Project Sunshine - The Secret Body-Stealing Conspiracy

May 3

Intro

"I don't know how to get them, but I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them, and particularly in the young age group. So, human samples are often of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country." This is a quote attributed to Dr. Willard Libby, then a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, on January 18th, 1955. It’s a real quote, and it should give you a pretty good indication of the gravity of the topic we’re going to be discussing. This topic does contain some upsetting and disturbing information, much of it to do with children, so treat this as a content warning before going further.

Questions About Radiation

Yes, in 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission came to the conclusion that they needed cadavers for science, and young ones - anybody under the age of 20 years old, but especially infants. And they would decide that due to concerns of national security and public opinion, they would need to access these cadavers without consent or information of those involved.

But what could cause a group of scientists to decide they needed to take such drastic steps? The answer, like the majority of secret government projects at the time, has to do with nuclear weapons research. More specifically, there were glaring gaps in scientific knowledge around the long-term effects of nuclear fallout. It was known that radiation had deleterious effects on human and natural life, but there was no quantitative understanding of how much radiation could impact the world or the implications of repeated nuclear weapons testing.

At the time, many scientists believed that the cumulative effect of nuclear weapons testing was negligible and was no more a risk than the background radiation, a position which Libby more or less personally agreed with going into these studies.

Libby’s personal beliefs aside, other scientists had gone public stating that there was no safe amount of exposure to high-energy radiation and that any additional amount would lead to additional health and genetic issues. Project GABRIEL was an early attempt to look at the repercussions of nuclear fallout from Atomic weapons testing. This report indicated that one isotope known as Strontium-90 was the primary concern for long-term fallout accumulation.

Strontium 90 was found to be a concern not only for its ability to travel through the biosphere, but because of the body’s affinity for integrating it like normal calcium. Once absorbed, the Strontium-90 would settle into the bones and teeth of the organism. From there it would continue to decay and had long term potential for creating cancers of the bone and other related tissues. And from this we get the need to test the bones of subjects, and particularly those under the age of 20 - as the bones are still growing at this age and would be most likely to be absorbing Strontium-90 from the ambient environment.

In 1953, the first iteration of Project Sunshine happened in the form of a think tank at the RAND corporation, a public-private organization which advised the Department of Defense. Before we get to the date of our 1955 meeting that birthed the quote in the beginning of the video, there would be another event that made the threat of radioactive fallout impossible to ignore: the Castle Bravo test of March 1, 1954.

Impact of Castle Bravo

Castle Bravo was meant to be a secret test of a high-yield thermonuclear device, in fact representing the first plane-deliverable fusion bomb. The testing would take place on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The device, with an estimated yield between 5 and 6 megatons, was placed on one end of the Atoll while Task Unit 6, responsible for the firing of the device, were situated in a reinforced concrete control center on the island of Enyu, at the opposite end of the Atoll some 20 miles away.

When the bomb was ignited, the result was considerably larger than anticipated - 15 megatons, the 5th largest nuclear detonation in the world to date. It left a crater 2 kilometers in diameter which can be clearly seen on satellite imagery. Within minutes, the crew in the concrete control center noted that their geiger counter was giving off readings of radiation, which was not meant to be the case. As they hunkered down and waited for the radiation to dissipate while calling for evacuation assistance, others in the area weren’t so lucky.

A Japanese fishing vessel by the name of Lucky Dragon No. 5 was also in the fallout radius. Upon returning to Japan, it was found that the 23 members on the vessel were suffering from acute radiation sickness and the boat itself was radiated enough to be detected at a distance of 100 feet. One of the crew died and another later fathered a stillborn child, which was blamed on the radiation. Many tuna were irradiated and had to be discarded, and this led to a loss of reputation that also greatly affected the local fishing economy. Throughout their lives, the crew were monitored annually and a very large percentage would go on to develop cancers of their internal organs.

Naturally, this caused an international incident at a scale which was no longer possible to ignore. Once again the Japanese people had been victims of radiation from nuclear weapons, and this time because of a test gone wrong. For its part, the US issued statements disowning any responsibility or fault, and would also refuse to disclose the composition of radioactive elements in the bomb for fear that the Soviets could use this information to reverse-engineer the process.

