Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) is a U.S. Army facility established in 1942 to test

biological Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary in ...

and

chemical weapon A chemical weapon (CW) is a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this can be any chemical compound intended as a ...

s, located about southwest of

Salt Lake City, Utah Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in Utah. With a population of 200,133 in 2020, t ...

, United States, and south of the

Utah Test and Training Range The Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) is a Department of Defense military testing and training area located in Utah's West Desert, approximately west of Salt Lake City, Utah. UTTR is currently the largest contiguous block of over-land superson ...

Location

Dugway Proving Ground is located about southwest of

, in southern Tooele County and just north of Juab County. It encompasses of the Great Salt Lake Desert, an area the size of the state of

Rhode Island Rhode Island (, like ''road'') is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is the List of U.S. states by area, smallest U.S. state by area and the List of states and territories of the United States ...

, and is surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges. It had a resident population of 795 as of the

2010 United States Census The United States census of 2010 was the twenty-third United States national census. National Census Day, the reference day used for the census, was April 1, 2010. The census was taken via mail-in citizen self-reporting, with enumerators serving ...

, all of whom lived in the community of Dugway, Utah, at its extreme eastern end. It is south of the

and together they form the largest block of overland contiguous special use airspace measured from surface or near surface within the continental U.S.(). The transcontinental

Lincoln Highway The Lincoln Highway is the first transcontinental highway in the United States and one of the first highways designed expressly for automobiles. Conceived in 1912 by Indiana entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, and formally dedicated October 31, 191 ...

passed through the present site of the Dugway Proving Ground, and is the only section of the old highway closed to the public. At least one old wooden bridge over a creek still stands. The name ''Dugway'' comes from a technique of digging a trench into a hillside to create a flat surface along which a wagon can travel.

Mission

Dugway's mission is to test United States and Allied

and

defense systems in a secure and isolated environment. DPG also serves as a facility for US Army Reserve and

US National Guard The National Guard is a state-based military force that becomes part of the reserve components of the United States Army and the United States Air Force when activated for federal missions.US Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sig ...

flight tests, mostly from nearby

Hill Air Force Base Hill Air Force Base is a major U.S. Air Force (USAF) base located in northern Utah, just south of the city of Ogden, and bordering the Cities of Layton, Clearfield, Riverdale, Roy, and Sunset with its largest border immediately adjacent t ...

in Clearfield. DPG is controlled by the United States Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC). The area has also been used by Army special forces for training in preparation for deployments to the War in Afghanistan.

History

In 1941, the US Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) determined it needed a testing facility more remote than the US Army's

Edgewood Arsenal Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) (sometimes erroneously called Aberdeen Proving ''Grounds'') is a U.S. Army facility located adjacent to Aberdeen, Harford County, Maryland, United States. More than 7,500 civilians and 5,000 military personnel work at ...

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean t ...

. The CWS surveyed the

Western U.S. The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the Wes ...

for a new location to conduct its tests, and in the spring of 1942, construction of Dugway Proving Ground began, including the establishment of

Michael Army Airfield Michael Army Airfield (MAAF) is a military airport located at the Dugway Proving Ground and owned by the United States Army. It is west of the proving grounds barracks at Dugway, Tooele County, Utah, United States. Overview Michael Army Ai ...

. Since its founding, much of Dugway Proving Ground activity has been a closely guarded secret. Testing commenced in the summer of 1942. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

, DPG tested toxic agents,

flamethrower A flamethrower is a ranged incendiary device designed to project a controllable jet of fire. First deployed by the Byzantine Empire in the 7th century AD, flamethrowers saw use in modern times during World War I, and more widely in World ...

s, chemical spray systems,

biological warfare Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill, harm or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. ...

weapons, fire bombing tactics, antidotes for chemical agents, and protective clothing. During 1943 the "

German Village German Village is a historic neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, just south of the city's downtown. It was settled in the early-to-mid-19th century by a large number of German immigrants, who at one time comprised as much as a third of the city's ...

" and " Japanese Village" set-piece domestic "hamlets" were built at Dugway, for practice in the fire-bombing of homes of the types in urbanized areas of

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

and the

Japanese Empire The also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was a historical nation-state and great power that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the post-World War II 1947 constitution and subsequent forma ...

's Home Islands. In October 1943, DPG established biological warfare facilities at UTTR's range telemetry and tracking radar installation, which is an isolated area within DPG known as the Granite Peak Installation. DPG was slowly phased out after World War II, becoming inactive in August 1946. The base was reactivated during the

Korean War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Korean War , partof = the Cold War and the Korean conflict , image = Korean War Montage 2.png , image_size = 300px , caption = Clockwise from top:{ ...

, under Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel Speers Ponder, and in 1954 was confirmed as a permanent

Department of the Army The United States Department of the Army (DA) is one of the three military departments within the Department of Defense of the U.S. The Department of the Army is the federal government agency within which the United States Army (U.S.) is org ...

installation. In October 1958, the United States Army Chemical Center, Maryland, moved the U.S. Army Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Weapons School to Dugway Proving Ground. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,

Project Bellwether A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of even ...

