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All posts for the month February, 2012
One morning after a hard night of partying (before I became a Christian and learned how to deal with this), I awoke to the most horrible smell making me think that the sewer had backed up into my house. When I tried to move I could not! I tried to call for my brother but I could not speak either. I felt paralyzed so I laid there for what seemed like an hour before I could move again.
When I got up, I went looking for where that smell came from but could not find it, and no one else smelled anything. That was my first experience with the Old Hag syndrome.
My second time was after I became a Christian and I had just gone through a very heartbreaking divorce. I was awakened in the middle of the night by a horrible smell. When I awoke, I realized that I could not move a muscle, except that I could move my head a little to look around. And what I saw was the ugliest looking face hovering at the foot of my bed. It seemed to be laughing at me as it bobbed up and down in the air. I then tried to speak to it to leave my house but immediately realized that I could not utter a word. And that devil seemed to laugh at me even more.
So I laid my head back down on my pillow and prayed and asked God why I could not speak to cast this devil out and He said to me that I had sin in my life, that I need to seek His forgiveness for. So I did and as soon as I did, I was able to sit up on my bed and I told that spirit “in the name of Jesus get out of my house”. And that thing rose up in the air with the most angry look on his face (for a moment I thought that he was going to charge at me) but it headed for my front door, and with one last look at me it flew off.
I have helped others who have had these encounters and I hope that my story here may be able to encourage others who are having these kind of problems that there is hope and help with this.
Joe
Some people instinctively know their body is haunted. Still many others just don’t. If in photos strange images as blurs or light ecto mist appear in your crotch or abominable region in more then one photo you just might be a candidate.
To find out a full investigation needs to be held with you considered as the haunted locations. Try passing an EMF Meter over your naked body. And recording EVP’s by placing a Digital Voice recorder in your genital regions. You might just be surprised at the results.
Once you have established that your body is inhabited by a single or group of ghosts get a fellow paranormal investigator to study you and carry on the same investigation. Confirmation that your body is haunted by a Womb ghost is mandatory before any removal or changes in the state of your posses bowel or womb can take place.
Sometimes the Womb or a Bowel Ghost in men will leave your body when you are asleep. I suggest you try focusing a Digital Video recorder on your private areas you as you sleep.
I have spoken to several groups at paranormal conferences and they too have related to me that the subject is popping up through out the United States. One Group of Paranormal Investigators in Georgia have three members who have ghost living inside them. A ghost hunter from Texas says he did not get a bowel ghost until he went to Waverly Asylum. He said to me he could remember the instant the ghost entered his body. He got a sharp pain in his penis then passed out.
There is enormous evidence of “ghosts” in all parts of the world. And that fact that so many have believed that ghosts could attack a fetus is nothing new. But ghosts through history have had other reasons to enter a woman’s womb in many different cultures from reincarnation to vengeance. Even Dead Babies have been known to haunt their mothers wombs after a abortion or miscarriage.
When a person dies only his physical body ceases to exist. His subtle ghost body (consisting of the subconscious mind, intellect, ego and soul, i.e. minus the physical body) however continues to exist and moves on to the other regions of the universe. Or into someone else’s body.
Often a womb infested with a ghost is that of the ghost of loved ones, or to those of strangers, and the worst case possible Devils and Demons. Any woman’s womb can attract many different forms of a paranormal haunting at least that is the common belief amongst many. And so can men. The ghost that haunt men are often found living in their genitals, bowels or stomach. And the number of ghosts or demons and devil’s that can infect a person is said to be uncountable.
Dead Lovers and Husbands are notorious for inhabiting a woman’s womb. Usually they do this just to keep the woman they loved from finding another suitor. Or to be born again as that women’s new born child.
These very malevolent ghosts and sometimes demon often show up in ghost photos with their heads or faces exposed peering from the haunted woman’s vaginal or lower stomach or crotch area.
Sometimes good Spirits of the dead father of a child will enter a womb just to protect his child from other ghosts.
Just because you have a baby that does not mean the ghost leaves your womb. one common belief is that the soul that is inside a woman might want to live out it’s life staying there just to always be with the person they loved until the day they die. Such might be the case of Sally Howard.
Like a real Genie in a bottle the ghost is said to be able to enter and come and go as it pleases. Their is a camp of people who believe that this is why woman should not ghost hunt or venture into haunted locations unless they protect them selves from womb ghost and demonic intrusions.
Expect to feel uncomfortable if your a woman, ghost hunting and pregnant. This can be a difficult problem so thinking about it ahead of time can help you prepare or consider not going at all. Ghost many say may be attracted to pregnant woman and the unborn child. The reason for this which is not quite clear but the results might be hard to deal with.
1. Gog and Magog
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Gog Magog appear in the Qur’an, Book of Genesis, the Book of Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation. They are variously presented as supernatural beings, demons or national groups that lurked upon the land. Gog and Magog occur widely in mythology and folklore and their existence is accepted by many religions including Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The widely accepted belief both in Christianity and Islam holds that “He of the Two Horns” (a great and righteous ruler) or Two Ages (one who impacts on two ages) travelled the world in three directions, until he found a tribe threatened by Gog and Magog, who were of an “evil and destructive nature” and “caused great corruption on earth.” The people offered tribute in exchange for protection, he agreed to help them, but refused the tribute; he constructed a great wall that the hostile nations were unable to penetrate. They will be trapped there until doomsday, and their escape will be a sign of the end: “The War of Gog and Magog” would precede the return of Jesus. .
2. Satyr
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Satyrs were originally seen as companions of the goat god Pan in ancient Greek civilisation. The first drawings of satyrs were of normal men, though often with an erect phallus. It was later merged with the Roman faun which is when they began to be depicted as half men half goats (the upper body being that of the man, and the lower half being that of a goat). Satyrs are described as roguish but faint-hearted folk — subversive and dangerous, yet shy and cowardly. Many early accounts which apparently refer to this animal describe the males as being sexually aggressive towards human women and towards females of its own species. In old age they are often seen with horns on their head, while young satyrs are seen with nubs instead.
3. Abarimon
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Abarimon is the name of a legendary race with backwards feet, but in spite of this handicap were able to run at great speed. They lived side by side with wild animals and attempts to capture them failed because they were so savage. They lived in a great valley of Mount Imaus (now called the Himalayan Mountains in Pakistan). There was a special quality of air which meant if it was breathed for a long period of time it would be impossible to breathe any other type of air and the inhabitants could never leave the valley alive.
4. Nephilim
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Nephilim are beings, who appear in the Hebrew Bible; specifically mentioned in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Numbers; they are also mentioned in other Biblical texts and in some non-canonical Jewish writings. They were called fallen ones because men’s hearts would fail at the sight of them. Some suggest that they were giants and when they fell, the ground shook, causing others to fall too. They might not be historical figures but ancient imagery with questionable meaning. Some view of them as the hybrid offspring of fallen angels and human women. In Hebrew Bible there is also mention of Rephaites alongside Nephilims, who were an ancient race of giants in Iron Age and were thought to be dead that lurked upon earth.
5. Mermaid
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A mermaid is a mythological aquatic creature with a female human head and torso and the tail of a fish..The mermaids have been discussed since at least 5000 BC. Her origins are believed to be from the Great Queen Atargatis, who loved a mortal shepherd and unintentionally killed him. Ashamed, she jumped into a lake to take the form of a fish, but the waters would not conceal her divine beauty. Thereafter, she took the form of a mermaid—human above the waist, fish below. Mermaids were however noted in British folklore as unlucky omens – both foretelling disaster and provoking it. There is a high possibility that people had been confusing them with Sirenias (aquatic animals) or people suffering from a congenital disease Sirenomelia (aka mermaid syndrome in which a child is born with his or her legs fused together).
6. Banshee
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The Banshee is a female spirit in Irish mythology, usually seen as an omen of death and a messenger from the Otherworld. The story of the bean-sidhe began as a fairy woman keening at the death of important personages. In later stories, the appearance of the banshee could foretell the death. According to the legend, the banshee can appear in a variety of guises. Most often she appears as an ugly, frightening hag, but can also appear as a stunningly beautiful woman of any age that suits her and is seen washing the blood stained clothes or armour of those who are about to die. Although not always seen, her mourning call is heard, usually at night when someone is about to die and usually around woods.
7. Abatwa
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In Zulu mythology, Abatwa are tiny humans said to be able to hide beneath a blade of grass and to be able to ride ants. They are said to live a nomadic lifestyle and are continually on the hunt for game. Legend states that if one happens to come across an Abatwa, one will typically be asked a question like, “From where did you first see me?” One must reply by saying one saw them from a mountain, or some far away area. They are said to be extremely sensitive about their size, and if one answers by saying that one only saw them right then for the first time, the Abatwa will try to kill them with poison arrows. Stepping on an Abatwa by accident is also said to be a death sentence.Due to their shy nature, they will only tolerate being seen by the very young (said to be anyone under the age of 4), by magicians, and by pregnant women. If a pregnant woman in her seventh month of pregnancy sees a male Abatwa, it is said that she will give birth to a boy.
8. Elf
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An elf is a being of Germanic mythology. The elves were originally thought of as a race of divine or semi-divine beings endowed with magical powers, which they use both for the benefit and the injury of mankind. In pre-Christian mythology, they appear to have been divided into light elves and dark elves, The earliest preserved description of elves comes from Norse mythology that holds that the men could be elevated to the rank of elves after death, Crossbreeding was possible between elves and humans in the Old Norse belief.Words for the nymphs of the Greek were translated to be same as “elves” or its variants by Anglo-Saxon scholars.
9. Cyclops
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In Greek and Roman mythology, a cyclops is a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of its forehead. It is a great possibility that people have been mistaken a congenital abnormality called Cyclopia in which the human baby is malformed having only one central eye.
10. Orc
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Orc is a word used to refer to various races of tough and warlike humanoid creatures in various fantasy settings. Orcs are often portrayed as misshapen humanoids who are brutal, warmongering, and sadistic. Orcs are described of varying size, ugly, filthy, with a taste for human flesh. They are fanged, bow-legged and long-armed, and some have dark skin as if burned. The author Tolkien describes them as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes … degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types”. They are portrayed as miserable, crafty and vicious beings. In nearly all the epic works, their origins are considered as foul broodlings animated solely by the Satan’s evil will.