It’s worth noting that this is just a surface-level overview of events, and completely skips over the terrible treatment and disease suffered by the native people of the Marshall Islands. The fallout of the Castle Bravo test is worthy of an entire documentary-length video of its own, but to stay on topic I think it’s important that we establish just the cliff notes of the event to understand how it impacted the events we’re about to hear about. If you want to see more about the Lucky Dragon 5 and the literal and metaphorical fallout of the situation, there are many videos on the topic including one I really like by the channel Plainly Difficult which devote much more time to this.

In Their Own Words

With that context fully established, we can now jump into our infamous 1955 meeting. This transcript was actually classified as “secret” for many years. Portions of it have become available due to a 1995 study by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

Right from the onset, we hear from the Director of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, or DBM, Director John Bugher. It’s clear that the events of the Castle Project have greatly shaped their priorities.

“The picture we had two years ago of being able to continue in a reasonably measured pace with respect to problems in environmental contamination has obviously not been possible to maintain. That is, events have overtaken us, and we must of necessity put on an accelerated program here as an expression of the fact that weapons have taken an enormous leap in energy release during the intervening time… The events of this spring during the Castle [nuclear weapons test] series were such as to bring very dramatically to the public attention the fundamental character of the things with which we are dealing and the necessity for precise knowledge and good prediction.”

It’s at this point also that we get into our opening quote from Dr. Libby. The essence of the job to be done is communicated very frankly; the men involved in the operation did not shy away from the truth that they would be covertly acquiring human samples for testing. Again, from Dr. Libby:

“I don't know how to snatch bodies. In the original study on the Sunshine at Rand [the Rand Corporation] in the summer of 1953, we hired an expensive law firm to look up the law of body snatching. This compendium is available to you. It is not very encouraging. It shows you how very difficult it is going to be to do legally.”

I would like to be able to share that compendium with you, but as far as I can tell, it is not part of the data that has been declassified, as I am only able to find snippets from the transcript as were released in the 1995 council reports. Whatever they contained, it’s obvious that the need for discrete acquisition of human remains and tissue samples would be very difficult to achieve within normal legal boundaries.

There’s some discussion of where the samples came, and potential sources of future samples.

“We were fortunate, as you know, to obtain a large number of stillborns as material. This supply, however, has now been cut off also, and shows no signs, I think, of being rejuvenated.”

This is followed by a conversation between Dr. Libby, and one Dr. Laurence Kulp, a geochemist who was a professor at Columbia University at the time.

“Dr. Kulp: . . . we have the channels in these places where we are getting everything. We have three or four other leads where we could get complete age range samples from different other geographic localities. These three are Vancouver, Houston, and New York. We could easily get them from Puerto Rico and other places. We can get virtually everyone that dies in this range.

Commissioner Libby: These are operative materials?

Dr. Kulp: No. This is all deaths between one and thirty. We have 20 coming from Vancouver and 20 from Houston in this range that have already been taken. So the channel is there, and the samples are flowing in.

Commissioner Libby: That is fine, Larry. Maybe you can reveal your technique to the other groups.”

And reveal his technique, he did, later in the document.

“Down in Houston they don't have all these rules. They claim that they can get virtually and they intend to get virtually every death in the age range we are interested in that occurs in the City of Houston. They have a lot of poverty cases and so on . . . .

Furthermore, before coming down to this conference I talked at some length with the Dean of the Columbia Medical School, and he has contacts all over the world where he is sure we can develop identical programs. In particular, we could develop a program in Australia, South America, Africa, in the Near East, and in Scandinavian countries, if the conference and the people here would like to have this developed.”

There’s a little bit of reading between the lines to be done here. In the discussion it’s clarified that these aren’t operative samples, meaning pieces of human tissue that might be removed from surgery for one reason or another, but remains from deaths in the age range of 1 to 30 years old.

Dr. Kulp mentions that they are able to access these remains because of cities where there are not many rules regarding the handling and protection of remains. In particular, he mentions poverty cases which brings up a really important point in the ethical considerations in this project. Although it’s not explicitly spelled out, it’s my impression that by this he’s talking about indigent burial or cremation services provided by the state. This happens when you have a person who is the responsibility of the state, or who otherwise dies where no surviving family members have access to the resources to take care of their end of life expenses.