—a study of weaponized, mosquito-spread infections—was based at DPG. From 1985 to 1991, Dugway Proving Ground was home to the

Ranger School The United States Army Ranger School is a 62-day small unit tactics and leadership course that develops functional skills directly related to units whose mission is to engage the enemy in close combat and direct fire battles. Ranger training w ...

's short-lived Desert Training Phase. It was first known as the Desert Ranger Division (DRD) until redesignated the

Ranger Training Brigade The United States Army Ranger School is a 62-day small unit tactics and leadership course that develops functional skills directly related to units whose mission is to engage the enemy in close combat and direct fire battles. Ranger training wa ...

's 7th Ranger Training Battalion in 1987, and taught students basic desert survival skills and small unit tactics. The program was later moved back to its original site at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1991, where it was deactivated in 1995. On September 8, 2004, the

Genesis Genesis may refer to: Bible * Book of Genesis, the first book of the biblical scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity, describing the creation of the Earth and of mankind * Genesis creation narrative, the first several chapters of the Book of ...

, a NASA spacecraft, was directed to impact into the desert floor of the Dugway Proving Ground because the topsoil there is like talcum powder, or moondust, and would likely cushion the troubled spacecraft's impact. The Genesis spacecraft's accelerometer had been installed backwards, which caused the spacecraft to malfunction upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere preventing the originally planned air retrieval. On January 26, 2011, Dugway Proving Ground was placed on lockdown. Al Vogel, a public affairs specialist for the installation, would only say that the lockdown began at 5:24 p.m. Employees were not allowed to leave, and those coming to work were not allowed in. Vogel said there were no injuries, no damage and no threats reported at the proving ground. There were about 1,200 to 1,400 people at Dugway when the lockdown occurred. It was later announced that the lockdown was in response to the temporary loss of a vial containing VX nerve agent. The lockdown was lifted on January 27 following recovery of the material. The incident was described simply as a mislabeling problem. Dugway Proving Ground was also home to the High Resolution Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detector, which discovered the first

ultra-high-energy cosmic ray In astroparticle physics, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) is a cosmic ray with an energy greater than 1 EeV (1018 electronvolts, approximately 0.16 joules), far beyond both the rest mass and energies typical of other cosmic ray pa ...

. Dugway is home to several radio telemetry and tracking radar (i.e. RIR-777, TPQ-39 (Ver. V) and MPQ-39) sites which track national flight assets during flight tests at UTTR. Activities included aerial nerve agent testing. According to reports from ''New Scientist'', Dugway was still producing quantities of

anthrax Anthrax is an infection caused by the bacterium '' Bacillus anthracis''. It can occur in four forms: skin, lungs, intestinal, and injection. Symptom onset occurs between one day and more than two months after the infection is contracted. The s ...

spores as late as 2015 to be used to develop anthrax testing detection and countermeasures, more than four decades after the United States renounced biological weapons, and shipping material intended to be inert to military bases and military contractors around the globe.Norrell, Brenda
"Skull Valley's Nerve Gas Neighbors"
''Indian Country Today'' (Oneida, N.Y.), October 26, 2005.McCombs, Brady, and Robert Burns
"Pentagon: Anthrax shipments broader than first thought"
AP via ''Military Times'', May 30, 2015. Retrieved 2015-05-31. There were at least 1,100 other chemical tests at Dugway during the time period of the Dugway sheep incident (see below). In total, almost 500,000 lb (230,000 kg) of nerve agent were dispersed during open-air tests. There were also tests at Dugway involving other weapons of mass destruction, including 328 open-air tests of biological weapons, 74 dirty bomb tests, and eight furnace heatings of nuclear material under open-air conditions to simulate the dispersal of fallout in the case of meltdown of aeronautic nuclear reactors.

"Sheep Kill" incident

In March 1968, 6,249

sheep Sheep or domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') are domesticated, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Although the term ''sheep'' can apply to other species in the genus '' Ovis'', in everyday usage it almost always refers to domesticate ...

died in Skull Valley, an area nearly thirty miles from Dugway's testing sites. When examined, the sheep were found to have been poisoned by an

organophosphate In organic chemistry, organophosphates (also known as phosphate esters, or OPEs) are a class of organophosphorus compounds with the general structure , a central phosphate molecule with alkyl or aromatic substituents. They can be considered ...

chemical. The sickening of the sheep, known as the Dugway sheep incident, coincided with several open-air tests of the nerve agent VX at Dugway. Local attention focused on the Army, which initially denied that VX had caused the deaths, instead blaming the local use of organophosphate

pesticide Pesticides are substances that are meant to control pests. This includes herbicide, insecticide, nematicide, molluscicide, piscicide, avicide, rodenticide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, microbicide, fungicide, and ...

s on crops. Necropsies conducted on the dead sheep later definitively identified the presence of VX. The Army never admitted liability, but did pay the ranchers for their losses. On the official record, the claim was for 4,372 "disabled" sheep, of which about 2,150 were either killed outright by the VX exposure or were so critically injured that they needed to be

euthanized Animal euthanasia (euthanasia from el, εὐθανασία; "good death") is the act of killing an animal or allowing it to die by withholding extreme medical measures. Reasons for euthanasia include incurable (and especially painful) conditio ...