11. Kapre
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Kapre is a Philippine mythical creature that could be characterized as a tree demon, but with more human characteristics. It is described as being a tall, brown, hairy male with a beard. Kapres are normally described as smoking a big tobacco pipe, whose strong smell would attract human attention. The term kapre comes from the Arabic “kaffir” meaning a non-believer in God. apres may make contact with people to offer friendship, or if it is attracted to a woman. If a Kapre befriends any human, especially because of love, the Kapre will consistently follow its “love interest” throughout life. Also, if one is a friend of the Kapre then that person has the ability to see it and if they were to sit on it then any other person could see it. Kapres are also said to play pranks on people, frequently making travelers become disoriented and lose their way in the mountains or in the woods.
12.Leperchaun
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Leprechauns have been linked to the Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish mythology who are thought to derive from the pre-Christian deities of Ireland. When the surviving stories were written, Ireland had been Christian for centuries, and the Tuatha Dé were represented as mortal kings, queens and heroes of the distant past; however there are many clues to their former divine status. Popular depiction shows leperchauns as being no taller than a small child. The leprechaun is said to be a solitary creature, whose principal occupation is making and mending shoes, and who enjoys practical jokes. According to William Butler Yeats, the great wealth of these fairies comes from the “treasure-crocks, buried of old in war-time”, which they have uncovered and appropriated.According to McAnally the leprechaun is the son of an “evil spirit” and a “degenerate fairy” and is “not wholly good nor wholly evil”
13. Ogre
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Ogre possibly derived from Oegrus from Greek mythology who was the son of Greek blood shedder god. The word ogre is of French origin. Keeping the Greek myth, Oegrus might have cursed some people to ogres where an ogre is described large, cruel, monstrous and hideous humanoid monster. Also featured in mythology, folklore and fiction. Ogres are often depicted in fairy tales and folklore as feeding on human beings, and have appeared in many classic works of literature. In art, ogres are often depicted with a large head, abundant hair and beard, a voracious appetite, and a strong body. The term is often applied in a metaphorical sense to disgusting persons who exploit, brutalize or devour their victims. The French tale tells of them as habitants of kingdom of Logres [England].
14. Dziwożona
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Dziwozoana or Mamuna are female swamp demons in Slavic mythology known for being malicious and dangerous. Most at risk of becoming one of these demons after death were thought to be midwives, old maids, unmarried mothers, pregnant women who die before childbirth, as well as abandoned children. Sometimes they carry off young men to be their husbands. The Dziwozona had huge breasts which they used for attack and murdering.
15. Mono Grande
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They are descibed as ape-like hairy and men-like torso-ed cannibals sighted in South America. They are reported as being aggressive to humans. And on encounter they attack humans on sight but might carry off women for breeding. However they are unrecognized by a scientific consensus and myths that came to South America with European colonists.
16. Vampires
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Vampires are mythological beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person.Although vampiric entities have been recorded in many cultures, the belief in vampires and bloodsucking demons is as old as man himself, and may go back to prehistoric times. Vampires were generally referred to as cold beings who could be destroyed by daylight. Holes appearing in the earth over a grave were taken as a sign of vampirism. There is no scientific evidence of vampirism except the Vampire Bat.
17. Tellem
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The Tellem were the people who inhabited the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali. It is thought by some in Mali today that the Tellem possessed the power of flight. They are described like “Lord of the ring’s Hobbit like creatures” and they built dwellings around the base of the escarpment as well as directly into the cliff-face like the hobbits. Many of these structures are still visible in the area.
18. Yeti
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Yeti or abominable snowman mythological humanoid creature said to inhabit the Himalayan region of Pakistan and Nepal. The scientific community largely regards the Yeti as a legend, yet it remains one of the most famous creatures of cryptozoology parallel to Bigfoot of North America. It is tall, bipedal creature covered with long white hair and wore no clothes. He had an interesting feature of changing his hair colour in sunlight to fox red.
19. Tiyanak
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Tiyank is a creature which, in Philippine mythology, imitates the form of a child. It usually takes the form of a newborn baby and cries like one in the jungle to attract unwary travelers. Once it is picked up by the victim, it reverts to its true form and attacks the victim.Aside from slashing victims, the tianak also delights in leading travelers astray, or in kidnapping children. Theories claim that the tianak is the spirit of a child whose mother died before giving birth. This caused it to be “born in the ground”, thus gaining its current state.
20. Werewolf
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Werewolf is a mythological human with the ability to shapeshift into a wolf or an anthropomorphic wolf-like creature, either purposely, by being bitten or scratched by another werewolf, or after being placed under a curse. This transformation is often associated with the appearance of the full moon. Werewolves are often attributed super-human strength and senses, far beyond those of both wolves or men.
21. Fomorian
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In Irish mythology, were a semi-divine race who inhabited Ireland in ancient times. They may have once been believed to be the beings who preceded the gods, similar to the Greek Titans. It has been suggested that they represent the gods of chaos and wild nature, as opposed to the Tuatha Dé Danann who represent the gods of human civilization. They are sometimes said to have had the body of a man and the head of a goat, or to have had one eye, one arm and one leg, but some, for example Elatha, were very beautiful.
22. Blemmyes
The Blemmyes was a tribe which became fictionalized as a race of creatures believed to be acephalous (headless) monsters who had eyes and mouths on their chest. Ancient writers sometimes used the term anthropophagi (Grk: man eaters) to describe the Blemmyes, as they were known for their cannibalistic proclivities.
23. Tikbalang
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Tikbalang is a creature of Philippine myth said to lurk in the mountains and forests of the Philippines. It is generally described as a tall, bony humanoid creature with disproportionately long limbs, to the point that its knees reach above its head when it squats down.It has the head and feet of an animal, most commonly a horse. It is sometimes believed to be a transformation of an aborted fetus which has been sent to earth from hell. Tikbalangs are said to scare travelers and lead them astray such that they keep on returning to an arbitrary path no matter how far he goes or where he turns. Supposedly this is counteracted by wearing one’s shirt inside out.
24. Encantado
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An encantado is a Brazilian legendary creature. They live in a deep underwater realm named the Encante. Encantados are most commonly viewed as a type of freshwater dolphin or sea snake that has the ability to shapeshift into human form. They are characterized by superior musical ability, seductiveness, and attraction to parties. The creature’s transformation into human form seems to be rare, and usually occurs at night. While in human form the encantado will wear a hat to hide its protruding forehead. It does not disappear while shapeshifting and frequently displays magical abilities, such as the power to control storms and haunt humans. They use various mind control techniques and can inflict illness, insanity, and even death. The creatures are known for kidnapping humans. Many villagers will not go near the Amazon River at night because of this. Plenty of South Americans believe in the existence of the encantado and claim to have seen and interacted with the species.
25. Aswang
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Aswang is a mythical creature in Filipino folklore. The aswang is an inherently evil vampire-like creature and is the subject of a wide variety of myths and stories, the details of which vary greatly. Spanish colonizers noted that the Aswang was the most feared among the mythical creatures of the Philippines, even in the 16th century. “Aswangs” are often described as a combination of vampire and witch and are almost always female. They are sometimes used as a generic term applied to all types of witches, manananggals, shapeshifters, werewolves, and monsters. Aswang stories and definitions vary greatly from region to region and person to person, so no one particular set of characteristics can be ascribed to the term. However, the term is often used interchangeably with manananggal, which is a particular creature with a specific set of features. They are often portrayed as a monster with wings which flap loudly when she’s far away and quietly when she’s nearer.
26. Basajaun
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In Basque mythology, the basajaunak are a spirit dwelling in caves or in the woods who protects flocks of livestock and teaches skills such as agriculture and ironworking to humans.The basajaun also exists in Aragonese mythology in the valleys of Tena, Ansó, and Broto. Fifteenth-century carvings depicting the basajaunak can be seen in Burgos Cathedral and in the monastery of Santa María la Real in Nájera.
27. Rakshasa
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Rakshasha is a demon or unrighteous spirit in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. They are believed to be derived from foot of the Hindu God of Creation. Rakshasas are a populous race of supernatural humanoids who tend toward evil. Powerful warriors, they resort to the use of magic and illusion when unsuccessful with conventional weapons. As shape-changers, they can assume various physical forms, and it is not always clear whether they have a true or natural form. Rakshasas are notorious for disturbing sacrifices, desecrating graves, harassing priests, possessing human beings, and so on. Their fingernails are venomous, and they feed on human flesh and spoiled food.
28. Wendigo
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Wendigo is a mythical creature appearing in the mythology of the Algonquian people. It is a malevolent cannibalistic spirit into which humans could transform, or which could possess humans. Those who indulged in cannibalism were at particular risk,and the legend appears to have reinforced this practice as taboo. Wendigos were alien like embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess; never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims. In some traditions, humans who became overpowered by greed could turn into Wendigos; the Wendigo myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation.
29. Incubus
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Incubus is a demon in male form supposed to lie upon sleepers, especially women, in order to have sexual intercourse with them, according to a number of mythological and legendary traditions. An incubus may pursue sexual relations with a woman in order to father a child, to carry on its legend. Some sources indicate that it may be identified by its unnaturally large or cold penis. Tradition holds that repeated intercourse with an incubus may result in the deterioration of health or death. Victims may have been experiencing waking dreams or sleep paralysis. The influence of incubi could also have been invoked to explain otherwise “unexplainable” pregnancies or real rapists might have been described as incubus to escape punishment.
30. Sasquatch
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Sasquatch or better known as Bigfoot is usually described as a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid. The scientific community considers Bigfoot to be a combination of folklore, misidentification, and hoax, rather than a real creature. Alleged witnesses have described large eyes, a pronounced brow ridge, and a large, low-set forehead; the top of the head has been described as rounded and crested, similar to the sagittal crest of the male gorilla. Bigfoot is commonly reported to have a strong, unpleasant smell by those who claim to have encountered it. Proponents have also claimed that Bigfoot is omnivorous and mainly nocturnal.
THE smallpox virus first became entangled with the human species somewhere between three thousand and twelve thousand years ago — possibly in Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs. Somewhere on earth at roughly that time, the virus jumped out of an unknown animal into its first human victim, and began to spread. Viruses are parasites that multiply inside the cells of their hosts, and they are the smallest life forms. Smallpox developed a deep affinity for human beings. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious disease, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. It was declared eradicated from the human species in 1979, after a twelve-year effort by a team of doctors and health workers from the World Health Organization. Smallpox now exists only in laboratories.
Smallpox is explosively contagious, and it travels through the air. Virus particles in the mouth become airborne when the host talks. If you inhale a single particle of smallpox, you can come down with the disease. After you’ve been infected, there is a typical incubation period of ten days. During that time, you feel normal. Then the illness hits with a spike of fever, a backache, and vomiting, and a bit later tiny red spots appear all over the body. The spots turn into blisters, called pustules, and the pustules enlarge, filling with pressurized opalescent pus. The eruption of pustules is sometimes called the splitting of the dermis. The skin doesn’t break, but splits horizontally, tearing away from its underlayers. The pustules become hard, bloated sacs the size of peas, encasing the body with pus, and the skin resembles a cobbled stone street.
