Case file · Official inquiry
Dugway sheep kill
In March 1968 about 6,000 sheep died in Utah's Skull Valley after an Army jet testing the nerve agent VX at Dugway Proving Ground released some of it too high.
1968 CE · 40.40, -112.72 · status: explained
The account
Dugway, founded in the early 1940s, tested chemical and biological weapons in great secrecy, including hundreds of open-air tests. A report first made public in 1998 was called the first documented admission that a nerve agent killed the sheep. The outcry fed into the Nixon administration's 1969 policy on chemical and biological weapons.
The sceptical view
This one was solved: the cause was a chemical weapons test, not anything anomalous. Kelleher and Knapp considered military experiments as an explanation for the ranch events and rejected it.