The services provided are typically very plain, involving maybe just a cremation and a very simple urn. In referring to the poverty cases, this might be people who were homeless or orphaned. Given the age range, it might also include children where the parents were impoverished and didn’t have the funds to attend to funeral expenses on their own. This brings up a common issue with secret government projects such as this one, where it’s frequently the poor and disenfranchised who bear the worst of the costs. Retention and autonomy over human remains is a fundamental human right and often something of great religious significance, so it’s a common and valid criticism to say that secretly taking this away from those who are poor is taking advantage of these communities. This is an idea that will return later.

In consideration for the samples needed, it was also discussed that human samples would be required from all over the world. As the science regarding the spread of radiation was still young, not much concrete evidence was available regarding the ability of ionized particles to remain in the air or travel through the environment and settle in different parts of the earth. So, to truly get an accurate picture of the damage being done to the world by nuclear weapons tests, they would need to quantify this spread across many of the world’s regions.

One Colonel from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project - the military group responsible for the storage and handling of nuclear weapons, which would later go on to become the Defense Atomic Support Agency - suggested that the armed forces could use their overseas network to collect samples. Examples included facilities in Germany and a Naval hospital in Cairo. Dr. Bugher would go on later to emphasize the potential necessity to pay locals in different areas for the collection of samples.

“I don't think that in other areas where one wants human material collected you have ever been successful unless you had someone locally responsible who got paid by the sample. Over the years in the Rockefeller Foundation in the yellow fever studies, we got tens of thousands of liver specimens all through Latin America by that scheme. Of course, we lost a few agents, too, who got shot or knifed, but not very many actually.

It was a complete failure in Africa, though, for interesting reasons irrelevant to this thing. You almost always have to have somebody who sees some reward for himself in doing this work. It is too much to ask of people that they maintain a pure exalted scientific enthusiasm and are just collecting samples.”

They had now laid out the necessity of the program, potential roadblocks, and parameters that would likely need to be met. There was one more issue to be dealt with; their public representation and secrecy. It was decided that the project would remain secret, with very few in the know. This would go on to become one of the most controversial of all of the choices made in the course of Project Sunshine. In response to a proposal about collecting baby teeth from children for testing, Commissioner Libby wrote the following:

“... I would not encourage publicity in connection with the program. We have found that in collecting human samples publicity is not particularly helpful.”

This would be a common theme in the discussion. Publicity and awareness about the program was seen to be a great risk as those involved seemed to feel that public opinion on the matter couldn’t be trusted to understand the necessity of the tests being done. A separate cover story was developed. When any existence of the project needed to be revealed, an incomplete explanation of the research activities would be given. Rather than searching for Strontium 90 in the bones, researchers would explain that they were trying to detect the presence of Radium in human bones.

For those who would necessarily need to be brought into the loop without full onboarding to the program, the AEC debated partial security measures.

“There is the system of L clearance, whereby when the need exists, we can disclose even restricted data to individuals not Q cleared, but who have had a preliminary check. That might be something which could be done without that individual having to fill out any forms or anything of the kind.

For this purpose you are not dealing with irresponsible people. You are dealing with directors of hospitals and pathologists, and persons in general who have an understanding of the seriousness of the project in which we are engaged . . . .”

If you’re not familiar, a Q clearance is a security clearance which allows access to highly restricted sites and information regarding nuclear energy and weapons. Additionally, depending on a person’s access authorization, the Q clearance may reach some of the most sensitive levels of compartmentalized information keeping and national security risk. It is equivalent to a Top Secret clearance, but within the Q clearance are many further restricted classifications. An L clearance works similarly to allow access to certain limited sites and information at a much lower level.

A letter sent to an associate at the Atomic Energy Project at the University of Rochester gives a little more insight into what types of people were being contacted, for what purpose, and what they might be told about the project.

This letter will explain in a little more detail than I was able to do over the phone our interest in obtaining infant skeletons from Japan.

The Division of Biology and Medicine is engaged in a project

to evaluate the long range radiological hazard which might

result from the large scale use of atomic weapons . . . In

order to help in the evaluation of the hazard, we are

providing for the direct measurement of the world-wide Sr-90

distribution which has resulted from the 40 or 50 nuclear

detonations in the last few years. One type of sample on

which we are concentrating is the bones of infants, either

stillborn or up to a year or two of age. We have found that

stillborn bones are easy to obtain in the United States, and

are trying to extend our collection to foreign countries.

It appears that the ABCC [Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission]

would be a logical contact in Japan. We could use perhaps 6

or 8 skeletons from that area.

