Unsettling May Have Occurred: Occasionally Uncomfortable Obscure True Stories from Human History

by Damn Interesting Editors, The

  All this took several months to prepare. Finally, just after lights-out at 9:30 PM on 11 June 1962, Morris decided that the group was ready to make its escape. He and the Anglins retrieved the dummy heads from their hiding place atop the cellblock, placed them in the beds, collected the raft, accessories, and a number of possessions, then left their cells for the last time.

  Allen West had been unable to join them, though the reasons for this are unclear. Some sources say that he had not dug enough to loosen his grille properly; others claim that he had reinforced his flimsy false wall with concrete and it had set, sealing him inside his cell. Regardless, the other three went ahead without him. Climbing a set of pipes, they took their raft and belongings thirty feet up to the prison roof, then climbed down the side of the building to the water's edge. There, they inflated the raft with a stolen concertina, a musical instrument similar to an accordion. At sometime around 10 PM that night they climbed aboard, shoved off, and started paddling. They have never been seen since.

  The following morning, guards discovered that the prisoners were missing and that the beds were occupied by disembodied artificial heads. They immediately alerted the FBI. After discovering that Allen West had originally been part of the plot, agents pressed him for information. The plan, he said, had been to paddle to nearby Angel Island, then swim the Raccoon Straits to the Marin Headlands, near the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. From there, they intended to steal a car, find a clothing store to rob, and then go their separate ways.

  The investigation that included this interview was immense, but there was simply no sign of Morris or of the Anglin brothers. No car-thefts or clothing-store robberies were reported locally in the days following the breakout, and the men did not seem to have had any friends or contacts in San Francisco who could have assisted them with their escape.

  Later, fragments of the makeshift raft and some of the prisoners' personal items were discovered on the shore of Angel Island. These were carefully wrapped to make them waterproof, leading investigators to suspect that the men had drowned since they would not have willingly abandoned their possessions. Also, some time later, a dead man in a prison uniform was discovered at sea. Though authorities suspected it to be the body of one of the three escapees, it had deteriorated too much to be identified.

  Officially, the three are recorded as missing and presumed drowned. Red & White Fleet, the company that manages the ferry to present-day Alcatraz, has offered one million dollars for the recapture of the three men; however, there has been no conclusive evidence that any of them survived. The FBI noted that the three men had previously been repeat offenders, but were never arrested again after their escape attempt. This observation cast further doubt on the possibility that they had survived it.

  Some recent attention to the story has come from its 2003 appearance on the Discovery Channel's MythBusters. The San-Francisco-based program examines urban legends via experiments. To investigate what might have happened to Morris and the Anglin brothers on that night in 1962, hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage attempted to replicate the events of the escape attempt. They constructed a raft using raincoats made from similar material; they waited for a day with similar ocean currents in San Francisco Bay; and, with a third man standing for the third member of the original crossing, they successfully paddled the distance.

  The MythBusters' experiment prompted a new hypothesis suggesting that the men could have reached the Marin Headlands directly with their raft, and ocean currents could have carried their possessions to Angel Island afterwards. Therefore, the show's hosts ruled that it was "plausible" that the prisoners may have survived their intricate escape attempt.

  Most recently, the story of the escape was re-broadcast on America's Most Wanted in November 2005. Though the men were officially pronounced dead long ago, the lack of closure to the case keeps the legend alive. So far there has not been any strong evidence to support either outcome, and there perhaps never will be. While it seems likely that the three men perished at sea, some can't help but wonder whether the clever escape artists - who would all be about eighty by now - could have managed to successfully steal back their freedom after all.

  Originally published 25 February 2007

  http://dam.mn/the-alcatraz-redemption/

  The Sheep Incident (1968 AD)

  It was half past midnight on March 17th, 1968. Keith Smart, the director of epidemiology and ecology at Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds, was awakened by the ringing of a phone. On the other end was Dr. Bode, a professor at the University of Utah, and the director of the school's contract with Dugway. There was a problem. Calls had been coming in. About 27 miles outside of the base, in the aptly-named Skull Valley, thousands of sheep had suddenly died. There were some survivors among the flocks, but it was clear that their hours were numbered. Veterinarians were dispatched to euthanize the few remaining animals.

  Army officials began drafting their official denial. A few days earlier, one of their planes had flown high over the Utah desert at Dugway with a bellyful of nerve agent. The plane's mission was simple: using a specially rigged delivery system, it was to fly to a specific set of coordinates and spray its payload over a remote section of the Utah desert. This test was a small part of the ongoing chemical and biological weapons research at Dugway, and it was one of three tests held that particular day. The flight would soon prove to be far more important than anyone could have guessed at the time.

  The sprawling 800,000 acres of Dugway Proving Ground is a mix of target ranges, dispersal grounds, laboratories, and military bunkers. The facility was established in the 1940s to provide the military with a remote locale to conduct safer testing. It was briefly shut down following World War 2, but the base enjoyed a grand reopening during the Korean War. By 1958, it was the official home of the Army Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Weapons School. The base tested all manner of unconventional military hardware; from researching new toxic agents to developing antidotes and protective clothing.

