Short Stuff: Yellow Rain

late nineteen seventies. The Vietnam War is well over, well for America at least, well that's true, um, But Vietnamese and Leotian people started noticing over there that periodically there would be a sticky yellow rain um when it was really sunny out coming down, and that this substance killed plants and made people sick, especially among the among the Moongo, which is to say h m O n G, which were people in Southeast Asia who fought with France against

the Communists since the nineteen fifties. Yeah, they were mountain people in north north Vietnam and in Laos. Yeah. I think they probably uh there, Oh, never mind, I was about to discuss a deleted scene and apocalypse now, but we don't have time for that. Are they the ones that they dine with they have dinner with it? I

think so. I think there were French in the in Mong, but it would make sense because the Mong cast their lot with the with the French, and then later on the Americans when the CIA showed up, because remember we've talked about this in multiple episodes. One of the things that the CIA did is they would drop behind enemy lines and say, oh, you hate the people were fighting too, well,

let's assemble a guerilla army, and the Mong fought with them. Well, that led to big time trouble for the Mong after the Americans withdrew and I believe nineteen seventy five, because that left the Mong holding the bag. Everyone knew that the Mong had fought against the Communists, and the Communists had just become successful in the Vietnam War, and so the Communists turned their um ire against the Mong people

who no longer had any any American backing. So as they were kind of driven from their homes and um and and two refugee camps across the border into Thailand. Um they were harassed by the Communist government and from that, from that that experience, this idea that they that something was being sprayed on them kind of took root, this yellow rain that was thought to be some sort of um biological weapon that was being deployed by the Vietnamese government.

And Um, the Americans took it quite seriously. And got their hands on some samples, and in I think nine one, Alexander Hague, who was Secretary of State at the time, said, yep, it's some sort of biological weapon. We think it's tricot sin, which is a micro toxin, and we think that the Soviets are supplying it in flagrant violation of anti biological weapons conventions that have been around. Since you didn't do your Alexander Haigue. That was my Alexander. It didn't come through.

The whole thing was well, goodness, sorry, Al, can you do one? Let's hear your well, I would I would just have said something about the soil at Union like that. That's uh, that's Henry Kissinger. Oh you're right, yeah, Alexander, he didn't talk anything like that. I was totally thinking Kissinger.

And it's funny. As soon as you said that, I got a mental picture that went from Kissinger to Hague because I totally remember Al Hague, now, yeah, for sure, all right, that was you know, he liked to impersonate Kissinger everybody, yeah, behind his back, and it wasn't very flattering, all right, So uh, and we're going to leave that in there, even though its short stuff. I don't care.

That was a classic s Y s K moment, my friend. So, uh, first of all, we should point out that this idea that it would be something like that after we had dropped agent orange all over the place for ten years, you can't blame them for thinking something like that is going on. However, Uh, something kind of smelled hinky in the nose of one. Matt Messelsson was a biologist at Harvard University, and he said, this doesn't really make sense

to me. So a couple of years later in he got some samples and he said, you know what's in here. It's really weird. He said, there's a lot of hollowed out pollen that's indigenous to this area. And this would mean that the Soviet Union is taking pollen, hollowing it out, filling it with poison, and bringing it back and dropping it down on sunny days like it's rain. It's a very bad idea, it's very outlandish. It's not a very

effective dispersal method. And the concentration of of myco toxins in there, anyway, was not really any different than samples of UH leaves and plants anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Right, like his His position was like, yes, these people are being harassed, but I don't think this yellow rain is actually a biological weapon being supplied by the USS are that there's something else going on. It's it's like you said,

it's just too outland ish. What that what the process would require for this to to be what it was. So he had he was a biologist, like you said, and he knew enough to know that bees, specifically UM giant Asian honey bees that lived in the area UM actually will eat pollen, but they don't eat the outer shell of the pollen. They eat the protein inside the pollen. So when they poop, they poop out regular pollen or

they poop out hollowed out pollen. Okay, So he said, I think I think this might just be a case of honey bee poop. I think that's what everybody's freaked out about, is it's just honey bee poop. But people were saying, Okay, yeah, that's true biologically, but what you're talking about for that for something that looks like yellow rain to be produced would would require a mind boggling number of bees to all poop at once in the same area. So explain that, Mr Messelson, mr. Mr Harvard

trained biologist. You can't, can you? And he said I will right after this message break. Al Right, So Messeilson takes a message break. Everyone's like, what's that, right, and he said, I just said he's a bathroom. Oh well, that's normal enough, but we don't call it message breaks. So there was well he used scare quotes. So uh so he said there's some other inconsistencies here too, because you interviewed a lot of people and um, there's a lot of people that said that there were no planes

around when this stuff was raining down, which is a problem. Yeah, because I mean that's how you disperse biological weapons typically is from a plane. So where's this you know, where's the plane? How is this stuff happening if there's no plane? And he also said that you know all these health problems that are going on, he said, it's really probably just um people with dysentery and nutritional deficiencies. And you know, it seems like you're asking very leading questions to me.

