Everybody loves a story about top secret government projects and conspiratorial activities that are supposedly carried out by the CIA, NSA or other secretive government agencies. With the rise of the internet, the world has been introduced to a wide variety of conspiracy theories concerning the United States Government. Most of these theories are cooked up by paranoid internet addicts who have no real evidence to back up their cooky claims. However, every once in a while, a long-held conspiracy theory turns out to be true after all. For example, the US Government admitted to conducting experiments on mosquitoes that would have tested their ability to transmit yellow fever to America’s Cold War foes several decades ago.
Back in 1965, when the Cold War was on the mind of every American, the American and Indian Governments worked together in order to develop a form of mosquito control. The World Health Organization and the Indian Council of Medical Research used American funds to research mosquitoes carrying yellow fever. On the surface, the joint project appeared to be aimed at decreasing the rate of yellow fever around the globe. At one point, the Indian researchers released thousands of sterile mosquitoes into the wild in order to reduce mosquito population sizes. This reduction, in turn, would have decreased the rate of yellow fever epidemics. Despite the seemingly humane goal of the project, Indian researchers who had worked on the project always had their suspicions about the project’s true goals. Unfortunately, back in 2002, the United States Government released documents that confirmed the Indian Government’s worst suspicions about the past project.
This confirmation came from documents that had become declassified and available for public viewing nearly 30 years after the project was aborted by the American Government. Apparently, government officials in America were studying mosquito flight patterns in an effort to judge their effectiveness at delivering mosquito-borne disease to America’s enemies at the time, mainly North Korea. If this form of entomological warfare was being explored more than 50 years ago, you have to wonder if weaponized insects exist in secret today.
Do you believe that, at some point or another, insects were used in order to deliberately spread disease within enemy nations?