Thus, on February 6, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed off on an order giving the War Department complete control over an astonishing 126,720 acres of previously open, public land, and the construction of a huge, secrecy-shrouded installation with both above- and below-surface facilities began. The Dugway Proving Ground quickly sprang to life. By the mid-1950s, more than a quarter of a million acres of additional land had been turned over to Dugway officials, thus massively increasing the size and scope of this isolated installation.
Despite various name changes in the years that followed, the mandate of the DPG remained very much unchanged: to further U.S. knowledge in the field of chemical and biological warfare. Today, the DPG has expanded to nearly 800,000 acres, and its airspace is constantly patrolled by the Air Force. And though understanding how the nation might best be protected from the ravaging effects of chemical warfare is without doubt a vital matter, it has not all been smooth sailing at Dugway. Not by a long shot.
Dead Sheep in Skull Valley
Imagine if you can a stark and shocking scene: It is early in the morning in mid-March 1968, and you are a rancher in Utah’s Skull Valley, a Native American Indian reservation of the Ghoshute tribe, less than 30 miles from the Dugway Proving Ground. Your income is mostly derived from breeding and selling sheep to the local communities, so your daily routine is to carefully nurture, feed, watch over, and house your animals. But this particular morning is destined to become one quite unlike any other. In fact, it’s about to turn into an absolute disaster.
As you ride your trusty steed (or drive your all-terrain vehicle) to the usual grazing area of your flock, you are met by a shocking sight: As far as the eye can see, sheep are lying dead on the valley floor. Others are struggling to take their very last breaths. Some wobble around on unsteady legs, their fates already tragically sealed. A few lie on the ground, unable or unwilling to move, suffering from fatal internal hemorrhaging. In the days to come, the casualty figure rises to 1,000 sheep. Then to 2,000. Finally it reaches a number that exceeds 6,000. To the uninitiated this may sound like the opening scenes of a big-bucks Hollywood eco-thriller. It is not. Rather, it represents one of the most notorious events in the history of the Dugway Proving Ground.
It became clear very quickly to those who called Skull Valley and its immediate surroundings their home that something deadly and disastrous had occurred in their midst. Even before the evidence was in, the locals were looking in the direction of Dugway — and only in the direction of Dugway. History has demonstrated they were wise to do so: On March 13, 1968, mere days before the sheep deaths occurred, personnel at Dugway had secretly engaged in several open-air tests using an agent known as VX, a chemical weapon that, today, is officially classed as weapon of mass destruction, and the use of it is banned by the United Nations. Utterly odorless and tasteless, VX makes for the ideal weapon: By the time a person even realizes that something is wrong, he or she may very well already be on an excruciating one-way road to oblivion. And that, as the people of Skull Valley learned at the cost of their livelihood, goes not only for human beings, but for sheep too.
When the scale of the tragedy became clear, the news spread like wildfire — or just like VX. On March 16, 1968, the panicked manager of a livestock company in Skull Valley breathlessly telephoned a Dr. Bode, who was then attached to the University of Utah but working under contract to the DPG, and informed him of the discovery of the sheep’s bodies. Quickly and astutely recognizing the likelihood of a connection to the activities of the nearby Proving Ground, Bode, in the early hours of March 17, called the chief of the Ecology and Epidemiology office at the DPG to report the initial deaths. As more and more reports swarmed in to the heart of Dugway, the realization that an event of disastrous proportions had occurred was fast becoming undeniable.
Well, to some it was undeniable; not to others. Outrageously, instead of owning up to their cataclysmic errors, staff at the base initially had the gall to place the blame on the ranchers’ use of organophosphate pesticides on their crops. That is, until autopsies of some of the sheep, chosen entirely at random, revealed the presence of levels of VX that were certainly significant enough to account for all of the deaths. Staff at the base was then forced to take a second look at the grim picture.
Secret reports and studies were duly prepared — all of which remained classified for years, and in some cases for decades—which clearly and undeniably implicated the DPG, and no one and nothing else, in the sorry state of affairs. Ranchers in the area were financially reimbursed by the government for the loss of their livestock, but there was still a great reluctance on the part of the DPG to officially own up to anything at all.
This would not be the only occasion when mysterious deaths of animals in the area were tied to the secret activities of the Dugway Proving Ground. On the Independence Day holiday weekend of 1976, no less than 20 horses were found dead on the Proving Ground, in an area called Orr Springs — precisely where certain germ warfare tests had taken place. Three days later, another 30 were dead. Scott Baranowski, a young soldier who was ordered to the site, helped to bury the carcasses of some of the unfortunate animals, after they had been carefully autopsied by base doctors. Then, quite suddenly, Baranowski fell briefly ill too, with a 104-degree fever accompanied by severe aches and pains.
The Army flatly denied that it had engaged in any sort of outdoor experimentation using nerve agents, and suggested — in extensive reports now in the public domain — that all the horses had died from nothing stranger than thirst, which is highly ironic, given that most of the bodies were found very close to sources of abundant water. In addition, a number of the bodies showed evidence of many large sores, and scientists from the DPG quietly informed Baranowski that some extremely hostile material was then currently being tested on base. Its true nature and origin, perhaps mercifully for us, remains unknown. Collectively, this all led Baranowski to believe that death from dehydration and thirst did not even begin to tell the whole story — maybe none of it. Nor did he believe that the lung cancer with which he was later diagnosed was unconnected. To this day, the Army and the DPG vehemently disagree with him.
Human Testing
Baranowski may not have been the only person deeply physically affected by their time spent at the Dugway Proving Ground. Steve Erickson, of the Citizens Education Project of Salt Lake City, who heavily researched the history of the DPG, said that many of the tests run at the base involved human subjects, some of whom were military personnel, and “can only be described as human experimentation.”[9] He cited one example in which soldiers were given BZ — a hallucinogen not unlike LSD in terms of its effects upon the human mind. A second example involved a group of Seventh Day Adventist volunteers who were exposed to a swarm of hungry mosquitoes that had been deliberately infected with a biological warfare agent by staff at Dugway as a means to try and determine if such insects could be considered viable methods of delivery.
Lest anyone dismiss such claims as conspiratorial nonsense, it is worth taking into consideration the following quote from an official (and officially declassified) General Accounting Office report of September 28, 1994: “From 1951 through 1969, hundreds, perhaps thousands of open-air tests using bacteria and viruses that cause disease in human, animals, and plants were conducted at Dugway. It is unknown how many people in the surrounding vicinity were also exposed to potentially harmful agents used in open-air tests at Dugway.”[10]