This whole thing really stinks at this point to Messilson, well, we'll also check there's one other thing there. So I went back and I was reading some like an article in science from the time, and they were saying like, like, there is indeed some sort of micro toxic poison that is hurting people. And so that was a big reason why this is still yet resolved because there was micro toxic poisoning. Messilson's position was, well, these people are living

in refugee camps. It's not like they're eating top of the line food. I'm sure some of them are eating moldy food and are suffering ill effects from it. So that would explain this appearance of micro toxic poisoning. And in in that guy's defense, that tricot the scene is supposedly was discovered in the USSR from people eating moldy food.

That's how it was first found. Amazing. Yeah, So a few years later nine I'm about to graduate high school and Messilson teams up with some Canadian biologists to figure this whole thing out, because the whole idea of like, why you know, you know how many bees it would take to poop down yellow rain on everyone, And they said, well, we're going to find out just how many bees it

would take. Uh. They realized that it was falling on hot, sunny days, which is the first big clue, and they measured the body mass of these bees before they left their highs, then after they came back to the hives, and they found out that while they were gone they lost of their body weight on the return flight. That is a big old poop. That's a big old poop. So they would leave together and these big giant swarms, thousands of them, they would poop. They would come back

to care for their little larvae. And they said, this is also happening most frequently on really hot sunny day, so we think we've kind of figured this thing out right. What they figured out was that the so um Asian honey bees the larva as they're developing, if they overheat, they will deform basically, um they they will um develop incorrectly, I guess. And so to keep the temperature in the hive lower, especially on hot sunny days, the hive, the bees in the hive will fly out and and excrete

waste all at once, basically or in one trip. And then when they come back, since they've lost their body weight, the temperature inside the hive is that much lower because their weight is not producing that much more waste heat. So they actually figured out that that's what bees will do, at least Asian honey bees, to keep the to regulate the temperature in the hive so that the larva can develop normally. Um, and they said, we think we just solve the mystery of yellow rain. That's right. Uh more.

Research in later years pretty much confirmed this and everyone is basically on board, except for the fact that Kissinger and Alexander Haig never came back and retract of their statements. So officially we um, you know, I don't know if that stuff matters or not, but officially we have never retracted that statement as as a nation that it was not the Soviet Union. Um. I just got finished watching Chernobyl,

so I gotta see it. I'm like at a fever point of like the truth and toxins because the Soviet Union still says or I'm sorry, Russia still says thirty one people died. How many people did die? Oh, they don't know, anywhere between four thousand and ninety thousand, depending on how you count. You know, cancer twenty years later

and stuff like that. Should we do? I was talking to a friend, Blair Um, who is a friend of both of ours, a photographer, and he was like, you gotta do one on Chernoba, And I'm like, everybody knows about it, now, should we do one? Maybe? Okay, because I'd love to. It's a fascinating topic, But if everybody already knows about it, it's like, what's the point. It's a it was a heck of a show. I'll say that, all right, Well I'll at least watch that, all right.

So to finish here, though the Mong, for their part, things haven't gotten a lot better. They continue to suffer to this day. Um. Very small amount of them made it over to the United States. Uh. Some people returned to Laos, some people returned to Vietnam. Uh. Like we said at the beginning, a lot of them were going to Thailand as refugees. But in two thousand nine the Thai government shut that down and sent away thousands and thousands of the Mong. And Uh, it's really just sort

of a sad situation. But as this article points out, the one silver lining is that, like this whole thing, anytime there's a new theory about what happened, or anytime it makes the news, the Mong also make the news, right, which I think is really worth pointing out. For sure, this this uh. One of the articles we used for this was um called the Mystery of Yellow Rain. It was written by Jacob Roberts for Distillations, which is a blog of the Science History Institute. Very good stuff. All right,

Well that's it for short stuff see later. M H. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M hm h