Hey everyone, it’s Jeremy here and this is the last podcast week of November, so ya’ll know what that means…Historically Significant Utah! The gang is short Julia this week because she headed out early to start her Thanksgiving shenanigans. Chris and Bre went to the Alton Brown show (I’m actually quite jealous) and afterwards they ate at the new Pretty Bird location. Go back a few years and you can listen to our interview with Chef Viet at the grand opening of Pretty Bird. Jeremy and Julia went to the Herriman Holiday Market, and we encourage everyone to shop local this holiday season.

This month we went down a deep rabbit hole and discussed the infamous Dugway Proving Grounds located 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Dugway Proving Ground is where the Army develops and tests biological and chemical weapons, tactics, and defenses, what are often called NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) hazards. DPG was established in 1942, shortly after the US was suddenly drawn into World War II. The Great Salt Lake Desert was an excellent location for this weapons development, being remote, thinly populated, and easy to secure.

In March 1968, 6249 sheep died in Skull Valley, an area only 30 miles from the Dugway testing site. The sheep were found to have been poisoned by a never agent ‘VX’ that had been developed at the proving grounds. The official claim was for 4,372 “disabled” sheep, of which about 2,150 were killed outright by the VX exposure. Another 1,877 sheep were “temporarily” injured or showed no signs of injury and but not marketable due to their potential exposure and put down by veterinarians.

From 1985 to 1991, Dugway Proving Ground was home to the Ranger Schools short-lived Desert Training Phase. It was first known as the Desert Ranger Division (DRD) until redesignated the Ranger Training Brigades 7th Ranger Training Battalion in 1987, and taught students basic desert survival skills and small unit tactics. The program was later moved back to its original site at Fort Bliss, Texas in 1991, where it was deactivated in 1995

We discuss some of the military tests involved human exposure to biological and chemical agents with intriguing titles like:

• “The Consequences of Ingestion by Man of Real and Simulated Fallout”
• Cluster bombs
• Soil spores
• “Operation Night Train”
• Weteye Chemical Bomb
• Birds to Tularemia
• “Big Jack”
• “Elk Hunt”
• “Autumn Gold”
• “Data report for DORK”
• Incapacitating Darts
• Entomological Munitions

“Entomological Munitions” was an experiment conducted at Dugway called “Operation Bellwether” which appears to study weaponized mosquitos. They took mosquitoes with an inert disease, and inert bacteria, and an inert virus and released them on civilian populations in the United States.

Following the public attention drawn to Area 51 in the early 1990’s, UFO hunters claim that numerous UFOs have been stored and reported in the area around Dugway. Dugway is being hailed as the new Area 51 (or) Area 52 to the diehard UFO Hunters.

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