After she first read the article more than a week ago, Melynda Petrie, public affairs director at Dugway Proving Ground, immediately dispatched intelligence officers on a document search.
The article in the November issue of Scientific American quoted a congressional investigator as suggesting test missiles armed with deadly biological agents were fired from Dugway to Fort Wingate, N.M., years ago and could be the source of an epidemic that killed 16 people in the Four Corners area this past summer."We conducted a thorough search of classified and unclassified documents and found no indication of any involvement on the part of Dugway firing missiles with biological or chemical agents toward Fort Wingate," Petrie said Monday.
She added that Dugway researchers have never fired missiles in any direction as a method of testing biological or chemical weapons.
"If someone in the public feels they have evidence this was done in the past, we invite them to come forward and tell us about it," she said, noting that media have questioned her since the outbreak in June about the possible involvement of biological agents.
"I want to stress this is speculation" on the part of the source, the article's author John Horgan told the Deseret News. "With the uncertainty surrounding the (accepted cause of the epidemic), other possible causes should also be considered."
Federal and state investigators have blamed the deadly outbreak on a newly recognized form of hantavirus, which is carried by rodents and transmitted to humans by airborne particles of feces and urine.
But the Scientific American article said rumors persist in the region that Fort Wingate, a former Army facility that stored chemical agents for a short time, was somehow involved. In response to those concerns, the Pentagon confirmed the depot stored chemical weapons but never biological, the article said.
Quoting the congressional investigator, who requested anonymity, the article said Fort Wingate was a target site for missiles from other military bases, including Dugway, where the missiles could have been armed with biological agents.
The firings that would have contaminated the Fort Wingate area occurred years ago, the investigator said, but disturbing the grounds during the fort's decommissioning earlier this year could have unleashed the dormant agents.
Fort Wingate was a depot "activity," under command of the Tooele Army Depot since World War II. The area is listed on the Army's non-stockpile chemical storage sites as a possible cleanup candidate because chemical weapons were stored there from 1942 through 1944, an Army spokeswoman said.
According to the Associated Press, state and federal officials are dismissing the theory that biological agents caused the deadly outbreak in the Four Corners area.
Scientific American said the congressional investigator noted that fewer than half of the victims tested positive for the virus, leaving doubt that all the illnesses stemmed from the disease. "Moreover, deaths were attributed not to kidney failure - the usual outcome of hantavirus infection - but from hemorrhaging of the lungs."