic we've been here before - Roswell Daily Record - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- For China and Russia, coronavirus hoaxes are another strain of disinformation warfare - The Globe and Mail - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- State Department marks bioweapons accord with reference to pandemic - Washington Times - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- Past Pandemics Exposed Chinas Weaknesses - Foreign Affairs Magazine - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- 'All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented': Author Max Brooks On COVID-19 - NPR - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
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- The decade of transformation: Remaking international relations - NationofChange - April 9th, 2020 [April 9th, 2020]
- Mad Man Modly: The Secretary of the Navy Gets the Boot - Antiwar.com - April 9th, 2020 [April 9th, 2020]