The pain of the splitting is extraordinary. People lose the ability to speak, and their eyes can squeeze shut with pustules, but they remain alert. Death comes with a breathing arrest or a heart attack or shock or an immune-system storm, though exactly how smallpox kills a person is not known. There are many mysteries about the smallpox virus. Since the seventeenth century, doctors have understood that if the pustules merge into sheets across the body the victim will usually die: the virus has split the whole skin. If the victim survives, the pustules turn into scabs and fall off, leaving scars. This is known as ordinary smallpox.
Some people develop extreme smallpox, which is loosely called black pox. Doctors separate black pox into two forms — flat smallpox and hemorrhagic smallpox. In a case of flat smallpox, the skin remains smooth and doesn’t pustulate, but it darkens until it looks charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets. In hemorrhagic smallpox, black, unclotted blood oozes or runs from the mouth and other body orifices. Black pox is close to a hundred per cent fatal. If any sign of it appears in the body, the victim will almost certainly die. In the bloody cases, the virus destroys the linings of the throat, the stomach, the intestines, the rectum, and the vagina, and these membranes disintegrate. Fatal smallpox can destroy the body’s entire skin — both the exterior skin and the interior skin that lines the passages of the body.
Smallpox virus’s scientific name is variola. It means “spotted” in Latin, and it was given to the disease by a medieval bishop. The virus, as a life form, comes in two subspecies: Variola minor and Variola major. Minor is a weak mutant, and was first described in 1863 by doctors in Jamaica. People usually survive it. Classic major kills one out of three people if they haven’t been vaccinated or if they’ve lost their immunity. The death rate with major can go higher — how much higher no one knows. Variola major killed half of its victims in an outbreak in Canada in 1924, and presumably many of them developed black pox. Smallpox is less contagious than measles but more contagious than mumps. It tends to go around until it has infected nearly everyone.
Most people today have no immunity to smallpox. The vaccine begins to wear off in many people after ten years. Mass vaccination for smallpox came to a worldwide halt around twenty-five years ago. There is now very little smallpox vaccine on hand in the United States or anywhere else in the world. The World Health Organization once had ten million doses of the vaccine in storage in Geneva, Switzerland, but in 1990 an advisory committee recommended that most of it be destroyed, feeling that smallpox was longer a threat. Nine and a half million doses are assumed to have been cooked in an oven, leaving the W.H.O. with a total supply of half a million doses — one dose of smallpox vaccine for every twelve thousand people on earth. A recent survey by the W.H.O. revealed that there is only one factory in the world that has recently made even a small quantity of the vaccine, and there may be no factory capable of making sizable amounts. The vaccine was discovered in the age of Thomas Jefferson, and making a lot of it would seem simple, but so far the United States government has been unable to get any made at all. Variola virus is now classified as a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent — the most dangerous kind of virus — because it is lethal, airborne, and highly contagious, and is now exotic to the human species, and there is not enough vaccine to stop an outbreak. Experts feel that the appearance of a single case of smallpox anywhere on earth would be a global medical emergency.
At the present time, smallpox lives officially in only two repositories on the planet. One repository is in the United States, in a freezer at the headquarters of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta — the C.D.C. The other official smallpox repository is in a freezer at a Russian virology institute called Vector, also known as the State Research Institute of Virology and Biotechnology, which is situated outside the city of Novosibirsk, in Siberia. Vector is a huge, financially troubled former virus-weapons-development facility — a kind of decayed Los Alamos of viruses — which is trying to convert to peaceful enterprises.
There is a growing suspicion among experts that the smallpox virus may also live unofficially in clandestine biowarfare laboratories in a number of countries around the world, including labs on military bases in Russia that are closed to outside observers. The Central Intelligence Agency has become deeply alarmed about smallpox. Since 1995, a number of leading American biologists and public-health doctors have been given classified national-security briefings on smallpox. They have been shown classified evidence that as recently as 1992 Russia had the apparent capability of launching strategic-weapons-grade smallpox in special biological warheads on giant SS-18 intercontinental missiles that were targeted on the major cities of the United States. In the summer of last year, North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan in a test, and the missile fell into the sea. Some knowledgeable observers thought that the missile could have been designed to carry a biologic warhead. If it had carried smallpox and landed in Japan, it could have devastated Japan’s population: Japan has almost no smallpox vaccine on hand and its government seems to have no ability to deal with a biological attack. The United States government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and Serbia. The list may also include the terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan — a quasi-religious group that had Ph.D. biologists as members and a belief that an apocalyptic war will bring them worldwide power. Aum members released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, and, as the year 2000 approaches, the group is still active in Japan and in Russia. In any case, the idea that smallpox lives in only two freezers was never anything more than a comfortable fiction. No one knows exactly who has smallpox today, or where they keep the virus, or what they intend to do with it.
THE man who is most widely credited with the eradication of smallpox from the human species is a doctor named Donald Ainslie Henderson. Everyone calls him D. A. Henderson. He was the director of the World Health Organization’s Smallpox Eradication Unit from its inception, in 1966, to 1977, just before the last case occurred. “I’m one of many in the eradication,” Henderson said to me once. “There’s Frank Fenner, there’s Isao Arita, Bill Foege, Nicole Grasset, Zdenek Jezek, Jock Copland, John Wickett — I could come up with fifty names. Let alone the tens of thousands who worked in the infected countries.” Nevertheless, Henderson ran it. Smallpox killed at least three hundred million people in the twentieth century. During that time, humanity was largely immune to smallpox, which is not the case today. When D. A. Henderson arrived on the scene in 1966, two million people a year were dying of smallpox. In the years since the eradication effort began, Henderson and his team have effectively saved more than fifty million lives. This could be the most impressive achievement in the history of medicine. Henderson and his colleagues, however, have never received the Nobel Prize for their work.
D. A. Henderson is now a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He is the founder and the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, a think tank that considers what might be done to protect the American population during a biological event. The term “biological event” hardly existed two years ago, but it is now used by emergency planners and by the F.B.I. to mean a terrorist attack with a bioweapon — an unnatural event, caused by human intent.
Henderson lives with his wife in a large brick house in Baltimore. I arrived there on a cold, drizzly Saturday, and he ambled to the door. Henderson is an imposing man, six feet two inches tall. He is seventy years old. He has broad shoulders and a broad, seamed, angular face, pointed ears that stick out at angles from his head, a brush of gray hair, metal-framed eyeglasses, sharp blue eyes, and an easygoing voice that can flash with calculation. He was wearing a red checked shirt, with suspenders that held up Saturday slacks.
“In the last ten days, we’ve had fourteen different anthrax scares,” he remarked in an offhand way as we stood in the front hallway of his house and he loomed over me. He has a top-secret-level national-security clearance, and he hears about little bioterror events that don’t get noticed by the media. He went on to say, “Everybody and his brother is threatening to use anthrax. This week, it happened in Atlanta, in Washington, D.C., in Michigan, and in California. It’s largely hoaxes. Of course, a real bioterror event is going to happen one of these days.”
We settled into easy chairs in the family room. The walls and shelves of the room were crowded with African and Asian sculptures and wooden Ethiopian crosses, which he had picked up in his global hunt for smallpox. A Japanese garden was visible through sliding-glass doors.
We ate ham and roast-beef sandwiches, and drank Molson Ice beers. Henderson bit into a sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. Then he said, “Often, you get a worried look on your face, with the first signs of rash. We speak of the ‘worried face’ of smallpox. That face is a diagnostic sign. The rash comes up all at once. It’s more dense on the face and the extremities. That’s how you can tell smallpox from chicken pox. With chicken pox, the rash crops up over a period of days, and it’s more dense on the chest and trunk of the body. Smallpox pustules have a dimple, a dent in the center. Doctors say that the pustules have a ‘shotty’ feel, like shotgun pellets. You can roll them between your fingertips under the skin.”
“How many doctors could recognize smallpox today?” I asked.
“Virtually none. Smallpox takes forms that even I can’t diagnose. And I wrote the textbook.” He is a co-author of “Smallpox and Its Eradication,” a large book in red covers, which experts call the Big Red Book of Smallpox. It was supposed to be the final word on smallpox-the tombstone of the virus.
ON February 15,1972, a thirty-eight-year-old Muslim clergyman returned to his home town of Damnjane, in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, after he’d been on a pilgrimage to Mecca, stopping at holy sites in Iraq. I will call him the Pilgrim. A photograph of the Pilgrim shows a man who looks well educated, has an intelligent face, and is wearing a clipped mustache and a beret. He had travelled by bus for his entire journey. The morning after his return home, he woke up feeling achy. At first, he thought he was tired from the long bus ride, but then he realized that he had caught a bug. He shivered for a day or two, and developed a red rash brought on by his fever, but quickly recovered. He had been vaccinated for smallpox two months earlier. Indeed, the Yugoslav medical authorities had been vaccinating the population of Yugoslavia relentlessly for more than fifty years, and the country was considered to be thoroughly immunized. The last case of smallpox in Yugoslavia had occurred in 1930.
The Pilgrim’s family members and friends came to visit him. They wanted to hear about his trip, and he enjoyed telling them about it. Meanwhile, variola particles were leaking out of raw spots in the back of his throat and mixing with his saliva. When he spoke, tiny droplets of saliva, too small to be seen, drifted around him in a droplet cloud. If the person is throwing off a lethal virus, the cloud becomes a hot zone that can extend ten feet in all directions. Although the raw spots in the Pilgrim’s throat amounted to a tiny surface of virus emission, smaller than a postage stamp, in a biological sense it was as hot as the surface of the sun, and it put enough smallpox into the air to paralyze Yugoslavia.
Variola particles are built to survive in the air. They are rounded-off rectangles that have a knobby, patterned surface-a gnarly hand-grenade look. Some experts call the particles bricks. The whole brick is made of a hundred different proteins, assembled and interlocked in a three-dimensional puzzle, which nobody has ever figured out. Virus experts feel that the structure of a smallpox particle is almost breathtakingly beautiful and deeply mathematical-one of the unexplored wonders of the viral universe. The structure protects the virus’s genetic material: a long strand of DNA coiled in the center of the brick.
