The scientists measured the body mass of hundreds of bees before they left their hives and after they came back, finding that the insects lost 20% of their weight on the return flight. The most revealing detail of yellow rain was when it tended to fall: hot, sunny days. In 1989 a Canadian biologist teamed up with a Malaysian scientist to solve the puzzle. Why would so many bees be in such specific locations, and why would they be pooping at the same time? It would take thousands of bees to make enough waste to look like rain. Meselson’s findings were initially met with skepticism by other scientists and the U.S. It also became clear that the original interviewers had asked leading questions and unconsciously manipulated testimonies. Most of the health problems could be explained by dysentery and nutritional deficiencies in refugee camps. The liquid sometimes rained down when there wasn’t a plane in sight. investigators, Meselson’s team found inconsistencies and contradictions in the testimony of people who witnessed yellow rain. Meselson theorized that the connection between yellow rain and sickness was part hyperbole, part imagination.Īfter reviewing the original study done by U.S. The health problems being reported were the result of poor sanitation and lack of food among people being bombed and raided by Communist soldiers. Meselson proposed a simpler explanation: yellow rain was no weapon at all-it was harmless bee feces. officials were correct, the Soviet Union would be importing tons of predigested pollen from Southeast Asia, only to turn around and send that same pollen back as a difficult-to-disperse chemical weapon. Furthermore, the team found that the concentration of mycotoxins was not significantly greater in samples of yellow rain–covered leaves than on plants anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Meselson’s team also realized the pollen was commonly eaten by giant Asian honey bees, which digest the protein inside pollen grains but not the outer shell, accounting for the hollowed out shape. This alone made Haig’s claims seem dubious: pollen would be an extremely ineffective dispersal method for poison. Meselson found that the substance included large amounts of hollowed-out pollen indigenous to Southeast Asia. Meselson was skeptical of the claims made by Haig and in 1983 acquired samples of yellow rain from American officials in order to analyze them. The Soviets denied the accusations vehemently and soon found an unlikely ally: Matt Meselson, a Harvard University biologist. But if the Soviet Union was really stockpiling and distributing chemical and biological weapons, it would be breaking a century of international laws and treaties. The Hmong’s suspicion of mysterious liquid falling from the sky wasn’t baseless: their American defenders, after all, had dumped the chemical herbicide known as Agent Orange on millions of Vietnamese between 19. secretary of state at the time, Alexander Haig Jr., announced that the Soviet Union had given the weapon to the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao, who dropped it on the Hmong (and other ethnic groups) in their villages and while they fled to refugee camps. analysts concluded in 1981 that the substance, dubbed “yellow rain,” was a chemical weapon made of fungus toxins and created by the Soviet Union. The newly empowered Communist regimes attacked the remaining Hmong, forcing them to flee to refugee camps in Thailand or face labor and reeducation camps in their home countries.Īfter a lengthy investigation, U.S. The CIA later recruited and mobilized Hmong soldiers, making them the target of sectarian violence when U.S. One ethnic group seemed especially affected by the substance: the Hmong, who had fought with France against Communists in Southeast Asia since the 1950s in the sparsely developed mountains in northern Vietnam and Laos. Witnesses claimed the strange substance killed plants and sickened people. In the late 1970s, after the end of the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese and Laotian people began noticing that a sticky yellow liquid periodically rained down from otherwise sunny skies.
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