Operation Sea-Spray

Operation Sea-Spray

America’s Bioweapons Tested On Their Own

Imagine stepping outside one morning, breathing in the fog, thinking it’s just another foggy morning, only this morning that fog is laced with live bacteria dropped by your own country’s navy.

That’s what happened in September 1950, in Operation Sea-Spray, one of the sickest acts of state-sanctioned bio warfare ever conducted on its own people.

For six days, a U.S. Navy minesweeper sailed just off the coast of San Francisco Bay, spraying trillions of particles of Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii into the air. These bacteria were designed to simulate a biological attack, to test how easily a city could be turned into a petri dish. They monitored the fog, the wind, and the spread, for science, they said. The fog didn’t stay off-limits, though. It drifted inland, over 800,000 people, including hospital patients, school kids, the elderly, anyone having the audacity to breathe.

The military reassured the public: these bacteria are “harmless.”

One week later, eleven people were admitted to Stanford University Hospital with rare urinary tract infections caused by Serratia. One man died from complications from a heart infection, and no one told him his death may have been caused by a military test; they dismissed it as “coincidence”.

San Francisco wasn’t the only target; from 1949 to 1969, the U.S. military conducted 239 open-air tests of chemicals and biological agents in cities across America, New York, Washington D.C., Key West, and Minnesota, without consent or warning.