Pox bricks are the largest viruses. If a smallpox brick were the size of a real brick then a cold-virus particle would be a blueberry sitting on the brick. But smallpox particles are still extremely small; about three million smallpox bricks laid down in rows would pave the period at the end of this sentence. A smallpox victim emits several bricks in each invisible droplet of saliva that spews into the air when the person speaks or coughs. When an airborne smallpox particle lands on a mucus membrane in someone’s throat or lung, it sticks. It enters a cell and begins to make copies of itself. For one to three weeks, the virus spreads from cell to cell, amplifying silently in the body. No one has discovered exactly where the virus z hides during its incubation phase. Probably it gets into the lymph cells, confusing the immune system, and victims are said to experience terrible dreams.
On February 21st, when the Pilgrim had been feeling achy for almost a week, a thirty-year-old man, a schoolteacher, who is known to experts as Ljatif M., arrived in Djakovica, a few miles from the Pilgrim’s town, to enroll in the Higher Institute of Education. Doctors who later investigated the schoolteacher’s case never found out how he had come in contact with the Pilgrim. One of them must have ended up in the other’s town. Possibly they stood next to each other in a shop-something like that.
On March 3rd, Ljatif developed a fever. Two days later, he went to a local medical center, where doctors gave him penicillin for his fever. Antibiotics have no effect on a virus. Then his skin broke with dark spots, and he may have developed a worried face. He felt worse, and a few days later his brother took him by bus to a hospital in the town of Cacak, about a hundred miles away. The dark spots were by this time merging into blackened, mottled splashes, which the doctors in Cacak didn’t recognize. Ljatif became sicker. Finally, he was transferred by ambulance to Belgrade, where he was admitted to the Dermatology and Venereal Diseases Department of the city’s main hospital. By then, his skin may have turned almost black in patches. We don’t have access to his clinical reports, so I am describing a generalized extreme smallpox of the kind Ljatif had.
Inside the cells of the host, smallpox bricks pile up as if they were coming off a production line. Some of the particles develop tails. The tails are pieces of the cell’s protein, which the virus steals from the cell for its own use. The tailed smallpox particles look like comets or spermatozoa. They begin to twist and wriggle, and they corkscrew through the cell, propelled by their tails toward the cell’s outer membrane. You can see them with a microscope, thrashing with the same furious drive as sperm. They bump up against the inside of the cell membrane, and their heads make lumps, and the cell horripilates. Then something wonderful happens. Finger tubes begin to extend from the cell. The tubes grow longer. The cell turns into a Koosh ball. Inside each finger tube is a smallpox comet. The fingers lengthen until they touch and join nearby cells, and the smallpox comets squirm through the finger tubes into the next cell. The comets are protected from attack by the immune system, because they stay inside the finger tubes, where antibodies and killer white blood cells can’t reach them. Then the Koosh ball explodes. Out pour heaps of bricks that don’t have tails. These smallpox particles are wrapped in a special armor, like hand grenades. They float away, still protected by their armor, and they stick to other cells and go inside them, and those cells turn into Koosh balls. Each infected cell releases up to a hundred thousand virus particles, and they are added to the quadrillions of particles replicating in the universe of the ruined host.
Ljatif’s skin had become blackened, mottled, and silky to the touch, and sheets of small blood blisters may have peppered his face. In a case of black pox, variola shocks the immune system so that it can’t produce pus. Small blood vessels were leaking and breaking in his skin, and blood was seeping under the surface. His skin had developed large areas of continuous bruises.
On March 9th, the Belgrade doctors showed Ljatif to students and staff as a case that demonstrated an unusual reaction to penicillin. (In fact, a very bad reaction to penicillin can look like this.) Ljatif’s eyes may have turned dark red. In hemorrhagic smallpox, one or two large hemorrhages appear in each eye, in the white encircling the iris, making the eyes look as if they could sag or leak blood. The eyes never do leak, but the blood in the eyes darkens, until the whites can sometimes seem almost black.
During the day of March 10th, Ljatif suffered catastrophic hemorrhages into the intestines. His intestines filled up with blood, and he expelled quarts of it, staining the sheets black, and he developed grave anemia from blood loss. For some unknown reason, black-pox patients remain conscious, in a kind of paralyzed shock, and they seem acutely aware of what is happening nearly up to the point of death — “a peculiar state of apprehension and mental alertness that were said to be unlike the manifestations of any other infectious disease,” in the words of the Big Red Book of Smallpox. We can imagine that Ljatif was extremely frightened and witnessed his hemorrhages with a sense that his insides were coming apart. During the final phase of a smallpox intestinal bleedout, the lining of the intestines or the rectum can slip off. The lining is expelled through the anus, coming out in pieces or in lengths of tube. This bloody tissue is known as a tubular cast. When a smallpox patient throws a tubular cast, death is imminent. Al1 we know about Ljatif is that his bleeds were unstoppable, that he was rushed to the Surgical Clinic of the Belgrade hospital, and that he died in the evening. The duty physician listed the cause of death as a bad reaction to penicillin.
“These hemorrhagic smallpox cases put an incredible amount of virus into the air,” D. A. Henderson said. Some of the doctors and nurses who treated Ljatif were doomed. Indeed, Ljatif had seeded smallpox across Yugoslavia. Investigators later found that while he was in the hospital in Cacak he infected eight other patients and a nurse. The nurse died. One of the patients was a schoolboy, and he was sent home, where he broke with smallpox and infected his mother, and she died. In the Belgrade hospital, Ljatif infected twenty-seven more people, including seven nurses and doctors. Those victims infected five more people. Ljatif directly infected a total of thirty-eight people. They caught the virus by breathing the air near him. Eight of them died.
Meanwhile, the Pilgrim’s smallpox travelled in waves through Yugoslavia. A rising tide of smallpox typically comes in fourteen-day waves — a wave of cases, a lull down to zero, and then a much bigger wave, another lull down to zero, then a huge and terrifying wave. The waves reflect the incubation periods, or generations, of the virus. Each wave or generation is anywhere from ten to twenty times as large as the last, so the virus grows exponentially and explosively, gathering strength like some kind of biological tsunami. This is because each infected person infects an average of ten to twenty more people. By the end of March, 1972, more than a hundred and fifty cases had occurred.
The Pilgrim had long since recovered. He didn’t even know that he had started the outbreak. By then, however, Yugoslav doctors knew that they were dealing with smallpox, and they sent an urgent cable to the World Health Organization, asking for help.
Luckily, Yugoslavia had an authoritarian Communist government, under Josip Broz Tito, and he exercised full emergency powers. His government mobilized the Army and imposed strong measures to stop people from travelling and spreading the virus. Villages were closed by the Army, roadblocks were thrown up, public meetings were prohibited, and hotels and apartment buildings were made into quarantine wards to hold people who had had contact with smallpox cases. Ten thousand people were locked up in these buildings by the Yugoslav military. The daily life of the country came to a shocked halt. At the same time, all the countries surrounding Yugoslavia closed their borders with it, to prevent any travellers from coming out. Yugoslavia was cut off from the world. There were twenty-five foci of smallpox in the country. The virus had leapfrogged from town to town, even though the population had been heavily vaccinated. The Yugoslav authorities, helped by the W.H.O., began a massive campaign to revaccinate every person in Yugoslavia against smallpox; the population was twenty-one million. “They gave eighteen million doses in ten days,” D. A. Henderson said. A person’s immunity begins to grow immediately after the vaccination; it takes full effect within a week.
At the beginning of April, Henderson flew to Belgrade, where he found government officials in a state of deep alarm. The officials expected to see thousands of blistered, dying, contagious people streaming into hospitals any day. Henderson sat down with the Minister of Health and examined the statistics. He plotted the cases on a time line, and now he could see the generations of smallpox — one, two, three waves, each far larger than the previous one. Henderson had seen such waves appear many times before as smallpox rippled and amplified through human populations. Reading the viral surf with a practiced eye, he could see the start of the fourth wave. It was not climbing as steeply as he had expected. This meant that the waves had peaked. The outbreak was declining. Because of the military roadblocks, people weren’t travelling, and the government was vaccinating everyone as fast as possible. “The outbreak is near an end,” he declared to the Minister of Health. “I don’t think you’ll have more than ten additional cases.” There were about a dozen: Henderson was right — the fourth wave never really materialized. The outbreak had been started by one man with the shivers. It was ended by a military crackdown and vaccination for every citizen.
AT the present time, the United States’ national stockpile of smallpox vaccine is a collection of four cardboard boxes that sit on a single pallet behind a chain-link fence inside a walk-in freezer in a warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, near the Susquehanna River, at a facility owned by Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. The vaccine is slowly deteriorating. The Food and Drug Administration has put a hold on the smallpox vaccine, and right now no one can use it — not even emergency personnel or key government leaders.
The vaccine is owned by the federal government and is managed by Wyeth-Ayerst, which is the company that made it, twenty-five to thirty years ago. It is stored in glass vials. The vials contain freeze-dried nuggets of live vaccinia virus. Vaccinia is a mild virus. When you are infected with it by vaccination, it causes a pustule to appear, and afterward you are immune to smallpox for some years. People who have been vaccinated have a circular scar the size of a nickel on their upper arm, left by the vaccinia-virus pustule they had in childhood after vaccination. Some adults can remember how much the pustule hurt.
People from Wyeth periodically open the boxes and send some of the vials out for testing, to see how the vaccine is doing. The vials once held fifteen million good doses, but now moisture has invaded some of them. The nuggets are normally dry and white in color, but when moisture invades they turn brown and look sticky, and the vaccine may be weakened. The vaccine was made by a traditional method: the manufacturer had a farm where calves were raised. The calves’ bellies were scratched with vaccinia virus, and their bellies developed pustules. Then the calves were killed and hung up on hooks, the blood was drained out of them, and the pustules were scraped with a knife. The resulting pus was freeze-dried. The vaccine is dried calf pus. According to one virologist who examined it under a microscope, “It looks like nose snot. It’s all hair and wads of crap.” It was a good vaccine for its time, but the F.D.A. would never clear it for general use today except in a national emergency. Furthermore, some people have bad or fatal reactions to the vaccine. There is an antidote, but the supplies of it have turned strangely pink, and the F.D.A. has put a hold on the use of these supplies, too.
D. A. Henderson believes that in practice doctors could obtain about seven million doses of vaccine from the vials. Unaccountably, most of the vaccine has not recently been tested for potency, so it has not been absolutely proved to work. The experts believe that it would work, but there still isn’t enough.
Henderson explained the problem this way: “If there’s a bioterror event, and someone releases enough smallpox to create a hundred cases — let’s say in the Baltimore area — it would be a national emergency. The demand for vaccine would be beyond all belief.” In Yugoslavia in 1972, the outbreak was started by one man, and eighteen million doses of vaccine were needed — one for almost every person in the country.
