Did the U.S. Army help spread Morgellons and other diseases?
by Hank P. Albarelli Jr., Zoe Martell
Last week’s Voltaire Network
article
concerning the mysterious spread of a fungus
disease in the Northwest United States provoked a number of readers to
contact Mr. H. P. Albarelli Jr., the author of both these articles, with new
information concerning strange diseases and the U.S. Army’s covert biological
warfare activities which involve the use of chemical and biological weapons
against human beings. There is a history of U.S. secret human
experimentation. In this case, it is unsuspecting U.S. citizens that are the
victims.
I went
to put some of the medicated salve on the lesions on my face and when I put
the salve near them the filaments beneath my skin moved into a group and then
moved away from the area I was going to treat. I was dumbstruck. I didn’t
know what to think. I screamed for my husband to come … the damn things
beneath my skin were alive; they moved to avoid treatment.
Morgellons victim, Vermont, May 2010.
One reader, former military scientist, Dr. Hanley Watson,
revealed that the Army, “from 1950 to at least mid-1976” conducted “numerous
experiments simulating biological or germ warfare attacks in dozens of
locations across the country.” Said Watson, “Previously these experiments
were downplayed by the Pentagon as ‘harmless tests’ occurring in about 8
areas in the US and employing benign substances, but this couldn’t be further
from the truth.”
Watson was referring to a 1976 Pentagon press conference during
which an Army spokesman revealed that researchers with the Army’s Fort
Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal, both in Maryland, conducted “simulated germ
warfare attacks, using nondisease [sic] causing biological substances in 8
areas of the US.” Among these experiments were a 1950 operation off the coast
of San Francisco; a 1966 biological warfare experiment in Manhattan in which
“the vulnerability of the New York subway system was tested”; and at least
three experiments conducted in Pennsylvania, Fort McClellan, Alabama, and
California with “fungal substances” to “perform field evaluations to
determine vulnerability to enemy biological attack.”
As widely reported in the mid-1970s, the San Francisco
experiment resulted in the death of at least one person. Additionally, the
1952 Alabama experiments resulted in a doubling of pneumonia cases in the
surrounding areas. Nonetheless, Army officials stated, “There is nothing we
have that shows any links between these tests and any outbreak of infection
or any deaths.”
Army officials went on in defending themselves and the
experiments by stating that the substance the Army used in many of the
experiments was Serratia marcescens, which they maintained is
harmless. Said the Pentagon, “The substance is present throughout the
environment and is considered not to cause disease.” But other physicians
said this claim is simply wrong. Several responsible physicians pointed out
that Serratia marcescens does cause infection in humans; and is
commonly found in bathrooms and public rest rooms. Doctors also state that
some strains of the bacterium are resistant to multiple antibiotics.
Eventually in 1976, the Pentagon amended its position, stating:
“For some individuals who lack a capability to develop immunity to most
disease Serratia marcescens could conceivably act as an opportunist
and produce an infection.” Assumably, the Pentagon was not referring to AIDS
patients, however, it is interesting to note that 1976 was about 6 years into
its research on a disease that sounded remarkably like AIDS. Also, apparently
the Pentagon was unaware of a 1946 Fort Detrick medical journal paper by Dr.
Tom F. Paine, which detailed an Army experiment with Serratia marcescens
that resulted in illness and infection in 4 subjects exposed to the bacterium
delivered in aerosol form.
Explained Watson further, “The experiments conducted from the
early 1950s through 1976 were many more in number than officially stated, and
they were conducted in many more locations than the reported eight.” Added
Watson, “In the 1950s and 1960s alone there were easily about two dozen
experiments conducted in the New England area.” One of the larger experiments,
as detailed in my book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and
the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments [www.voltairenet.org/article165450.html#nb1], is the strange, and
allegedly coincidental, experiment at a Manchester, New Hampshire woolen mill
that resulted in the anthrax-related tragic deaths of 4 mill employees. In
September 1957, at the same time the outbreak took place, biochemists from
Fort Detrick just happened to be on site at the mill performing tests with an
anthrax vaccine. Fort Detrick researcher Dr. George G. Wright had developed
the prototype vaccine being tested at the mill. Wright’s vaccine is
essentially the same controversial serum administered today to American
troops.
