Baseless Conspiracies Ep. 186: Plum Island, Operation Paperclip and the Lyme Disease Confession

Jon Herold and Zak Paine open Episode 186 on Memorial Day with Jon describing how he found a lone star tick crawling up his arm the night before, making the follow-up to last week's tick episode feel extremely personal. The full hour is dedicated to tracing the documented history of US government tick and insect bioweapons programs. Jon walks through Nazi scientist Dr. Eric Traub, brought to America under Operation Paperclip in 1945, who set up the Plum Island research facility nine miles from Lyme, Connecticut. USDA National Archives files bearing Traub's name and labeled "tick research" were found empty. Jon then walks through a series of declassified programs: Operation Sea Spray spraying bacteria over San Francisco Bay civilians in 1950, bacteria-filled light bulbs smashed in the New York City subway in 1962, plague and flea drops over Cuba, and 282,800 radioactive lone star ticks released across Virginia between 1966 and 1969 that reached Long Island by 1970. The episode closes with the most damning piece: a 2013 filmed interview in which Dr. Willie Bergdorfer, the scientist who officially "discovered" Lyme disease, admitted on camera that the Borrelia pathogen causing modern Lyme disease was the same one he had created as a US military bioweapons agent in 1952.