Recently unearthed documents from the Pentagon have confirmed that the United States was experimenting with using swarms of “killer mosquitoes” as biological weapons.
According to a report by daily mail, The declassified 69-page document from 1977, currently available at the Defense Technical Information Center, reveals details of the secret US military project called Project Bellweather.
The document also sheds light on several other secret projects involving insects, including Operation Drop Kick and Operation Big Buzz.
The Pentagon conducted real-world experiments between September and October 1959 to analyze how mosquitoes bite under different environmental conditions.
The purpose of the experiments was to evaluate how mosquito swarms would act as a biological weapon if unleashed against enemy troops or other populated areas.
In those experiments, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that bite humans were used. The species is known to cause several life-threatening diseases, including chikungunya, dengue, yellow fever and Zika.
The document says: “The literature indicates that the deliberate employment of infected arthropod vectors against enemy targets has great strategic potential.”
Military researchers studied the use of mosquitoes in war zones with these experiments.
The insects were not infected with disease-causing agents, but rather the researchers analyzed how far they could travel, how long they could survive after being dispersed, and whether they would actively seek out and bite human hosts.