Watson also cited a number of Army experiments conducted during
the same time period and later with spore-borne diseases. One of these
experiments was conducted in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. There the Army used
a fungal substance known as aspergillus fumigatus. Watson said that
this fungal substance could result in disease and severe infection in humans.
In addition to the aspergillus fungus, Watson and a former Fort
Detrick microbiologist said the Army, through the Special Operation Division
(SO) at Fort Detrick, experimented with several other fungus substances
including spore-borne C. gattii from Australia, and with a “substance very
much like Morgellons disease in its effects.”
This substance was referred to as “FD-CPX.” Said the former
Detrick scientist, who worked under project MK/NAOMI, a joint CIA-Army
program for 6 years, “CPX was a problematic substance for us. We worked with
it in mutated form, and a number of sub-contractors came down with the
disease and that caused all sorts of additional problems. They were still
working with it when I left the post. I don’t know if SO ever got it right.”
The Mechanicsburg experiment took place, according to Pentagon
officials, “in a warehouse in the area” that “was completely closed off to
others not participating in the tests.” Said an Army spokesman, “The fungus
was not released into the atmosphere outside the warehouse and presented no
dangers to anyone unrelated to the activity.”
In light of future developments in Mechanicsburg, following the
experiment, this assertion is difficult to accept. Several years after the
Army activities, scientists in Pennsylvania began to notice that an unusually
large number of animals, including cats, dogs and horses that had become ill
from the fungus infection. Reportedly, the number of animals that became ill
increased for a number of years.
Dr. Watson, along with two other former Fort Detrick
researchers, including the late Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, also revealed an odd
experiment that took place in Pascagoula, Mississippi and produced one of the
most puzzling UFO and strange entity cases on record in America. This was the
incident, detailed in Albarelli’s book, involving two local fishermen who
claimed to have been abducted by aliens from a fishing pier in October 1973.
Much overlooked in the case is that the pier was not far away from a former
Fort Detrick research site, Horn Island. The barrier island was formally used
from 1943 to 1945 by Army researchers, but former microbiologists with the
military report that several experiments were conducted on the island, and
other islands off the coast of Maryland, in the late-1960s and early 1970s. Detrick microbiologists conducted intensive experiments on the islands “involving
human research subjects” and a number “of natural hallucinogenics as well as
advanced neuroscience techniques” aimed at the objection of producing
“previously unexplored and unique psychological warfare methods.” Some
researchers maintain that these experiments were part of the Army’s
top-secret Operation Strange Man, which is said to have involved “mutated
human subjects.” As unbelievable as these reports seem, there have been
unexplained sightings, some by law enforcement officials, of very odd humanoid
creatures in several of the related locations over the years. Said one of
Watson’s former Detrick colleagues: “These were experiments involving human
subjects that went way beyond what anyone could imagine. Some of the findings
and technology was transferred to Southeast Asia during the later stages of
the war there.”
Besides Horn Island, the Army’s Chemical Corps and Fort Detrick
conducted numerous experiments at Plum Island off the coast of New York. Plum
Island, originally known as Fort Terry, In the early 1950s it was under the
command of the Army Chemical Corps, and then in 1954 it was nominally
transferred to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and
the mission of its research was changed from “one which encompassed studies
on various exotic animal diseases to determine both their offensive and
defensive potentialities as biological warfare agents to one which pertains
only to the defensive aspects of [animal diseases],” according to writer
Michael Carroll, who wrote a book on Plum Island. Despite the changes made to
the official record, research at Plum Island changed little in reality;
diseases with the potential to be used as offensive agents continued,
unhindered, and a close relationship remained in place between Plum Island and
the Department of Defense.
Lyme disease is a tick-vectored spirochetal disease, which was
identified in 1975 when a mysterious illness broke out among residents in Old
Lyme, Connecticut. It rarely appears by itself in humans, with sufferers
often testing positive for infection by several tick-borne diseases
concurrently. The Plum Island animal diseases laboratory is located a mere
twelve miles from the first identified cases of Lyme disease.
Research at the Plum Island facility is known to have included
diseases carried by arthropods; in fact, Carroll describes in his book the
historical presence of a large “tick colony” on the premises. Carroll’s
history of the testing done at the facility indicates that outdoor, field
testing of diseases was done on and near Plum Island, and also details
numerous breaches in safety procedures throughout the history of the
laboratory’s operation. In 1978, for example, a cattle disease called Hoof
and Mouth disease escaped from the Plum Island, infecting cattle in neighboring
areas.
