Secret Pentagon files reveal US Army tested swarms of ‘killer mosquitoes’ as biological warfare weapons
Pentagon documents appear to confirm that the US experimented with using swarms of disease-infected mosquitoes as biological weapons.
The Daily Mail has unearthed a 69-page report which was quietly declassified in 1977 and dumped on the website for the Defense Technical Information Center, the Pentagon’s official library for scientific and technical information.
The file detailed a classified US Army program, dubbed Project Bellwether, that conducted real-world experiments to study how well mosquitoes bite people outdoors in hot, desert conditions.
The goal of the tests, carried out between September and October 1959, was to gather data to evaluate the insects as potential biological weapons that could be unleashed against enemy troops or other populated areas.
Military researchers used Aedes aegypti, a human-biting mosquito known for spreading dangerous diseases, including Zika, dengue fever, yellow fever and chikungunya.
The report stated: ‘The literature dealing with accidental and intentional laboratory infection indicates that the deliberate employment of infected arthropod vectors against enemy targets holds great strategic potential.’
The declassified report noted that these experiments had begun years earlier, with multiple mosquito projects in the mid 1950s, including Operation Drop Kick and Operation Big Buzz.
In 1955, the latter allegedly dropped 300,000 yellow fever-infected mosquitoes over the predominantly black neighborhood of Carver Village in Savannah, Georgia, to test if the insects could survive being released from airplanes over their targets.
The Aedes aegypti mosquito is capable of carrying yellow fever and dengue fever
Documents uncovered in the Pentagon’s Defense Technical Information Center revealed a secret project to use mosquitoes and ticks as weapons of war
Yellow fever is a serious disease that starts with high fever, headache, muscle aches, nausea and vomiting. In severe cases, it causes jaundice, bleeding and can kill up to 50 percent of people who develop the serious form of the virus if left untreated.
Dengue is another mosquito-borne illness that causes intense fever, severe headaches, joint pain and extreme fatigue. While most people recover, severe cases can lead to internal bleeding and shock that can kill one in five untreated patients.
During the Cold War, the US military carried out another little-known experiment known as Operation Drop Kick to determine whether mosquitoes could be used as delivery systems for biological weapons.
The program involved breeding and releasing millions of mosquitoes in a series of field tests. Researchers studied how far the insects could travel, how long they could survive after being dispersed and whether they would actively seek out and bite human hosts.
The mosquitoes used in the tests were not infected with disease-causing agents. Instead, the experiments were designed to assess whether the insects could effectively spread pathogens if they were ever used in a biological warfare campaign.
The tests showed that mosquitoes could survive aerial release and successfully locate and feed on humans, demonstrating their potential as vectors for biological agents.
The 1960 Pentagon report revealed how scientists continued the work started by projects like Operation Big Buzz, conducting 52 live trials involving US soldiers who volunteered to be bitten by the mosquitoes in an open desert environment in Utah.
A team from the US Army Chemical Corps was specifically looking to see if mosquitoes could survive and bite effectively in hot and dry areas that were much different from the tropical climates Aedes aegypti were used to.
Images in the declassified report from the Pentagon showed soldiers examining mosquito traps
Scientists also examined how the insect agents dealt with certain weather factors, including high winds, extreme temperatures and intense sunlight.
Results revealed that disease-carrying mosquitoes would still be able to bite and infect targets even when dropped into areas different from their natural hunting grounds.
These tiny killers were also believed to be effective in temperatures below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, making them a biological warfare option in a wide range of climates.
On average, when a group of ten soldiers sat in a small ring at the Dugway Proving Ground, they were bitten 40 times when exposed to 100 Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
In a file stored in the CIA’s public archives, a major magazine in the former Soviet Union appeared to learn of the plot and publicly accused the US of breeding ‘killer mosquitoes.’
The 1982 article in the Soviet magazine Literary Gazette said: ‘CIA-recruited American biologists at the laboratories, under the guise of combating malaria, are breeding particularly poisonous mosquitoes which infect their victims with deadly viruses.’
Despite secretly acknowledging that US biological warfare labs had been working to infect insects with pathogens dangerous enough to kill if left untreated, the CIA publicly denied that the program existed for decades.
CIA spokesman Kathy Pherson dismissed the report as ‘ridiculous Soviet propaganda.’
An article stored by the CIA revealed the agency’s response to claims the mosquito program existed made by the Soviet Union in 1982
The revelations discovered in the Pentagon report give more credibility to other claims involving secret CIA research projects aimed at using ticks to carry life-threatening illnesses to other countries during the Cold War.
Dr Robert Malone, who helped lay the groundwork for mRNA vaccine technology, claimed he analyzed declassified government documents from Cold War biological weapons programs that link the spread of Lyme disease to CIA experiments.
Malone highlighted experiments in the 1960s that allegedly released more than 282,000 radioactive ticks in Virginia and open-air tick research at Plum Island, a federal laboratory located near the Connecticut community where Lyme disease was first identified.
Malone’s report argued the research was part of a much larger Cold War biological weapons program known as Project 112, which involved dozens of secret tests aimed at studying how insects could be used to spread pathogens.
Meanwhile, scientists at Western Michigan University recently argued that the technology currently exists to deliberately infect ticks with specific viruses, including one that would make its victims allergic to eating meat.
However, researchers Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth believed that scientists currently lack an easy and effective way to carry out a large-scale infestation campaign across an entire country.