“That first wave after the bioterror event could be a hundred people with smallpox,” Henderson said. “It takes two weeks after exposure before doctors can diagnose smallpox. Meanwhile, those hundred people will give smallpox to a thousand or two thousand people. That’s the second wave. Some of those first hundred people will go to other cities — to Washington, to New York, all over. So the second wave will include cases in other American cities, and probably in foreign countries. By then, it’ll be too late to treat them, and we’ll lose the second wave. We’ll be well into the third wave — ten to twenty thousand people with smallpox — before we can really start vaccinating people. By then, we’ll begin to pick up so many cases in the Baltimore area that we won’t be able to track cases, and we’ll just have to vaccinate everybody around Baltimore. A lot of people in Baltimore work in Washington. And so you’re going to have a whole lot of people in Washington with smallpox. You can see the deal. Immediately, you would have to vaccinate Washington.” Henderson thinks that a hundred million doses of vaccine would be needed in the United States alone to stop a surging outbreak triggered by a hundred initial cases of smallpox from a bioterror event. That much vaccine could be stored in the space occupied by a one-car garage.
Raindrops splattered on a wooden deck in Henderson’s garden, and the room grew dark, until it was a pool of shadows full of African masks. Henderson’s voice came out of the gloom. He didn’t bother to get up and turn on the lights. He said, “The way air travel is now, about six weeks would be enough time to seed cases around the world. Dropping an atomic bomb could cause casualties in a specific area, but dropping smallpox could engulf the world.”
Henderson passionately wants to get rid of the virus. “What we need to do is create a general moral climate where smallpox is considered too morally reprehensible to be used as a weapon. That would make the possession of smallpox in a laboratory, anywhere, effectively a crime against humanity. The likelihood that it would be used as a weapon is diminished by a global commitment to destroy it. How much it is diminished I don’t know. But it adds a level of safety.”
IN the late seventeen-hundreds, the English country doctor Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaids who had contracted cowpox from cows seemed to be protected from catching smallpox, and he thought he would do an experiment. Cowpox (it probably lives in rodents, and only occasionally infects cows) produced a mild disease. On May 14, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into the boy’s arm a droplet of cowpox pus that he’d taken from a blister on the hand of a dairy worker named Sarah Nelmes. A few months later, he scratched the boy’s arm with deadly pus he had taken from a smallpox patient, and the boy didn’t come down with smallpox. The boy had become immune. Jenner had discovered what he called vaccination, after the Latin word for cow. He saw the road to eradication clearly. In 1801, he wrote, “It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.”
A Soviet epidemiologist, Viktor Zhdanov, deserves credit for kick-starting the modern effort. At the 1958 annual meeting of the World Health Assembly, in Minneapolis, he called for the global eradication of smallpox. He spoke passionately and logically, but the scientific community was skeptical. Many biologists held a common view that it was impossible to separate a wild microorganism from the ecological web it lived in. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson endorsed the idea of smallpox eradication. It was a political move to help improve American-Soviet relations. D. A. Henderson was then the head of disease surveillance at the C.D.C. He was given an order to report to Geneva to head the W.H.O.’s new Smallpox Eradication Unit. He didn’t want the job, but he was told that if he didn’t take it he would have to resign from government service. He went to Geneva, where he formed a hand-picked team. “The World Health Assembly proposed a ten-year program, because Kennedy had said we could land a man on the moon in ten years,” he recalled.
The team set a goal of vaccinating eighty per cent of the population of countries that harbored smallpox. Henderson says that from the beginning they had another idea as well, and it proved to be the key. The idea was to track smallpox outbreaks and vaccinate people in a ring around any outbreak. This is known as surveillance and ring vaccination. In order to throw a ring around smallpox, they had to know where the demon was moving at all times, and they started showing villagers photographs of a baby with smallpox, so that the villagers could recognize and report cases to the authorities.
Henderson’s team needed a way of vaccinating people fast. They tried a machine called the Ped-o-Jet, which was operated by foot pedal. It could shoot jets of vaccine into the arms of thousands of people in a day, but it broke down. Then they tried a needle with two points. It was known as the bifurcated needle, and it looked like a tiny two-pronged fork. The points of the fork held a droplet of vaccine, and the needle was to be jabbed repeatedly into a person’s arm. It could be used by a volunteer who had no medical training.
They discovered that the virus rose and fell in seasonal waves, like flu. This led to an idea to attack the virus with a ring assault when it was at its ebb. The virus was a wild organism that lived only in humans. It needed to find and invade a susceptible human every fourteen days or it would die. If each outbreak of the virus could be surrounded by a ring of immune people during the virus’s low season, the virus would not be able to complete its fourteen-day life cycle. It would be cut off, unable to move to the next human host, and its chain of infection would be broken.
The ring had to be tight. If it developed a leak, smallpox would blow out. In January, 1975, smallpox blew out in Bangladesh, after the eradicators thought they were on the verge of stopping it everywhere in Asia. Variola major swept through more than five hundred towns and villages. Henderson began shuttling between Geneva and Bangladesh, and in April of that year, when things were still not under control, he visited the Infectious Disease Hospital in Dacca, the nation’s capital. He wanted to do rounds in a smallpox ward. “I went down the rows of beds,” he told me. There were seventy or eighty people, and half of them were dying. “There is nothing you can do for any of these patients. They were afraid to move. There were a lot of flies crawling all over the place. My God, they talk about the odor of smallpox. It is an odd smell, not like anything else.”
The skin gives off gases. “It’s a sickly odor, like rotting flesh, but it’s not decay, because the skin remains sealed and the pus isn’t leaking out,” Henderson said. “That smell is one of the mysteries of smallpox. No one knows what it is. I was with this British guy, Nick Ward, M.D. He had worked in Africa — he was a tough guy. At the end, he stood by a fence looking at the ground. Finally, he said to me, ‘I don’t know that I could go through another situation like that again.”‘
Nicholas Ward, who now lives in France, remembered that moment. “I’ve spent a fair amount of my life working with tropical diseases, and I can truly say there is nothing so awful as a case of smallpox, particularly the type where a person becomes a bloody mess,” he said. He knew the odor. “I would have a shrewd idea of a diagnosis after walking into a home. I could smell it.”
Henderson and his team mounted ring vaccinations across Bangladesh, and they traced cases and contacts, trying to surround the life form. Finally, in the fall of 1975, they cornered variola on an island off the coast of Bangladesh. It was a marshy, poor place called Bhola Island, and there, on October 16th, a three-year-old girl named Rahima Banu broke with the last case of naturally occurring Variola major anywhere on earth. She survived. Rahima Banu would be twenty-seven years old today; researchers have lost track of her. Doctors from the Smallpox Eradication Unit collected six of the girl’s pustules after they had dried into scabs, peeling them off her skin gently, with tweezers. Two years later, on October 26, 1977, the last natural case of the mild type of smallpox, Variola minor, popped up in a cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin. He survived, and the last ring tightened around variola, and its life cycle stopped.
THE headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, is a jumble of old and new buildings, joined by elevated walkways, which give the place the feel of a maze. The buildings sit along Clifton Road, an artery that winds through green neighborhoods in the northeastern part of Atlanta. I arrived at the C.D.C. On a perfect day in spring. Changeable clouds marched across a deep sky, and oak trees were shedding green flowers. Across the street from the entrance, a blue jay screamed in a pine tree, and the branches glittered in the sun, throwing off a scent of pitch.
Joseph J. Esposito, Ph.D., who is the chief of the C.D.C.’s Poxvirus Section, led me along an outdoor walkway toward his laboratory and office. Esposito is a stocky man of moderate height, in his mid-fifties, who runs to keep his weight down, and he has a dark beard and wears eyeglasses over brown eyes that are perceptive and serious. I asked him if we could get closer to smallpox. We passed along an aerial walkway covered with a chain-link fence, and we turned onto another walkway. We stopped and leaned on a railing. We were facing the C.D.C.’s Level 4 biocontainment building. It contains the Level 4 hot suites-labs where researchers work with lethal viruses while wearing pressurized spacesuits. The building has a line of windows tinted blue-green, like fish tanks. “The variola is in there somewhere,”Joe Esposito said, offering me a grave smile and nodding at the Level 4 building. “There is a kind of electricity in the air when we’re working with smallpox. Everybody around here always seems to know — ‘Joe’s got the smallpox out of the freezer.’ “
The smallpox freezer may be encircled by alarms and motion detectors. It may or may not be wrapped in chains. It may be a stainless-steel cylinder. Or it may be a white box intended to look like any other freezer. Officials at the C.D.C. won’t comment.
Inside the freezer, the entire collection of smallpox occupies a volume slightly larger than that of a basketball. It consists of approximately four hundred little plastic vials the size of pencil stubs, the residue of D. A. Henderson’s war with variola. They’re an inch long and they have plastic screw caps. They sit in seven little white cardboard boxes, in a rack inside the freezer, which keeps the virus not strictly alive, not exactly dead, but potent. Most of the vials contain milky ice or bloody ice. The virus has been cultured in flasks of live cells (milky ice) or in live chicken eggs (live eggs have a blood system). Around twenty-five of the vials contain human scabs-dried smallpox pustules. The scabs look like pencil erasers.
The six scabs that were collected from the girl in Bangladesh named Rahima Banu used to sit in a vial, but recently Esposito’s group used the last of her scabs for research. The strain that came out of her scabs is known as Bangladesh 1975 — or, informally, as the Rahima. Now that the scabs are gone, the Rahima exists in vials of milky ice.
Esposito sat hunched in his chair in front of his computer. His office is a windowless room with cinder-block walls. A troll with Shocking-pink hair stood on top of the computer, staring at him wide-eyed. “I like to think like a virus,” Esposito said. “If you can think like a virus, then you can begin to understand why a virus does what it does. A smallpox particle gets into a person’s body and, in a way, it’s thinking, I’m this one particle sitting here surrounded by an angry immune system. I have to multiply fast. Then I have to get out of this host fast. It escapes into the air before the pustules develop.” By the time the host feels sick, the virus has already moved on to its next host. The previous host has become a cast-off husk (and is now becoming saturated with virus), but whether the person lives or dies no longer matters to the virus. However, the dried scabs, when they fall off, contain live virus. The scabs are the virus’s seeds. They preserve it for a long time, just in case it hasn’t managed to reach a host in the air. The scabs give the virus a second chance.
