To the editor:
I read with great interest your Dec. 15 article "Guinea pigs used in '50s tests weren't all animals."Dugway Proving Grounds was the subject of a major TV show on French and German TV some years ago. I worked directly on that show to further expose the dangerous nature of human experimentation and the destructive nature of some of these biological, chemical and radiological warfare experiments which were launched at Dugway.
Dugway was also the exploration grounds for the use of BZ, a hallucinogenic chemical 100 times more powerful than LSD and which can be active in the soil for almost 100 years. The amount of contaminated area in the Dugway area as a result of these tests has not been a matter of released information to this day, at least not to the best of my knowledge. There were also known accidents with BZ during the testing phases carried out at Dugway.
I grew up in Farmington and was aware of the explosions occurring on the back side of Antelope Island prior to the bombing of Japan with atomic weapons in World War II. I was led to understand that these bombings were part of the test flights for the Enola Gay's eventual bombing of those Japanese cities.
I was further interested when FOIA documents showed that Farmington was the recipient of radiation fallout during the Yucca Flats bomb testing of the early 1950s.
The U.S. government knew of these tests, of the radiological devastation that it would visit upon the inhabitants of the small towns downwind. I almost died from radiation burns from one of those tests in the early 1950s. Doctors were not informed of these tests. The continued high incidence of cancers and leukemias in Utah are a matter of public record.
The fact that Utahns were unwilling and unwitting guinea pigs for the purpose of visiting CBR (chemical, biological, radiological) warfare on the peoples of earth is a political time bomb that can still explode.
Members of the Church of Scientology have been involved in exposing these atrocities for some years. Your printing of the Dec. 15 article is an important public service.
There is much more available in the documents obtained under FOIA. It needs wider exposure. Utah has been selected as a state of experimentation. Its populace deserves much more information than has been given. Their lives have been put needlessly at risk.
Rev. Heber C. Jentzsch
President
Church of Scientology International
Los Angeles, Calif.