Short Stuff: Yellow Rain

After the Vietnam War, the Hmong people told the world a toxic weapon was being used on them. Thus began a mystery that still remains today, which might have been solved when it was chalked up to bee poop.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck,
and there's Josh over there, and this is short stuff.
Get up, Chuck. All right, We're gonna go to the
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

(00:28):
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

(00:51):
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

(01:12):
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

(01:37):
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.

(01:59):
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.

(02:24):
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

(02:49):
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,

(03:13):
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

(03:34):
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

(03:57):
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

(04:19):
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

(04:39):
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

(05:02):
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.

(05:22):
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

(05:43):
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

(06:20):
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

(06:41):
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,

(07:04):
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

(07:25):
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

(07:48):
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,

(08:09):
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,

(08:29):
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.

(08:52):
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

(09:13):
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,

(09:35):
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

(09:56):
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

(10:18):
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

(10:41):
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,

(11:02):
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

(11:22):
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

(11:45):
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,

(12:07):
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