According to declassified army documents, Fort Derick scientists
also experimented widely with Venezuelan Equine Encephalomyelitis Virus
(VEEV). Several documents cite that Fort Detrick assigned some its top
researchers to efforts to weaponized the virus, but say nothing about the
number of former Nazi biochemists who worked closely with Fort Detrick and
Edgewood Arsenal researchers, including the much overlooked German scientist,
Dr. Gernot Bergold.
Gernot H. Bergold (1911–2003)
The U.S. Army’s Project Paperclip [www.voltairenet.org/article165450.html#nb2] secretly brought Bergold to
the United States after the war. In America, Dr. Bergold, who under Hitler’s
Third Reich headed the Nazi’s Entomological Department and the Department of
Insect Vectors of the Division of Virus Research, secretly worked on the VEE
virus for the military at Fort Detrick, and then at a military-sponsored
facility in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Psychologist Dr. Karen Cronick, who
now works in Venezuela, reports that in the 1970s, at about the same time
Bergold was conducting his work with VEE, there was an outbreak of the virus
in Michigan. This outbreak has been virtually blacked out by the media and
state officials.
Dr. Cronick states, “The coincidence of these events has always
troubled me. A tropical disease that was researched in Michigan suddenly
appeared there in the general population. There is no way the insect
vector that transmits the disease could get so far north by any normal
migration. Could the Michigan outbreak have been a controlled experiment?
It is the perfect place to carry one out: the Great Lakes and winter are
natural limits to any unrestrained expansion of infected vectors.”
As reported in an earlier Voltaire Network [www.voltairenet.org/article165450.html#nb3] by this author, Morgellons
disease, which was experimented with by Fort Detrick in the 1960s and beyond,
has recently been reported as a “disease of high-level concern” in certain
areas of the country, including Vermont, and Florida, Texas and California.
For reasons thus far unknown, Morgellons seems to be wide spread among
Vermont’s small population of 600,000. Some doctors in Chittenden County,
Vermont’s most populated region estimate that about 300 people in the state
have the disease.
According to a number of organizations dedicated to the study of
Morgellons, there are about 15,000 people in the US suffering from the
disease. Included in this number are many well-known names, singer Joni
Mitchell, baseball player Billy Koch, and others.
Natasha Cebek, 44, who lives in Vermont with her 3 children,
reported that she has had Morgellons disease for about 3 years. “I don’t
really know how I contracted the disease,” she said in an interview this
week. “I came to Vermont years ago to live in a clean, natural environment
free from pollution and environmental assaults and never imagined anything
like this would happen to me.”
Cebek says she has been to several physicians nearly all of whom
“gave me a Stepford wives-type smile. One even offered to send me to a
psychotherapist. That made me quite angry; I had been healthy all my life; I
had taken special care to eat properly and live a quality life and to teach
my children to do the same. I didn’t need psychological attention; I needed
medical care; quality, expert care.”
Cebek states, “There’s no comfort in numbers. I’ve learned that
well over a hundred people have sought treatment for this disease at the same
facilities I’ve visited. That’s a major outbreak in my view; that’s a major
public health problem, but health officials here don’t speak about it
publicly.”
One form of Mogellons disease.
Kathleen Vanoudenallen, a registered nurse who is a close friend
of Cebek’s, and who has intensively studied Morgellons for years, and first
diagnosed Cebek, stated this week, “I don’t think there’s much doubt that
Morgellons looks like something that has been altered, something not natural
that may have been created in a lab, something weaponized. Some former
military researchers say they worked on just such a disease years ago. How it
got out into the general population is anyone’s guess. Nobody wants to go the
record with information about the government’s work with the disease.”
Recounted Cebek, “When I learned that this disease could
possibly be a result of covert biological warfare work performed by our
government I was outraged. I wanted to scream, to smash the wall. How dare
they do this to unsuspecting citizens? How dare they use people like this?
What gives them the right? Who the hell do they think they are?”
"Operation Paperclip" : des V2 à
la Lune», Réseau Voltaire, Augsut 24, 2004.
Source: http://www.voltairenet.org/article165450.html