Declassified Files Reveal US Tested Mosquitoes as Biological Weapons in 1959

Newly exposed Pentagon records suggest the United States once developed swarms of disease-carrying mosquitoes as potential biological weapons. The Daily Mail uncovered a 69-page document that was quietly declassified in 1977 and subsequently posted to the Defense Technical Information Center, the Pentagon's official repository for scientific and technical data. This file details Project Bellwether, a classified Army initiative that conducted real-world trials to assess how effectively mosquitoes could bite humans in scorching, desert environments.

Executed between September and October 1959, these tests aimed to collect data on deploying insects against enemy forces or civilian populations. Military scientists utilized the Aedes aegypti, a species notorious for transmitting Zika, dengue fever, yellow fever, and chikungunya. The report explicitly stated that using infected arthropods against enemy targets possessed significant strategic value. It further noted that such projects had been underway since the mid-1950s, encompassing operations like Drop Kick and Big Buzz.

In 1955, Operation Big Buzz allegedly released 300,000 yellow fever-infected mosquitoes over Carver Village, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Savannah, Georgia. The objective was to verify if the insects could survive aerial dispersal and successfully reach their targets. Yellow fever is a severe condition marked by high fevers, headaches, muscle pain, nausea, and vomiting; severe cases can lead to jaundice, bleeding, and death in up to half of untreated patients. Dengue presents similar symptoms, including intense fever, severe headaches, joint pain, and extreme fatigue, with severe cases causing internal bleeding and shock that can be fatal to one in five untreated individuals.

During the Cold War, the military also pursued Operation Drop Kick to determine if mosquitoes could serve as delivery systems for biological agents. This program involved breeding and releasing millions of insects in field tests to study their travel range, survival duration after dispersal, and ability to seek out human hosts. Notably, the mosquitoes utilized in these specific Drop Kick trials were not infected with disease-causing agents, yet the broader context of the era reveals a disturbing history of experimenting with pathogens against innocent communities.

Contrary to initial assumptions, the experiments were structured to evaluate whether insects could disseminate pathogens if deployed in a biological warfare scenario. Testing confirmed that mosquitoes could endure aerial deployment and successfully locate and feed on human targets, validating their utility as vectors for biological agents.

A 1960 Pentagon report detailed how researchers advanced the work initiated by initiatives like Operation Big Buzz, executing 52 live trials in which US soldiers volunteered to be bitten by mosquitoes within an open desert in Utah. A unit from the US Army Chemical Corps specifically investigated whether mosquitoes could survive and bite effectively in hot, dry conditions distinct from the tropical environments native to *Aedes aegypti*.

Declassified images from the Pentagon report depicted soldiers inspecting mosquito traps while scientists analyzed how these insect agents reacted to environmental variables such as high winds, extreme temperatures, and intense sunlight. Findings indicated that disease-carrying mosquitoes retained the ability to bite and infect targets even when released in areas outside their natural hunting grounds. These insects were also deemed effective in temperatures below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, establishing them as a biological warfare option across a broad spectrum of climates.

Data from the Dugway Proving Ground showed that on average, a group of ten soldiers seated in a small ring were bitten 40 times when exposed to 100 *Aedes aegypti* mosquitoes. A file archived by the CIA revealed that a major publication in the former Soviet Union discovered the plot and publicly accused the United States of breeding "killer mosquitoes." An article in the 1982 issue of the Soviet magazine *Literary Gazette* stated: "CIA-recruited American biologists at the laboratories, under the guise of combating malaria, are breeding particularly poisonous mosquitoes which infect their victims with deadly viruses."

Although the CIA internally acknowledged that US biological warfare laboratories were working to infect insects with pathogens capable of causing death if left untreated, the agency publicly denied the existence of the program for decades. CIA spokesman Kathy Pherson dismissed the 1982 report as "ridiculous Soviet propaganda." Documents stored by the CIA record the agency's response to the Soviet Union's 1982 allegations regarding the mosquito program.

Revelations from the Pentagon report lend credibility to other assertions concerning secret CIA research projects intended to use ticks to transmit life-threatening illnesses to other nations during the Cold War. Dr. Robert Malone, a contributor to the development of mRNA vaccine technology, asserted that he analyzed declassified government documents linking the spread of Lyme disease to CIA experiments. Malone pointed to experiments in the 1960s that allegedly released more than 282,000 radioactive ticks in Virginia and conducted open-air tick research at Plum Island, a federal laboratory located near the Connecticut community where Lyme disease was first identified.

Malone's report argued that this research constituted a larger Cold War biological weapons program known as Project 112, which involved dozens of covert tests aimed at studying how insects could spread pathogens. Meanwhile, scientists at Western Michigan University recently argued that the technology currently exists to deliberately infect ticks with specific viruses, including one that would render victims allergic to eating meat. However, researchers Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth maintained that scientists currently lack an easy and effective method to execute a large-scale infestation campaign across an entire country.