3. Mosquito Swarms Released in American Cities to Spread Dengue Fever
Any sense of ethics that might have been gained following the horrors of World War II were apparently lost in the fervor to win the Cold War. The government’s tactic seemed to be to strike first, and that strike was usually on American citizens who had no idea what was going on. In the hot and humid American South, which is notorious for its bug populations, swarms of mosquitoes were released over Georgia and Florida via helicopters. The intention was to see how capable the mosquitoes would be of transmitting diseases such as yellow fever and dengue fever.
Government researchers tracked how quickly the swarms of mosquitoes spread, entered people’s houses, and bit them. They found that within one day, the mosquitoes could spread as far as two miles. The experiment showed that mosquitoes could be so successful at waging biological warfare in Asia that the army’s Engineering Command designed a plant that could breed 130 million mosquitoes per month, just to spread diseases.
The records for the project were finally released when the Church of Scientology pressed for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. It is not known how many people died because of the diseases spread by the mosquitoes.