POXVIRUSES move easily through the animal kingdom. Along with herds of animals or swarms of insects come poxviruses circulating among them like pickpockets at a fair. Esposito once classified what he and other virologists have glimpsed of the poxviruses in nature. He noted monkeypox, swinepox, buffalopox, skunkpox, raccoonpox, gerbilpox, a few deerpoxes, a sealpox, turkeypox, canarypox, pigeonpox, starlingpox, peacockpox, dolphinpox, Nile crocodilepox, penguinpox, two kangaroopoxes, and a quokkapox. (The quokka is an Australian wallaby.) Any attempt to get to the bottom of the butterflypoxes, mothpoxes, and beetlepoxes would be something like enumerating the nine billion names of God.
A caterpillar that has caught an insectpox dissolves into a liquefaction of insect guts mixed with pure crystals of poxvirus. This is known as a virus melt. The melt pours out of the dead caterpillar, and other caterpillars come along and accidentally eat the crystals lying on a leaf, and they melt, and so it goes for millions of years in the happy life of an insectpox. “It is a good thing no person has been known to catch an insectpox,” Esposito remarked. (You might avoid eating melted caterpillars.) The yellow-fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, suffers from a fatal mosquitopox. At least two midgepoxes torment midges. Grasshoppers are known to get at least six poxes. If a grasshopperpox breaks out in a swarm of African Locusts, it can wipe them out with a plague.
Viruses have an ability to move from one type of host to another in what is known as a trans-species jump. The virus changes during the course of a jump, adapting to its new host. The trans-species jump is the virus’s most important means of long-term survival. Species go extinct; viruses move on. There is something impressive in the trans-species jump of a virus, like an unfurling of wings or a flash of stripes when a predator makes a rush. Some fifty years ago, in central Africa, the AIDS virus apparently moved out of chimpanzees into people. Chimpanzees are now endangered, while the AIDS virus is booming.
For most of human prehistory, people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. The poxviruses did not deign to notice Homo sapiens as long as the species consisted of scattered groups; there was no percentage in it for a pox. With the growth of agriculture, the human population of the earth swelled and became more tightly packed. Villages became towns and cities, and people were crowded together in river valleys.
Epidemiologists have done some mathematics on the spread of smallpox, and they find that the virus needs a population of about two hundred thousand people living within a fourteen-day travel time from one another or the virus can’t keep its life cycle going, and it dies out. Those conditions didn’t occur in history until the appearance of settled agricultural areas and cities. At that point — roughly seven thousand years ago — the human species became an accident with a poxvirus waiting to happen.
Smallpox could be described as the first urban virus. It is thought to have made a trans-species jump into humans in one of the early agricultural river valleys — perhaps in the Nile Valley, or in Mesopotamia, or in the Indus River Valley. In the Cairo Museum, the mummy of the Pharaoh Ramses V, who died as a young man in 1157 B.C., is speckled with yellow blisters from face to scrotum.
In 1991, Joe Esposito and the molecular biologist Craig Venter, who was at the National Institutes of Health, sequenced the entire genome of the Rahima strain of smallpox; that is, they mapped all its DNA. They found that the virus contains a hundred and eighty-six thousand base pairs of DNA (each base pair being a step on the ladder of the molecule), and that the DNA contains about a hundred and eighty-seven genes-making smallpox one of the most complicated viruses known. (The AIDS virus has only ten genes.) A gene is a piece of DNA, which contains the recipe for making one protein. Esposito’s team noticed that smallpox has a gene that is also found in the placenta of a mouse. Smallpox knows how to make a mouse protein. How did smallpox learn that? “The poxviruses are promiscuous at capturing genes from their hosts,” Esposito said. “It tells you that smallpox was once inside a mouse or some other small rodent.” D. A. Henderson speculates that the original host of smallpox may have been an African rodent that lived in a crescent of green forests along the southern Nile River. The forests disappeared, cut down by people, and possibly the rodent has gone extinct. This is only a guess. Smallpox moved on.
THE principal American biodefense laboratory is the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, in Fort Detrick, Maryland — an Army base that nestles against the eastern front of the Appalachian Mountains in the city of Frederick, an hour’s drive northwest of Washington. There is no smallpox at USAMRIID, for only the two W.H.O. repositories are allowed to have it. The principal scientific adviser at USAMRIID is Peter Jahrling, a civilian in his fifties with gray-blond hair, PhotoGray glasses, and a craggy face. Jahrling was the primary scientist during the 1989 outbreak of Ebola virus in Reston, Virginia: he discovered and named the Ebola-Reston virus.
“I don’t think there is any higher biological threat to this nation than smallpox,” Jahrling said to me, in his office, a windowless retreat jammed with paper. His voice was croaking. “I was over in Geneva for a meeting on smallpox, and I came back with some flu strain,” he said hoarsely. The flu strain had swept through the world’s smallpox experts. “Shows how fast a virus can move. If we have some kind of bioterror emergency with smallpox, there will be no time to start stroking our beards. We’d better have vaccine pre-positioned on pallets and ready to go.”
Jahrling opposes the destruction of the official stocks of smallpox. “If you really believe there’s a bioterrorist threat out there, then you can’t get rid of smallpox,” he said. “If smallpox is outlawed, only outlaws will have smallpox.” His group has been testing antiviral drugs that might work on smallpox, and he feels that in order to verify the effectiveness of a new drug it would be necessary to test it on live smallpox virus.
One of Jahrling’s researchers, John Huggins, led me into the central areas of USAMRIID. Huggins is a chunky man with round Fiorucci eyeglasses. He turned into a corridor leading to the Level 4 spacesuit hot suites, or hot zones. The walls were cinder block, and the light turned bile green. A smoky reek drifted in the corridors, coming from huge autoclaves — pressure cookers — where contaminated equipment and waste were being heated and sterilized after being brought out of a hot zone. We stopped at a door that had a window of thick glass, looking into hot suite AA5, the Ebola hot zone.
I pressed my nose against the glass. It was cool, and there was a faint rumble of blowers, keeping the zone at negative pressure, so that no contaminated air would flow out through cracks. The suite was dark and drowned in shadows, illuminated only by light coming from lab equipment. I could see no one in there but white mice in racks of plastic boxes. They were scribble-scrabbling in pine shavings.
“These mice are all infected with Ebola,” Huggins said. “They bleed when they die. Like humans.”
The mice looked fine. I couldn’t see any blood in the shavings.
“We’re giving them an antiviral drug that saves their lives,” Huggins explained. “They’re kind of perky. It’s called an S.A.H. drug. It’s not ready for human testing. It could work in humans, but we don’t know.”
In 1995, Huggins spent time in a spacesuit at the C.D.C. Level 4 lab in Atlanta, testing drugs on live smallpox. He found that a drug called cidofovir can block smallpox replication. Cidofovir, which is normally used against a virus that infects AIDS patients, has drawbacks. It must be given to people by I.V. drip, and there is some concern that it might damage the kidneys. Huggins and Jahrling believe that within five years better smallpox drugs are likely to be discovered. They say they will need to test the drugs directly on the virus. They add that the drug must be tested on the live virus in order to receive F.D.A. approval.
In March, a committee of the highly respected Institute of Medicine, in Washington, D.C., concluded that one of the main reasons for retaining live smallpox virus would be to help develop drugs against it. D. A. Henderson, who was not a member of the Institute of Medicine committee and thoroughly disagrees with its conclusions, thought that Jahrling was being too optimistic. “To get a new antiviral drug against smallpox is going to cost three hundred million dollars,” he said. “The money simply isn’t there.”
Jahrling stood his ground. “Ceremonial destruction of smallpox is the crown jewel in D. A. Henderson’s career,” he said. “He would like to throw the lever on smallpox himself. If I had spent my life tramping the planet to eradicate the virus, I would want to throw the lever, too. What he did was a great accomplishment, but he has become blinded by the last glittering crown jewel of total eradication.”
KEN ALIBEK, who was once Kanatjan Alibekov, a leading Soviet bioweaponeer and the inventor of the world’s most powerful anthrax, shocked the American intelligence community when he defected, in 1992, and revealed how far the Soviet Union had gone with bioweapons. In a new book of his, entitled “Biohazard,” Alibek says that there were twenty tons of liquid smallpox kept on hand at Soviet military bases; it was kept ready for loading on biowarheads on missiles targeted on American cities. I contacted certain government sources and asked them if there was any evidence to corroborate Alibek’s claims.
One person who asked not to be named said, “I really have to be careful what I say. Yeah, Alibek’s claims have been corroborated in multiple ways. There’s not a lot of evidence. There’s some.”
Another person who asked not to be named said that the Soviet Union had put the biowarheads on ICBM missiles and test launched them sometime before 1991 over the Pacific Ocean. The United States — probably using spy satellites that orbited near the tests — was able to monitor the missiles as they soared into space and then punched back through the atmosphere and landed in the sea. The warheads were spinning weirdly: they were unusually heavy, and they had a strange shape. The warhead was heavy because it had an active refrigeration system to keep its temperature near or below the boiling temperature of water during reentry. Nuclear warheads don’t need to be actively cooled. Why would a warhead need to be cooled? Presumably, because it was designed to contain something alive. But what? The person said, “The warhead was built to carry a very small quantity of biological weapon. Anthrax wouldn’t have worked too well, because you need to put a lot of anthrax in the air to kill people, and anthrax isn’t contagious. With smallpox, you don’t need much. If you use smallpox, you get around the most difficult technical problem of bioweapons — the problem of dissemination. With smallpox, you use people as disseminators.”
In 1989, a Soviet biologist named Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain. British intelligence agents spent a year debriefing him in a safe house. By the end, the British agents felt they had confirmed that the U.S.S.R. had biological missiles aimed at the United States. This information reached President George Bush and the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs. Thatcher then apparently telephoned the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and sternly confronted him. She was furious, and so was Bush. Gorbachev responded by allowing a small, secret team of American and British biological-weapons inspectors to tour Soviet biowarfare facilities. In January of 1991, the inspectors travelled across the U.S.S.R., getting whirlwind looks at some of the major clandestine bases of the Soviet biowarfare program, which was called Biopreparat. The inspectors were frightened by what they discovered. (“I would describe it as scary, and I feel a responsibility to tell the world medical community about what I saw, because doctors could face these diseases,” an inspector, Frank Malinoski, M.D., Ph.D., said to me.) On January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the main virology complex, in Siberia, and the next day, after being treated to vodka and piles of caviar, they were shown into a laboratory called Building 6, where one of the inspectors, David Kelly, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they had been working with. The technician said that they had been working with smallpox. Kelly repeated the question three times. Three times, he asked the technician, “You mean you were working with Variola major?” and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically that it was Variola major. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter the British government has. “There was no ambiguity,” Kelly says.