on-site by veterinarians. Another 1,877 sheep were "temporarily" injured, or showed no signs of injury but ultimately were not marketable due to their potential exposure. All of the exposed sheep that survived the initial exposure were eventually euthanized by the ranchers, since even the potential for exposure had rendered the sheep permanently unsalable for either meat or wool. The incident, coinciding with the birth of the

environmental movement The environmental movement (sometimes referred to as the ecology movement), also including conservation and green politics, is a diverse philosophical, social, and political movement for addressing environmental issues. Environmentalists a ...

and anti-

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...

protests, created an uproar in Utah and the international community.

U.S. GAO report

The

U.S. General Accounting Office The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a legislative branch government agency that provides auditing, evaluative, and investigative services for the United States Congress. It is the supreme audit institution of the federal gover ...

issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies performed "hundreds, perhaps thousands" of weapons tests and experiments involving hazardous substances. The quote from the study: More specifically, there are reports that certain nerve agents such as

tetrodotoxin Tetrodotoxin (TTX) is a potent neurotoxin. Its name derives from Tetraodontiformes, an order that includes pufferfish, porcupinefish, ocean sunfish, and triggerfish; several of these species carry the toxin. Although tetrodotoxin was discovere ...

and

datura stramonium ''Datura stramonium'', known by the common names thorn apple, jimsonweed (jimson weed), devil's snare, or devil's trumpet, is a poisonous flowering plant of the nightshade family Solanaceae. It is a species belonging to the ''Datura'' genus a ...

have been tested at this military base. The complete nerve agent was code-named "VX"—one of a series of "V" nerve agents tested at the base.

Anthrax shipments

In May 2015 it was revealed that Dugway lab had inadvertently shipped live anthrax bacillus to locations around the country. Shipped samples, it was said, were supposed to be inert. Labs receiving the live samples were in Texas, Maryland, Wisconsin, Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, California and Virginia, the Associated Press reported. Days after the first report, the military divulged that the mis-shipments had been broader than initially reported and launched an investigation. Dugway was involved in developing a test to identify biological threats in the field. In September 2018, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released findings of an investigation into the anthrax shipping lapses made at Dugway. The investigation looked into whether "systemic oversight changes regarding biosecurity have since been implemented across DOD facilities. The findings are mixed." The U.S. Army had sought 35 specific changes, but only 18 of those 35 changes have been made, as of the GAO report. According to the report, the DOD "had not fully identified the infrastructure capabilities required to address threats, had not planned to identify potential duplication without considering information from existing federal studies, and had not updated its guidance and planning process to include specific responsibilities and time frames for risk assessments." On December 13, 2019, the U.S. Air Force said it had kept the Ultra Long Endurance Aircraft Platform (Ultra LEAP) at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah airborne for two days during testing of the surveillance drone at the site.

UFO speculation

Following the public attention drawn to Area 51 in the early 1990s, UFOlogists and concerned citizens have suggested that whatever covert operations may have been underway at that location, if any, were subsequently transferred to DPG. The ''

Deseret News The ''Deseret News'' () is the oldest continuously operating publication in the American west. Its multi-platform products feature journalism and commentary across the fields of politics, culture, family life, faith, sports, and entertainment. Th ...

'' reported that Dave Rosenfeld, president of Utah UFO Hunters, claimed but provided no proof for "Numerous UFOs have been stored and reported in the area in and around Dugway ... ilitary aircraft can't account forall the unknowns seen in the area. It might be that our star visitors are keeping an eye on Dugway too. ... ugway isthe ''new'' Area 51. And probably the new military spaceport."

References

Dugway Proving Ground: Blocks 3000, 3001, 3004, and 3005, Census Tract 1306, Tooele County, Utah
United States Census Bureau

External links

*
Dugway Proving Ground NewsWest Desert Test CenterArticle: Does Utah Have an 'Area 51'?High Resolution Fly's Eye Experiment
*

Historic American Engineering Record Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP) is a division of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) responsible for administering the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and Historic American Landscapes ...

(HAER) documentation, filed under Dugway, Tooele County, UT: ** ** ** **
P. Bradford Westwood collection on the Dugway Proving Ground, MSS 7524
a
L. Tom Perry Special Collections

Brigham Young University Brigham Young University (BYU, sometimes referred to colloquially as The Y) is a private research university in Provo, Utah. It was founded in 1875 by religious leader Brigham Young and is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-d ...

{{Authority control Biological warfare facilities Buildings and structures in Tooele County, Utah Chemical warfare facilities Government buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Utah Great Salt Lake Desert Lincoln Highway Military installations in Utah Proving grounds Research installations of the United States Army Military facilities on the National Register of Historic Places in Utah Historic American Buildings Survey in Utah Historic American Engineering Record in Utah National Register of Historic Places in Tooele County, Utah 1942 establishments in Utah United States biological weapons program