It has been decided, for various reasons including public

and international relations, to classify this project SECRET

for the present. Hence, the unclassified description of our

purpose in obtaining these bones is for Ra analyses. We

actually are providing for the measurement of Ra as well as

Sr-90 in many or all of the samples, so that the Ra story is

merely incomplete, not false. The complete purpose I have

described for you alone.

The Full Scope

One of the more shocking and vivid accounts of a family affected by secret operations to remove body parts comes from mother Jean Pritchard in a 1995 Channel 4 UK documentary entitled “Deadly Experiments”. Pritchard gave birth to a daughter who was stillborn, and recounts the following:

"I asked if I could put her christening robe on her, but I wasn't allowed to, and that upset me terribly because she wasn't christened. No one asked me about doing things like that, taking bits and pieces from her."

It’s reported that doctors had removed the legs from Pritchard’s baby to send them off to the US, hence why she was not allowed to dress her daughter for the funeral herself. It would have been plainly apparent what had been done without the mother’s knowledge and permission.

It’s difficult to put a number on the amount of whole cadavers and pieces which were secretly removed and sent to laboratories for incineration and testing. Even now, more than 60 years after these activities were taking place, much of the information remains highly classified. Further complicating the matter is that it seems the governments of several countries were not only working jointly with the US on this project, but were also running their own independent tests and studies, and it can be difficult to tell how the few reported numbers are divided.

For example, one of the most cited numbers comes from a 1995 New York Times article where it’s stated that over 1,500 samples were collected, many of them whole cadavers. Even more shocking is the claim that of these samples collected, only a little over 500 were actually analyzed for their intended use.

UK media, however, reported a much higher number of over 6000 samples discreetly taken and sent for testing - some to the US, and some to research laboratories within the UK. Paul Fawcett, spokesperson of the Medical Research Council which funded the experiments, defended the activities in 1995 in the wake of the release of Channel 4’s documentary and the resulting demand for answers:

“They were taking bone samples not secretly but discreetly. There was no law to say samples couldn't be taken at post mortem, not only to determine the cause of death, but also for other health problems. It was something that took place, but if your nearest and dearest has died the last thing you want is a grisly account of what is going to be done. It would be grossly insensitive.”

While this was happening, doctors and researchers from the UK were conducting another sort of experiment involving radiation. Pregnant women were injected with or asked to consume radioactive iodine for testing and monitoring. Many women later came forward and stated that they were never informed of the risks involved or even that the tests included radioactive substances until after they had been injected. Although consent had been obtained, it was not fully informed consent, and women were reportedly incentivized to take part in such tests with incentives such as better food, wards with fewer patients, and sitting rooms with TV service.

Ultimately, it would come to light that the experimentation included cooperation from governments and medical systems around the world; notably including the UK, Hong Kong, Australia, and parts of South America. In many cases, participation in these experiments would not be revealed to the public at large until the late 1990’s or even beyond the year 2000. The obscuration of these activities and lack of government transparency even many decades later was commonly blamed on the classified nature of documents which were protected to such an extent that even future administrations of government had no idea of the activities and lack of records completely and accurately describing their involvement.

Fallout, Controversy and Legacy

It’s hard to have an even-handed discussion of Project Sunshine and its findings without acknowledging both the world in which it happened and its contributions to scientific understanding of nuclear dangers. Whatever else can be said about the way experiments were conducted and samples acquired,

Tests on the samples acquired were able to confirm that Strontium 90 was in fact spread as a result of nuclear testing, and could make its way into the environment where it could be absorbed by wildlife and by humans as an aggressive calcium impostor. This would be among the very first quantitative evidence that repeated nuclear bombing and testing would lead to widespread and potentially inescapable public health consequences, and would lead to support for limiting tests and establishing radiation monitoring programs. Additionally, it advanced the state of understanding of radionuclides and potential treatments and preventative measures to help mitigate the threat.

Ultimately Project Sunshine would come to be vilified not for the experiments themselves but for the secrecy, deception, and medical paternalism whereby researchers robbed families of their autonomy and capacity to decide for themselves because they feared the public would not be capable of understanding the necessity of running these tests and would not be rationally convinced to sacrifice in furtherance of these goals.