The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be working with it. All the Russian smallpox stocks were supposed to be kept in one freezer in Moscow, which was supposed to be under the control of the World Health Organization. For Vector to have smallpox would be a supreme violation of rules set down by the W.H.O.
Then they went upstairs into Building 6, and entered a long corridor. On one side was a line of glass windows looking in on a giant airtight steel chamber of a type known as a dynamic aerosol test chamber. The device is for testing bioweapons. Small explosives are detonated inside the chamber, throwing a biological agent into the air of the chamber. The chamber in Building 6 had an octopus-like structure of tubes coming out of it where sensors could be attached or monkeys could be clamped with their faces exposed to the chamber’s air. An airborne bioweapon would get into the sensors or into the animals’ lungs. On the other side of the corridor was a room that Frank Malinoski said “looked like a NASA control room,” and video cameras provided views inside the chamber, so that Vector scientists could watch the release of a bioweapon.
Vector scientists later told the inspectors that the chamber was a Model UKZD-25-a bioweapons explosion-test chamber. It was the largest and most sophisticated modern bioweapons test chamber that has ever been found by inspectors in any country. It was used for testing smallpox.
The inspectors asked to put on spacesuits and to go inside. (They had brought along Q-Tip-like swab kits: they would have liked to swab the inner walls of the chamber, in the hope of collecting a virus.) The Russians refused. “They said our vaccines might not protect us,” Malinoski says. “It suggested that they had developed viruses that were resistant to American vaccines.” The Russians ordered the inspectors to leave Building 6.
At a large gathering that evening, three inspectors — David Kelly, Frank Malinoski, and Christopher Davis — publicly confronted the head of Vector, a virologist named Lev Sandakhchiev, about Vector’s smallpox. (His name is pronounced “Sun-dock-chev.”) He back-pedalled angrily. Davis, a medical doctor with a Ph.D. who was then with British intelligence, now recalls, “Lev is gnome-like, a short man with a wizened, weather-beaten, lined face, and black hair. He’s very bright and capable, a tough individual, full of bonhomie, but he can be very nasty when he is upset.” Sandakhchiev heatedly insisted that his technician had misspoken. He called on his deputy, Sergei Netesov, to support him. The two Vector leaders insisted that there had been no work with smallpox at Vector. They had been doing genetic engineering with smallpox genes, they said, but Vector didn’t have any live smallpox, only the virus’s DNA — and the more they spoke the murkier their statements seemed. David Kelly remembers, “They were both lying, and it was a very, very tense moment. It seemed like an eternity, but it only lasted about fifteen minutes. And then there were so many other aspects of Vector we had to explore.”
“The brazenness of these people!” one inspector later fumed. “They had been testing smallpox in their explosion chamber the week before we arrived.”
Lev Sandakhchiev is still the head of Vector. He declined to be interviewed for this account but has steadfastly maintained that no offensive bioweapons research occurs now at Vector. In January of this year, at the Geneva meeting of smallpox experts, Sandakhchiev delivered a paper (and may have caught their flu). In his paper he claimed that Vector did not have any smallpox until 1994, when, he said, Vector had obtained it legally from Moscow. D. A. Henderson was also at that meeting. “It was quite elaborate and quite unbelievable,” Henderson said. “I rolled my eyes, and saw other people rolling their eyes at me. We’re sitting there, he’s presenting us with all this horseshit, and he knows it’s horseshit. Sandakhchiev is lying flagrantly.”
Four sources have suggested to me that Lev Sandakhchiev was in charge of a Vector research group that in 1990 devised a more efficient way to grow weapons-grade smallpox in industrial-scale pharmaceutical tanks known as bioreactors. The Vector smallpox bioreactors had a capacity of six hundred and thirty litres — virus tanks big enough for a microbrewery. Once the Vector scientists had worked out the details of variola manufacturing, the results were written up in master production protocols — recipe books — and these protocols ended up at the Russian Ministry of Defense, in Moscow. At the time, weapons-grade smallpox was being manufactured by two older methods at a top-secret virus-munitions production plant near the city of Sergiyev Posad, forty-five miles northeast of Moscow. At another virus-munitions plant, near Pokrov, about two hundred miles southeast of Moscow, military virus-production specialists converted the plant to the new Vector method of making smallpox in the large virus bioreactors, but apparently never started the reaction. When one considers that a single person infected with smallpox would be considered a global medical emergency, this is rather a lot of smallpox activity to have bubbling near Moscow. It means that live smallpox virus and the protocols for how to mass-produce it had spread to various places in Russia by the nineteen-nineties. Indeed, live smallpox could be bubbling in reactors now at Sergiyev Posad-no one in the United States government admits to having a clue, and no Russian journalists have seen the place. Peter Jahrling said, “I really think that Vector is out of the offensive BW [biowarfare] business. But Sergiyev Posad is the black hole. We have no contacts there, and the Russians won’t allow us to visit the place.”
These days, Lev Sandakhchiev has cordial relationships with Peter Jahrling and Joe Esposito. They are eager to draw their colleague into the circle of open international science. During their visits to Siberia, Sandakhchiev has come across to them as warm and human, and desperate for research money to support his institute. Sometimes, candid remarks slip out from the Russians. Jahrling put it this way: “There were tons of smallpox virus made in the Soviet Union. We know that. The Russians have admitted that to us. I was in a room with one of the Vector leaders when he said to us, ‘Listen, we didn’t account for every ampule of the virus. We had large quantities of it on hand. There were plenty of opportunities for staff members to walk away with an ampule. Although we think we know where our formerly employed scientists are, we can’t account for all of them-we don’t know where all of them are.’ ” Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world. A master seed strain of smallpox could be carried in a person’s pocket. The seed itself could be a freeze-dried lump of virus the size of a jimmy on an ice-cream cone.
While I was sitting with D. A. Henderson in his house, I mentioned what seemed to me the great and tragic paradox of his life’s work. The eradication caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into a weapon rivalling the hydrogen bomb.
Henderson responded with silence, and then he said, thoughtfully, “I feel very sad about this. The eradication never would have succeeded without the Russians. Viktor Zhdanov started it, and they did so much. They were extremely proud of what they had done. I felt the virus was in good hands with the Russians. I never would have suspected. They made twenty tons — twenty tons — of smallpox. For us to have come so far with the disease, and now to have to deal with this human creation, when there are so many other problems in the world . . .” He was quiet again. “It’s a great letdown,” he said.
For years, the scientific community generally thought that biological weapons weren’t effective as weapons, especially because it was thought that they’re difficult to disperse in the air. This view persists, and one reason is that biologists know little or nothing about aerosol-particle technology. The silicon-chip industry is full of machines that can spread particles in the air. To learn more, I called a leading epidemiologist and bioterrorism expert, Michael Osterholm, who has been poking around companies and labs where these devices are invented. “I have a device the size of a credit card sitting on my desk,” he said. “It makes an invisible mist of particles in the one-to-five-micron size range — that size hangs in the air for hours, and gets into the lungs. You can run it on a camcorder battery. If you load it with two tablespoons of infectious fluid, it could fill a whole airport terminal with particles.” Osterholm speculated that the device could create thousands of smallpox cases in the first wave. He feels that D. A. Henderson’s estimate of how fast smallpox could balloon nationally is conservative. “D.A. is looking at Yugoslavia, where the population in 1972 had a lot of protective immunity,” he said. “Those immune people are like control rods in a nuclear reactor. The American population has little immunity, so it’s a reactor with no control rods. We could have an uncontrolled smallpox chain reaction.” This would be something that terrorism experts refer to as a “soft kill” of the United States of America.
The idea that a biological credit card could execute a soft kill of the United States has reached the White House. The chief terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, has sent word through the federal government that getting national stockpiles of smallpox vaccine is a top priority.
The effort started four years ago. So far, the government has little to show except numerous meetings among agencies, with no hope of vaccine anytime soon. The Department of Defense has put all its vaccine efforts into something called the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program, which is run by the Joint Program Office for Biological Defense. People inside the military don’t want their names used when they talk about the Pentagon’s efforts. “It’s a fucking disaster,” said one knowledgeable military officer who has had direct experience in the matter. Last year, the Pentagon hired a systems contractor called Dynport, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, to develop and make a number of different vaccines for troops. The smallpox-vaccine contract calls for three hundred thousand doses, at a cost of $22.4 million, or seventy-five dollars a dose, with delivery now scheduled for 2006. (The date has been pushed back at least once already.) This amount of vaccine could be made in about fifteen flasks the size of soda bottles. There are 2.3 million people in the armed forces, and they have several million more dependents. “Three hundred thousand doses is not enough vaccine to protect anyone — not even our troops. It totally ignores the fact that smallpox is contagious,” one military man said. “These guys ought to be buying tank treads and belt buckles. They know nothing about vaccines.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (H.H.S.) has been given the responsibility by the White House for producing a stockpile of smallpox vaccine large enough to protect the American civilian population in case of a bioterror event; originally, the idea was for H.H.S. to consider hiring the military’s contractor, Dynport, to make forty million extra doses, in addition to the three hundred thousand that Dynport was making for the Pentagon. (Any such initiative would require competitive bidding.)
At a series of meetings at H.H.S., a top Dynport executive said that forty million doses could be quite expensive. One scientist asked if a group of knowledgeable people could be drawn together to come up with an estimate of costs. The Dynport man answered, “Yes, we can do a study that will list the questions that need to be asked. It will cost two hundred and forty thousand dollars and will take six weeks.”
Somebody then asked how much it would cost to answer the questions. The Dynport official responded, “That will be a different study. That study will cost two million dollars and will take six months.”
With that, one scientist at the meeting burst out, “This is horseshit! We’re asking an encyclopedia salesman if we need an encyclopedia!”
The C.E.O. of Dynport, Stephen Prior, said that the situation is more complicated:”The civilian population is very different from the military. There’s an age spread from newborns to the elderly, there’s more compromised immunity, with AIDS, chemotherapy, and organ transplants. And possibly thirty-five per cent of people have never been vaccinated. So it’s not just scaling up the manufacturing.”
Another knowledgeable observer is the retired Army General Philip K. Russell, M.D., who gave the order to send biohazard troops into Reston in 1989 to deal with a building full of monkeys infected with Ebola. Russell said to me, “Many of us are afraid that Dynport won’t deliver the goods without wasting an inordinate amount of money.”
However, H.H.S. has quietly opened talks with other potential contractors, preparing to solicit bids to make a civilian stockpile of smallpox vaccine, though there has been no announcement. “The effort at H.H.S. still isn’t organized,” D. A. Henderson said. General Russell said, “If smallpox really got going, people should be most concerned about a lack of effective leadership on the part of their government.”