  In March 1968, the toxin under scrutiny was VX, one of the most potent nerve agents in existence. The original compound was created by Ranajit Ghosh, a chemist working at Imperial Chemical Industries. The liquid proved to be an effective pesticide and it was quickly put on the market under the name Amiton. Not long afterwards, however, it was taken off the market for being too toxic to handle safely. The agent's extreme toxicity drew the attention of government weapons research labs, whose scientists were always on the lookout for more efficient ways to kill people. Amiton, the pesticide too successful for its own good, was to become the “V” class of nerve agent. The majority of the research done on V-Class agents went into developing a potent weapons-grade version of the chemical. That research birthed VX.

  VX was a triumph among the biological warfare community. Odorless and tasteless, it's three times as toxic as Sarin. In initial trials, this over-achieving compound was also found to be highly stable, enabling long shelf life and environmental persistence. VX works by blocking chemicals in the victim's body from functioning. It prevents the enzyme acetylcholinesterase from allowing muscles to relax, resulting in the contraction of every muscle in the body. Exposure to a minute or diluted dose of VX will cause muscle twitching, drooling, excessive sweating, and involuntary defecation, among other unpleasantries. Exposure to a lethal dose -- about ten milligrams -- will cause convulsions, paralysis, and eventually asphyxiation due to sustained contraction of the diaphragm muscle. Unless the affected skin is cleaned and an antidote is administered immediately, a single drop of liquid VX will kill a person in around ten minutes.

  On March 13th, Dugway ran a series of three tests using VX. The tests were routine, like any of the thousands of weapons tests that were conducted there over the previous twenty years. In the first test, an artillery shell packed with VX was fired onto the range; and in the second, 160 gallons of the compound were burned in an open pit. Both tests were completed without incident. The third test involved delivery via airpl
ane, with over a ton of a special VX mixture sprayed over the desert. Unbeknownst to the pilot, the spray nozzle that controlled the flow of the chemical had broken. As he climbed to a higher altitude, the chemical continued to seep from the plane. Winds that day were blowing between 5-20 mph, with gusts reaching 35 mph. These strong easterly winds carried the VX straight to Skull Valley. The next day, the sheep grazing in the area began to die, and within days thousands of them had perished. The government and local numbers differ, but anywhere between 3,483 and 6,400 sheep died in the aftermath of the test.

  Skull Valley resident Ray Peck was working in his yard the evening after the tests, but retired early after developing an earache. The next morning the ground outside his home was littered with dead birds, and he watched as a dying rabbit struggled in the distance. A helicopter touched down soon after and unleashed its cargo of equipment and scientists upon the confused family. They quickly collected wildlife carcasses, performed blood tests on the Pecks, and departed. Though they suffered no fatalities from their exposure, the family complained of numerous ailments in the years following the tests. Ray Peck said he began suffering from violent headaches, numbness and paranoia. His daughters -- children at the time of the incident -- experienced an unusually high rate of miscarriage in their adult years. While there's no way of definitively knowing what caused the problems, the Pecks believe their exposure to VX is the cause of their many health problems.

  The Army was characteristically roundabout in their comments on the incident. They admitted to having tested a chemical in that immediate time period. They even made mention that the plane carrying the VX may have malfunctioned. However, they assured the public that the massive, unexplained die-off could not possibly have been caused by the ton of VX dropped less than 30 miles from Skull Valley. Despite their assurances that they were innocent of any wrongdoing, the Army ultimately chose to pay the ranchers for their losses and bury the animals on base property.

  The Army worked furiously to stuff all of the worms back into the Dugway can, but the damage was already done. The Dugway Sheep Kill received widespread attention both at home and abroad. The outrage over the incident was intensified just a year later when the US media was tipped off to the existence of CHASE. The Cut Holes And Sink 'Em program was the Army's plan for discreetly disposing of dangerous surplus materials. It involved the scuttling of ships loaded with the deadly cargo up to 250 miles offshore. Unfortunately for the US Army's PR department, some of the materials involved were mustard gas, Sarin, and VX. Apparently a good many people had serious misgivings about dumping dangerous chemicals into the ocean. These concerns were further reinforced by the fact that the Army itself wasn't sure whether or not the metal and concrete slabs that housed the chemicals would survive the massive pressure during their 16,000 foot descent to the ocean floor.

  In 1974 the US Senate ratified the international Biological Weapons Convention which prohibited the use of toxin-based weapons such as VX. Less than two years later, on July 4th, 1976, the base was again in the news; this time after 20 wild horses were found dead. The horses had died where they stood, many with open oozing sores and ashen mucous membranes. Scott Baranowski, a soldier on duty that day, was the first to arrive. He also took part in the investigation and burial of the sick and dying horses. Within days, fifty of the animals had died, and Baranowski found himself bedridden with a high fever, severe joint pain, and headaches.