This is me speaking from opinion only, but it’s likely that Project Sunshine would be remembered much differently if it had been approached with an air of transparency from the beginning. For instance, had families been approached with the truth about the experiments - even if they were told some details were withheld for national security considerations - it’s very likely that a sense of patriotism and duty to community may have provided the number of samples needed to perform the tests. At the time, public sentiment was shown to be very willing to accept unusual circumstances and government projects if they were thought to lead to more safety and understanding of the growing nuclear age. Remember that ultimately only a little over 500 samples were reported to have been actually analyzed for their purpose.

As touched on earlier, the National Institutes of Health at one point wanted to collect baby teeth samples from children for radiologic testing. Although it’s likely that the experiments would have required a variety of different tissue samples to reach a thorough result, at least some of that demand likely could have been fulfilled simply by a campaign for allowing dentists to collect such samples at routine visits and send them away. Even if they had stuck to a cover story such as the Radium testing they had discussed, at least this way the samples would have been collected from a willing and informed source. When considering relative harm, a person who consents to having a sample tested based on a lie or incomplete truth about what that sample will be tested for has been harmed far less than a family whose loved one’s remains have been mutilated and collected without knowledge or permission.

Part 13 of the Advisory Committee Report, which you’ll find in the references section if you’re interested in reading for yourself, does a great job summing up the government culture of secrecy at the time and the conflation of national security with public opinion and acknowledgement. Most people, suspicious though they are of secret programs which are kept hidden from the public, are willing to acknowledge at least the theoretical utility and necessity of classifying some information which has prevailing security implications. For instance, information that could have led to other countries reverse engineering their own nuclear weapons is widely accepted to be tightly guarded for good reason.

However, it’s noted that national security was not actually invoked in any real form as a reason for keeping the Project Sunshine meeting and its activities from public knowledge. It’s been noted that there’s nothing in much of the data which meets typical requirements for classification. Rather, again and again the researchers and scientists involved come back to public opinion and response to such activities. Transcripts of conversations and letters between officials at the time point to a pervasive fear that the government should fully understand what they were dealing with in terms of the radiation problem before any of it should be released to the public. In a sense, it was felt that if the cat was let out of the bag there would be nothing that could be done to reverse public opinion on the dangers of nuclear radiation, and in fact there might even be a great deal of public anger for workers and others who had already been exposed to strong radioactive sources and potential harm resulting from them.

Despite this controversy and the fact that Project Sunshine has been released publicly in newspapers, documentaries, and government hearings, there seems to be disproportionately little public awareness or interest in the matter today. It’s literally one of the most cohesive and well-documented government conspiracies of our time, involving secrecy and deception with multiple governments around the world conspiring to engage in experimentation on stolen human tissue without public knowledge. Yet, public fervor around the topic never seems to stay strong for long when the issue is again raised publicly. Maybe this is because of the time that’s passed and the distance between people alive today and the families who were wronged. Or, it could be an indication that disgust around the practices of acquiring tissue samples doesn’t outweigh public perception of the necessity of the tests regardless.

Of note, in 1958 Project Sunshine was continued in a much more naturalistic form in Belgium. Rather than dealing with human tissue samples, Belgium’s take on the experiment considered the impact on pastured grass and crops as well as the livestock that grazed on them. This research continued to demonstrate the potential dangers of Strontium 90 absorption, and allowed for the testing of potential countermeasures to help mitigate the issue should it become more severe.

Many of the scientists who worked on the project would go on to have long and notable scientific careers, perhaps most notable among them being Willard Libby. In 1960, Libby would win the Nobel Prize in chemistry for demonstrating a process for using the isotope Carbon-14 for relative dating - a discovery which had massive impacts in geology and archaeology among many other fields of study. Once a skeptic of the widespread dangers of nuclear radiation and war, experiments with radiation would convince Libby that limiting of nuclear testing was necessary to avoid crossing a threshold of dangerous radioactive saturation.

It’s inarguable that the advancement into the age of nuclear weapon proliferation placed humanity on a path of increasingly high stakes in armed conflicts. It’s also unlikely that many would disagree that scientific understanding of the effects and potential countermeasures for nuclear fallout is absolutely necessary for comprehending the scope of the problem. What’s less black and white, however, is the acceptability of the experiments undertaken in order to get us there. Let me know your thoughts on this and anything else covered today in the comments. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for giving me this much of your time to listen to a little-known part of Cold War History and its impact on the world. Until next time, it’s been a pleasure as always. Thank you.