It was 1968, military testing in the deserts of the West was in full cold war fever, and more than 6,000 sheep had been found dead in a remote valley in western Utah.
Dr. Delbert A. Osguthorpe, right, with Dr. Gustave L. Davis, a pathologist from Washington University in St. Louis, in Washington in May 1969.
The United States Army, which had a chemical warfare facility not far from Skull Valley, where the sheep had died, denied responsibility. But Dr. Delbert A. Osguthorpe, a prominent large-animal veterinarian who had been appointed by Gov. Calvin L. Rampton to head the state’s investigation, knew that his diagnosis was correct and insisted right back. The sheep, he concluded, were killed by nerve gas.
Utah’s Congressional delegation pressed for hearings in Washington, and eventually the truth came out: valves on a plane carrying nerve agents had failed, and the gas had fallen as precipitation on the sheep herd.
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