The Government's Tick Problem

I know you have had a tick on you

before. Did you know that in 1982 a

scientist named Willie Bergdorfer

discovered the bacterium that causes

Lyme disease? A little bullseye

infection around a a nasty tick bite.

They named the disease after him.

Borelia Berg Dorfery. Hilarious name.

Tragic disease. What they didn't tell

you is that he spent the previous 30

years weaponizing ticks for the United

States military. And before he died, he

sat in front of a camera and told the

truth to a few people. This has recently

been declassified and conspiracy

theorists were proven right once again.

All right, guys. Yeah. I mean, what?

Again, again, and again, and again. How

are we always this right all the time?

This is crazy. I'm not really a

conspiracy theorist, but like a little

bit though. Kind of. I'm starting to

become more and more of one. I don't

exactly trust the powers that be.

You want to see the type of motherucker

that trusts the powers that be? Friend

of the show, Arnuki Beast. Spooky

Island. Press like. Willie Bergdorfer

was born in Basil, Switzerland in 1925.

Willie studied zoology, parasettology,

and bacteriology at the University of

Basil. and in 1951 he finished his PhD.

His thesis was on burellia spyroets in

ticks. He was 26 years old and already

one of the world's foremost experts on

tickborne pathogens. His entire academic

career up to that point had been spent

studying how spyroet bacteria survive

and reproduce inside of a tickenheimer

and how ticks transmit those bacteria to

a new host when they suckle them. They

feed. That is exactly what Lyme disease

is. A spyroet transmitted by a tick

during feeding. That's Lyme disease. L

YME. You probably know somebody who's

been infected and probably still dealing

with it even years later. 3 days before

Christmas 1951, he arrived at the Rocky

Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana

in a snowstorm. RML was a National

Institutes of Health facility originally

set up to study Rocky Mountain spotted

fever. It also housed the largest living

tick collection in the United States,

which is disgusting and scary. And it

had a second purpose that wasn't exactly

televised. The US Army was running a

biological weapons program out of Fort

Dietrich, Maryland, and they needed

someone who understood ticks better than

anyone on the planet. Willie Burgdorfer

was theiring guy. Port Dietrich, if you

didn't know, was the center of the

American biological weapons programs

from 1943 to 1969. It was run by the US

Army Chemical Corps. And by the late

1950s, the operation was big as they had

labs that could breed 130 million yellow

fever mosquitoes per month and 50

million fleas per week. Thank God. They

had a million liter gas tight test

sphere called the eightball where they

tested airborne pathogens on animals and

humans. At least they were volunteers

most of the time, right? They had an

entire enmological weapons department

dedicated to turning insects into

delivery systems of biological weapons.

The logic is very simple and even

scarier than let's say the logic of a

bomb. Bomb kills people in a blast zone

and then that's it. An infected insect

bites someone, that person gets sick,

the insect is still alive, bites another

person. You don't have to keep dropping

bombs. You just drop a bunch ofing bugs

and they just work and live and people.

Willie Burgdorfer's first assignment was

to figure out how to package plague

infected fleas into cardboard tubes so

they could be loaded into cluster bombs

and dropped from airplanes. That's

awesome. What is he? a aing scaven. His

ongoing work luckily moved away froming

plague bombs to tick. He developed

techniques for force-feeding them

through glass capillary tubes filled

with pathogens. Okay, we're back to

theing scaven fever, tomia, epidemic

typhus, rabies, western ecoin

encphilitis. All my homies hate western

ecoin encphilitis. He and an

entomologist named James Oliver worked

on a program to drop weaponized ticks

from aircraft over enemy territory. A

military document from the era explained

the system. Arthropods, these little

guys, inject the agent directly into the

body so that a mask is no protection to

a soldier and they will remain alive for

some time, keeping an area constantly

dangerous. This all went on from 1953 to

1969, the year of our lord. And the

whole time, Burgdorfer lived a

completely normal life in Hamilton,

Montana.

A relatively normal life when you're

spending your days developing scaven

weapons tactics and bomb delivery

methods. He married a local fellow named

Dale C in 1953. It was it was a woman.

They had two sons. He coached little

league, went to church, and was known

around town as the tick guy at the Rocky

Mountain Lab. He would help you identify

a bug and then he also just happened to

spend his mornings force-feeding

pathogens to tick through glass tubes

for the DoD. So that's kind of like a

you know kind of a put into perspective

sort of moment. Eventually Chris Newbie

began an investigation that later

uncovered that Burgdorfer maintained a

Swiss bank account throughout his career

separate from his NIH salary which she

traced through documents in his personal

files and he never explained what it was

for. The reason I bring that up is

because this wholeing thing is a really

strange web, a strange

bug nest of web pieces that's really

freaky and it's a rabbit hole and a

conspiracy and we'll get into it and

it's been declassified recently and we

were right the whole time. Burgdorfer

wasn't working alone. Fort Dietrich had

recruited scientists through a program

called Operation Paperclip which brought

over 1,600 German and Austrian

scientists to the United States after

World War II. Some of them were

bioweapons researchers who had

experimented on prisoners in

concentration camps. All of them were

Nazis. Kurt Blom, the deputy Reich

health leader, had proposed spreading

malaria using mosquitoes as delivery

systems and tested it on prisoners at

Dau and Bookenbald. Edward May ran the

enmological division of the SS Institute

for Practical Research and received a

commission in 1943 to experiment on

concentration camp prisoners with

humanly harmful insects. That's a quote.

One of them was a man named Eric Tr who

had been the lab chief at the leading

boweapons facility uh Rhymes Island

which was in the Baltic Sea where he

worked directly under Hinrich Himmler on

weaponizing animal diseases using biting

insects specifically ticks. The were in

on it as well. Chob came to the United

States in 1949, consulted at Fort

Dietrich, and helped establish a new

research facility modeled after his era

island lab. And that facility was built

on an island off the coast of Long

Island, New York. Talked about it once

before with my buddy Isaiah and Jackson

in the Redthread Podcast. Go check that

out maybe if you want to. But things

have changed cuz [ __ ] got declassified.

But we'll get to it anyways. We'll get

to the the cool island facility first.

what the government actually did with

the weapons Burgdorfer was building.

Let's talk about that for a minute. So,

Burgdorfer and Fort Dietrich had the

weapons. The question is, what did they

do with the weapons? In 1962, the

Kennedy administration launched

Operation Mongus, which was a covert

campaign to destabilize Fidel Castro's

Cuba. Many things were done to

destabilize Castro's Cuba. Most people

know about the poisoned cigars and the

exploding seashells, all that [ __ ]

crazy [ __ ] What you might not know is

task 33b. A declassified status report

reads, quote, "Plan for incapacitation