  The government's internal testing on the carcasses came up negative for all known chemical nerve agents. The Army refused to officially admit fault for the deaths and ultimately attributed them to dehydration. The official report states that the animals were confused by a recent relocation of a watering hole and had died before discovering the new one -- a phenomenon that was later observed in some populations of wild horses. The Bureau of Land Management rejected this explanation, citing that some of the horses had died within a few yards of the new water source, and that all of them had died in a relatively short amount of time. Since the horses were wild, there were no legal damages to be claimed or paid, so the Army's explanation was reluctantly accepted. As for Scott Baranowski, he reports that he has suffered chronic health issues since that early July day. Attempts to obtain his medical records from that time have met with little success. Baranowski has been told they "don't exist."

  While the Dugway incidents cannot take all the credit, they certainly contributed to the volatile politics of the late 1960s and early 70s. The American public had grown weary of the Vietnam war, and the Army's dangerous tests and reckless disposal of deadly chemicals were too much for many people to accept. Animals had been dying for decades to help improve the technology of warmaking, but the casualties of Dugway and CHASE actually managed to impede military progress: In response to public protests over these incidents, President Nixon disbanded the Army Chemical Corp, and took action to ratify the Geneva Protocol to prohibit chemical weapons in war.

  In 1998, the government's report on federal and state studies from the incident thirty years earlier was made public. The findings showed that the levels of VX were “sufficient to account for the death of the sheep.” Even in the face of this evidence, the Army has failed to take official responsibility for the debacle.

  Originally published 17 March 2008

  http://dam.mn/the-sheep-incident/

  The Artificial Prison of the Human Mind (1971 AD)

  Photo courtesy Philip G. Zimbardo

  In 1971, a study about prisons was funded by the U.S. Navy to try to better understand problems in the Marine Corps.' prisons. The study was run by a group of researchers at Stanford, led by psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo. The idea was to create a controlled environment in the Stanford halls to simulate a prison. There would be participants recruited to play both the prisoners and the guards, and the experiment would last for two weeks.

  No one thought the experiment would have any big problems - the participants were just playing a short game of prison. Yet in less than a week the prisoners were becoming psychologically disturbed, and the guards disturbingly sadistic. There were riots, hunger strikes, and abusive treatment - all in the mock-up jail cells created in the halls of the Stanford psychology department. The study had to be canceled early, leaving one critical question - how could a fake prison situation become real so quickly?

  The problem couldn't have been the characteristics of the participants. The original twenty-four volunteers were picked for their stability of mind, out of a group of seventy. Also, the pick between the prisoners and prison guards was made at random via coin tosses. Thus, there was no bias when it came to the players.

  Zimbardo did attempt to make the prison more real with some degrading tactics to simulate a real prison. Each prisoner was given a number that was their identification for duration of the experiment. As for clothing, a prisoner only got one ill-fitted Muslin smock, an uncomfortable pair of rubber thong sandals, and a nylon pantyhose cap (which was put over the head, as though they had a shaved their hair off). If that wasn't bad enough, each had a chain on their foot, its constant clinking specifically to remind them that they were not free.

  The guards were made to be quite intimidating - they went to a military surplus to get their khaki outfits and wooden batons. Also, they each wore large, reflective glasses. This was not in order to look cool, but to prevent eye contact with the prisoners.

  On the chosen start date, the prisoners were arrested for armed robbery and taken from their homes by the actual Palo Alto police, who cooperated with the project. Their arrival at the pseudo-jail was as nasty as in any prison - they were stripped naked and deloused, then given their uniforms and numbers. And so the simulation began.

  The first day of the experiment was relatively peaceful. Then, on the second day, the prisoners got feisty and attempted a rebellion. They took off their stocking caps and numbers, as well as barricading their cells with their beds. The guards took this threat seriously, calling in reinforcements to solve the problem.
In the end, they used fire extinguishers to blast the prisoners away from the doors, then rushed in, stripped them naked, and sent the ringleaders into solitary confinement.

  To further break the rebellion they used some mind games on the remaining prisoners; some were put in "good" cells where they were treated nicely, where the rest were put into “bad” cells where they were mistreated. After half a day, some of the prisoners were switched, thoroughly confusing the prisoners. Had someone ratted on another? Were there informers in their midst? Further rebellions were crushed.

  This was only the beginning of the problems, though. The guards became abusive in response to the prisoners' rebellion. Regular head counts were made into hour-long ordeals with torment and forced physical exercise. Bathroom usage became a right, and was often denied at night. Instead, prisoners had to do their thing into buckets in their cells, which the guards sometimes refused to throw out. The allowance of food became a tool for the guards. Prisoners were forced into humiliating and degrading circumstances, through nudity and forced acts. Guards would become more abusive during the night as well, when they thought the cameras were turned off.

  This environment got to be too much for some of the participants. Within two days, one prisoner began to have an emotional breakdown. However, at this point the guards started taking their roles very seriously - they thought he was trying to get out of his time by acting crazy. The participant soon became convinced that there was no escape from the study and went into a rage, an action that was finally enough to prompt his release from the study. He was not the only one who was released from the study early, and many others who stayed suffered from uncontrollable crying and disorganized thought.