Jamie founded Listverse due to an insatiable desire to share fascinating, obscure, and bizarre facts. He has been a guest speaker on numerous national radio and television stations and is a five time published author.
There’s no doubt that the US government, as well as governments around the world, are into some pretty shady stuff. One of the most notorious US government operations is probably MKULTRA, which was the blanket name for the CIA’s attempts at mass mind control. That’s far from the only questionable—and frankly terrifying—government project that has been done on American soil.
Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) in Utah was established as a military installation with the reallocation of public lands in 1942. By the 1950s, there was a definite need for a remote testing facility, a role that DPG would fill nicely. It became the location of the Biological Warfare Assessment Laboratories in 1954. With that title came the necessity of figuring out whether or not insects were viable for use as delivery systems for various types of nasty diseases. Specifically, they wanted to know if they could deliver the plague via fleas.
Operation Big Itch dropped countless fleas on the Utah desert. Cages of guinea pigs were set up on the ground to gauge how successful the drop was, as there were concerns about whether or not the fleas would survive and how much they would spread if they made it to the ground. The fleas were sealed in containers that were designed to rupture with the firing of a CO2 cartridge at an altitude of 300–600 meters (1,000–2,000 ft).
The experiment was something of a success. The guinea pigs became infested with the fleas, but it was also decided that it was necessary to drop the fleas close to the target to make sure that the bugs made it to their hosts. Not all of the drops went off flawlessly. In one attempt, one of the cartridges fired while it was still in the plane, and the crew was swarmed by fleas.
Overall, the test was enough of a success that there were plans in the works to build a massive flea-breeding facility that would raise 50 million fleas a week. Producing enough plague virus for all of those fleas wasn’t as easy, however. When researchers failed in their attempts to figure out how to do so, the plan fell by the wayside.
Between May 28 and October 7, 1957, military personnel were exposed to 29 nuclear tests in order to gauge their response after being near to and witnessing a detonation. At the time, it seemed quite likely that the world would end up in a full, no-holds-barred nuclear war. In order to make sure that military personnel could still function after the shock of the blast, Operation Plumbbob was performed on a group of men based in Fort Bragg, who were designated as “Task Force Big Bang.”
The 167 men of the task force were sent to Nevada, where they were familiarized with the weapons and safety measures throughout August. Slated to leave Nevada on September 5, the test, code-named Shot Galileo, was carried out on September 2. In theory, it was pretty simple. The men would watch the nuclear explosion and then disassemble and reassemble their rifles. After that, they would run a course through a minefield and infiltration course (including obstacles like barriers, walls, and foxholes), and their results would be compared to how they did without the nuclear factor.
The blast was detonated, the course was run, and the men were decontaminated. Bizarrely, the psychological evaluation ended up being of little to no use. Prior to running the course, the men had already been exposed to a nuclear detonation—Shot Smoky, on August 31. Since the whole point was to see how personnel responded when they were forced into a situation that they had never been in before, none of the results were particularly useful.
Other parts of Operation Plumbbob included testing warhead designs, as well as seeing how military and civilian buildings could—or couldn’t—withstand a nuclear explosion. In one experiment, 1,200 pigs were caged and dressed with various protective coverings to see which one would protect them best. Most survived the thermal blast, but most were also covered with third-degree burns. Later, an examination of the men involved in the operation (over 16,000 throughout the course of the program) found that there was an unnaturally high rate of leukemia due to the extreme levels of radiation that they had been exposed to.