What's Going On At Plum Island?

What's Going On At Plum Island?

You may be familiar with Plum Island from "Silence of the Lambs," where Clarice Starling disingenuously holds out the prospect of "walks on the beach" to entice Dr. Lector to help her out.

"Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center. Sounds charming," he drily replies.

Plum Island is a small, J-shaped patch of land off the Eastern end of Long Island. It was named for the beach plums which grow along its shoreline. Doesn't that sound lovely?

The United States Government bought the island in 1899, and initially used it as a military post. In the 1950s the island was handed over to the USDA, which established the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, ostensibly to help our beleaguered domestic farmers cope with animal disease outbreaks.

Rumors about Plum Island have been rampant since the 1960s. One early charge is that the center was involved in biological warfare tests - in "weaponizing" diseases like anthrax and smallpox. Although the military has repeatedly denied it, this was almost certainly the case in the center's early years and throughout the Cold War.

Tellingly, in 2003 the island's facility was handed from the USDA to the US Department of Homeland Security. The war on terror clearly requires research on anthrax and smallpox, does it not? The use of biological weapons in warfare violates the Geneva Convention, but that doesn't mean that the government won't study it.

The contagious and deadly diseases (for both human and animal) being kept at the facility read like a list of horrors. Foot and mouth disease. Anthrax. Smallpox. Polio. But what else could be kept and studied there?

Many people charge that Lyme Disease originated at Plum Island. Although Lyme Disease was described in America in small pockets in the 1700s, the charge is that the modern version was accidentally released from the island's facilities. Although mammals found on Plum Island are shot on sight, the theory is that an infected tick hitched a ride to the mainland on one of the island's plentiful migratory birds.

Others have noted that the spread of West Nile Virus in America would seem to indicate Plum Island as a potential epicenter. An escaped mosquito could easily have been carried by the sea winds from the island to the mainland.

Farther on the fringe is the theory that AIDS did not evolve naturally in the wild, but was created at Plum Island and released in America in order to destroy the homosexual community.

When the "Montauk Monster" washed ashore in the summer of 2008, many people believed it to have been an experimental animal that somehow escaped Plum Island. Aside from the unlikelihood that an animal of that size would be able to slip unnoticed from the facility, it has been fairly conclusively established that the Montauk Monster was in fact a rotten raccoon which had suffered from mange.

More puzzling are accounts from 2010 of a body which washed ashore on Plum Island itself. To the best of my research, the body has not been identified. It was described as being a six foot-tall black man with "very long fingers" and no apparent cause of death.

Photo credit: Flickr/jimmywayne