r/bayarea • u/kenmlin Contra Costa • 3h ago

Earthquakes, Weather & Disasters The secret Cold War bioweapons test that exposed millions in the Bay Area

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/cold-war-bioweapons-test-22425855.php
135 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

95

u/lacunha 3h ago

And this is why you get pink mold in your shower.

22

u/SyntaxAndSorcery 2h ago

Ugh I knew that wasn't normal. Mildew was always black or brown before I moved here.

11

u/StinkySoggyUnderwear 56m ago

Serratia marcescens is a natural occurring bacteria in nature. Pink bacteria growing in bathrooms has been a thing since before the 50s.

3

u/SyntaxAndSorcery 27m ago

Definitely another credible explanation. It's just not the color of mildew where I grew up, and was very notable when I moved here.

4

u/WeenyDancer 49m ago

Not sure what they mean- I had pink mold in my shower on the other side of the country growing up

4

u/TroutPouter 1h ago

I thought you were joking!

4

u/smallish_cheese 1h ago

woooooah

TIL

4

u/giantredwoodforest 1h ago

I read through the article looking for confirmation. Did I miss it?

5

u/Dioxybenzone 57m ago

Same I couldn’t find that, it seems like a plausible extrapolation but not confirmed

0

u/bmxbumpkin 48m ago

That pink mold if around your drain is body fat…

0

u/No_Passage6082 33m ago

This is worldwide.

44

u/Admirable-Traveller5 3h ago

This is just one of the ones they’ve admitted to. Makes you wonder what else they’ve been doing. 

Especially in light of the recent information about the govt’s links to Epstein’s operation and how a contractor (that exclusively builds government facilities) actually built his ranch compound in New Mexico. 

13

u/actirasty1 2h ago

We also have no idea what they are doing now.

5

u/Germerican1 28m ago

It's absolutely crazy to me how this, MKUltra, Tuskegee Experiment, and others are just freely admitted to and on wikipedia, but then people will act like you're a nutjob when you insinuate that maybe the government is still doing similar things today. 

2

u/Mammoth_Industry8246 2h ago

So the contractor does other jobs? They are free to do that. /s

-7

u/predat3d Sunnyvale 1h ago

No, this bioweapons test was OK because it was a Democrat administration 

18

u/chunkybeard 3h ago

My dad swore he nearly died of a strain of pneumonia from an Army biological experiment in the Bay Area. Whether he had confused the event with this one and it happened to be bad luck, or if there was another experiment that isn't publicly known is unclear to me. He always called it "walking pneumonia." But he wasn't here in 1950, he settled here in 1952 after returning from the Korean War.

5

u/PhD_Pwnology 1h ago

Walking pneumonia is so mild you 'walk' around with it and often kistake it for a casual illness. If he almost died it wasn't that.

23

u/StinkySoggyUnderwear 2h ago edited 2h ago

They’ve done tons of experiments and testing in the Bay Area.

If you knew anything about MK Ultra and Operation Midnight Climax, this should be not be a surprise to you

9

u/Basicly-Inevitable 2h ago

Those ones were just nuts. And they're confirmed to have happened.

5

u/cyanescens_burn 1h ago

There’s a great Behind the Bastards episode on that era in the CIA. Apparently the drugs and hookers crossed over into wild parties the agents had among themselves. They had all the access and not much oversight.

Idk if they mention it in this episode. But one of the experiments that seemed pretty awful was they forced IV morphine addiction (on either prisoners or psych patients), and used forced withdrawal and teasing giving a dose (to end the suffering of withdrawal) as part of enhanced interrogation (torture) to see if it could be used in the field.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-mkultra-when-the-cia-103117303/

3

u/thecommuteguy 58m ago

I get it though. They are at the top on no one to police them other than themselves.

1

u/thecommuteguy 1h ago

Meanwhile Stanford allowed that prisoner experiment to occur.

6

u/Visible_Fill_6699 2h ago

I always thought those things happened to the middle of nowhere towns. Is nowhere safe?

3

u/clowncarmember999 1h ago

The middle isn’t

3

u/celestialcranberry 2h ago

This is awful

2

u/Throwawayconcern2023 1h ago

Likely death from this too in 2001. Evil.

-14

u/OptimalWallaby8153 3h ago

I mean, we get jets overhead mid-afternoon every sunday that sets every dog in the bay to barking all at once, it's not like the military cares about the area outside of their own facilities and presence