The 6 Most Evil Human Experiments Perpetrated By The U.S. Government

Published October 24, 2017
Updated December 6, 2021

The Military Poison Tests

Boxcar Plane

Wikimedia CommonsAn American C-119 “Boxcar,” of the sort used to dust the Midwest with bacteria.

As early as 1942, people in the War Department whose job was to be paranoid about security were worried about how wide-open and vulnerable the United States was. On their recommendation, President Roosevelt created America’s first biological warfare bureau, officially to study the country’s vulnerabilities and devise an appropriate response, should Japan, Germany, or, later, the Soviet Union ever get the idea to spray some germs around the U.S.

Unfortunately, the bureau’s method of “assessing vulnerability” was to covertly attack those perceived vulnerabilities with germ warfare of its own. Over a period lasting 20 years, from 1949 to 1969, well-intentioned officials working for the Department of Defense repeatedly doused whole cities across America with chemicals, bacteria, and fungal spores that they were pretty sure would be mostly harmless.

One of the earliest (of more than 200) tests took place in September 1950, when a U.S. Navy ship near San Francisco hoisted its fire hose and sprayed tons of bacteria into a bank of fog that was drifting over the city.

Later, government officials checked in with local hospitals to see how many people had been infected. It turned out to be thousands, and one of them may have died as a result, but the human experiments kept going.

To get more data about how a biological attack might spread, project planners dusted rural areas with potentially carcinogenic cadmium, including several schools in Minneapolis. They went with a cover story that the military was experimenting with shrouding cities in smokescreens in case of nuclear attack.

In New York, in 1966, agents threw light bulbs filled with bacteria onto the subway tracks to see if the whoosh of air from the trains would spread the contaminants. It turns out it would – samples dropped at 14th Street were found as far away as the 59th Street station.

The bacteria, Bacillus globigii, a pathogen that causes food poisoning, also coated the clothes, skin, and hair of subway passengers. None of the people who were exposed knew what was going on, and nobody was ever punished for these human experiments.


Enjoy this article on human experiments? Next, learn about more of the most evil science experiments ever conducted. Then, read about Josef Mengele’s appalling Nazi experiments.

author
Richard Stockton
author
Richard Stockton is a freelance science and technology writer from Sacramento, California.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.