In September nineteen fifty, US Navy vessels spent six days releasing bacteria into the air over San Francisco as part of a classified test to see whether biological weapons could be covertly deployed against a city. Eight hundred thousand residents breathed it in without knowing. Within a week, eleven patients at Stanford University Hospital developed unusual infections caused by the same bacteria. One man died. The operation was classified for twenty-seven years.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover Operation Sea-Spray and what it was part of — the military's programme of over two hundred and thirty-nine open-air biological and chemical agent tests conducted over American cities between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen sixty-nine. San Francisco was one city. Minneapolis, the New York City subway, and the low-income neighbourhoods of Saint Louis were others. The people who lived there were not asked.

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