I WANTED to get closer to smallpox virus. In Joe Esposito’s lab, at the Centers for Disease Control, there was a test going of a biosensor device for detecting smallpox. It was a machine in a black suitcase. It could detect a bioweapon using; the process called the polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R. — the same kind of molecular fingerprinting that police use to identify the DNA of a crime suspect. The suitcase thing was called a Cepheid Briefcase Smart Cycler, and it had been co-invented by M. Allen Northrup, a biomedical engineer who founded a company to make and sell biosensors. He was there, along with a cluster of other scientists.
Esposito, the official guardian of one half of the world’s official supply of smallpox, handed a box of tubes to a scientist in the room. Two of the tubes contained the whole DNA of smallpox virus but not live smallpox. The DNA drifted in a drop of water; it was the Rahima strain. Two other tubes contained anthrax. The samples were snapped into slots in the machine.
Northrup turned his attention to a laptop computer that nestled in the machine. Northrup is a chunky man with a mustache and reddish-brown hair. He tapped on the keys.
We waited around, chatting. Meanwhile, the Cepheid was working silently. It showed colored lines on its screen. In fifteen minutes, the anthrax lines started going straight up, and someone said, “The anthrax is screaming.” Finally, one of the smallpox lines crept upward, slowly. “That’s a positive for smallpox, not so bad,” a scientist said. Emergency-response teams could carry a Cepheid suitcase to the scene of a bioterror event and begin testing people immediately for anthrax or smallpox. The machine is priced at sixty thousand dollars.
Afterward, Joe Esposito went around collecting the used tubes. The smallpox-sample holder — a plastic thing the size of a thumbnail-had been left on a counter. I picked it up.
Esposito wasn’t about to let anyone walk off with smallpox. “Leave me that tube,” he said. “You are not allowed to have more than twenty per cent of the DNA.”
Before I handed it to him, I glanced at a little window in the tube. When I held it up to the light, the liquid looked like clear water. The water contained the whole molecules of life from variola, a parasite that had colonized us thousands of years ago. We had almost freed ourselves of it, but we found we had developed a strong affinity for smallpox. Some of us had made it into a weapon, and now we couldn’t get rid of it. I wondered if we ever would, for the story of our entanglement with smallpox is not yet ended.
The Reptilian Aliens which are called Reptoids are proportional in size to modern humans. They have a snake like or lizard appearance. These are highly advanced entities but viewed as being of a negative, hostile or dangerous disposition since they regard humans as a totally inferior race. They would perceive us much the way we would perceive a herd of cattle. The information about these creatures varies from source to source. Supposedly they consider Earth their ancient outpost and want to have complete control over it because their planet is becoming unable to adequately support life.
The so-called “Reptilians”, or “Reptoids”, is noted that there is no implication in these descriptors other than of intelligent, communicative persons. What distinguishes these “Reptilian” extraterrestrials is their skin, which has small, fine scales, rather than smooth, their face, which has larger-than- human yellowish-green eyes with a “starburst”-shaped pupil, the eyes often oval, and an almost snout-like blunt process in the area of the nose and mouth, giving this type an almost dragon-like humanoid appearance.
Another group of extraterrestrials for convenience, I call the “Jawas“, after their resemblance to the creatures in the film, Star Wars. This group is distinguished by their clothing. They wear hoods and robes, are generally short (three to four-and-a-half feet tall), and their faces are concealed by the shadows thrown by their hoods. Sometimes there is a much taller hooded and robed one on board the UFO, who often stands to the Experiencer’s left as s/he lies on the ET medical examining table.
This Tall One appears to direct the procedures, and often is the one who telepathically communicates with the Experiencer. A few Experiencers have noted glowing eyes under the “Jawas'” hoods.
Other Experiencers have reported that when they got a glimpse of the Being whose face was shadowed by the hood, it was a type of “Gray”. Still others saw neither glowing eyes nor “Grays” under the hoods, but rather never could distinguish the features in the shadows of the hoods. There are often mixed- race crews on the UFO’s. In such cases there could be “Jawas” or “Praying Mantis” types or “Reptoids” or “Grays”, joining in a coordinated effort in carrying out scientific or medical tasks.
A few Experiencers have noted robot-like figures, whose movements and “vibes” (or rather lack thereof) strongly suggest that these are robots sent remotely by the extraterrestrials to observe, reconnoiter, and possibly retrieve objects. The robot-like figures appear to be relegated to the more impersonal tasks of information – gathering and stealthy surveillance, without the risk to the extraterrestrials that they would otherwise run of possibly encountering hostile human responses.
Upon closer looking, the experiencer was able to see the actual nonhuman face of the extraterrestrial behind the mentally-imposed “human” mask. Extraterrestrials are capable of producing ‘screen memories’ and what the abductee sees is not necessarily what is the true version of what has been seen.
Few races today have actually remained as pure genetic stock, with the exception of two races that the Andromedans say are really genetically clean. That is the Reptilians from Alpha Draconis, and the other is what we call, or know as the Elohim, which are a very ancient race of humans that survived Lyra. All other races are a varied degree of hybrid or mixture of races of different genetic stock.
DRACO MOTHMEN In the constellation of Draco, there is another race of entities which has in the past visited Earth. They are 8-foot-tall. dark, nocturnal aliens who appeared around graveyards and parks. They have red eyes that glow in the dark and wings to fly. They are referred to by us as Mothmen. They are also the source of legends of the past relating to gargoyles and Valkeries. Even some qualities of vampires have been taken from the qualities of this creature — the ability to fly and nocturnal habits. The Mothmen have no particular influence on earth at this time other than as causing panic and a cause for curiosity. They are mostly hidden underground and do not wish to attract attention
RELIGIOUS CONNECTIONS
The Vedas divide the beings of the Universe into 3 basic classifications:
The Buttahs:
Being that dwells in spiritual darkness. The person may be intellectually developed. The Buttah are normally associated with nightmares, abductions and the taking of small children. They usually come around at night. The Grey aliens who do abductions falls into this category. The Reptilians are also part of this group. They are usually not very physically attractive. Apparently long ago there was a visitation long ago by Buttahs called Wacshashas who were negative, powerful, aggressive beings.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE REPTILIANS AND THE GREYS
The most common encounter between Humans and Aliens appears to be with the beings called Greys. They are said to be about four feet tall and get their name from the color of their skin. They look insectoid in nature with large heads and large black eyes. They have limited facial features including a dot of a nose with a slit type mouth. They have no visible reproductive organs. It is reported that they are subservient to the Reptilians and appear to be a worker-technician class. Some people relate that they are cruel, others state that they appear benevolent
In addition, they are supposedly here to ready us for our next step. The problem is that what the next step is, varies from one source to another. Some say that they are here to infuse new life in their dying species through genetic manipulation with human DNA. Others say that they are here as a scouting type party for a full scale invasion from the Reptilians. Another opinion is that they are here to help humans move to the next step of our evolutionary process.
According to the Andromedans, the Greys are training us to fight their war against the Draconians (One of their masters) when they get here, because they are going to use us as their soldiers. Just like when our military sends in the infantry and marines, those implanted will be the first ones on the beach. While the Greys sitting back on board their ships, and wondering how the battle is going. they have chosen our world to be the battle ground.
At the same time they are still going about preparing the earth for its new owners. Apparently, the Greys are going to make this attempt, but the inevitable truth is that the Reptilians from Alpha Draconis are on their way here now. And this has very serious implications for us. We have boxed ourselves into a corner and the only way we can change the outcome is that we have to consciously become aware of what our world is really about, what’s really going on here.
WHAT IS THE PERCENTAGE OF ABDUCTIONS?
According to Britain’s highly respected UFO abduction researcher and retired police officer, Anthony Dodd, reports of Grays comprise about 75-80% of alleged encounters while Nordics, Reptilians and Praying Mantis types round out the other 20-25%
THE REPTILIANS VS THE RENEGADE MILITARY
The renegade military-intelligence units deliberately intimidate, physically abuse, and even gang-rape the civilians they kidnap. The extraterrestrials do not. (Although the psychological warfare division of the rengegade military-intelligence units, and their dupes who swallow their progaganda, put out lurid false stories in UFO magazines, books and internet newsgrpuos about “raping reptilians” and other sci-fi comic book fantasies.)
WHERE DO THE REPTILIANS LIVE?
CALIFORNIA
NEW YORK CITY – may prove that giant cavities exist in granite at depths of more than 11 miles, conclusions which have also been supported by Louis V. King, a mathematician who calculated that, at normal temperatures, a cavity would exist at a depth of between 17.2 and 20.9 miles. R. L. Blain-Sanders, in an article titled ‘TUNNELS AND CAVERNS BENEATH NEW YORK CITY,’ which appeared in the Fall, 1981 issue of SHAVERTRON, described the author’s knowledge of a large triangular system of tunnels utilized by a ‘Masonic lodge’, deep below the surface of New York City. There is in fact evidence that Dorr did dynamite shut the lower level of ‘Kin Sabe’ cave in Kokoweef Peak, and there are present-day attempts to break through into this underground system.
ASIA – AGHARIANS – (or Aghartians) -A group of Asiatic or Nordic humans who, sources claim, discovered a vast system of caverns below the region of the Gobi desert and surrounding areas thousands of years ago, and have since established a thriving kingdom within, one which has been interacting with other-planetary systems up until current times. Vast cavern systems below Tibet allegedly link the Agharti systems of central Asia to “Snakeworld”, a multileveled cavern system under the southwestern slopes of the Himalayas where the “Nagas” dwell, according to Hindu legend. Here a serpent cult of human and reptilian collaborators dwells, one which is said to have had contact with the Nazi Thule society during World War II. Long ago an Asian prince is said to have led several militant followers — warrior monks — into the caves and came in conflict with this serpent cult. Following the conflict the reptilians and collaborating forces were driven out, however in recent centuries they have regained some ground (Evadamic).
A PREDICTION FOR THE FUTURE FROM THE HOUSE OF DAVID
Between now and 2007 AD, our planet will have a 70 degree pole shift. Saudia Arabia will become the new North Pole. In the next 10 years, these are the changes we’ll be witness to:
1. We will all become telepathic.
2. The Andromedan Council has ordered all extraterrestrial presences on the planet, in the planet, and on the moon to be completely out of our space. They want everything that’s ET, benevolent or not, off the planet. This will be very interesting since there are over 1,833 reptilians living in our planet and over 18,000 grays living underground and on the moon. The council would like to see how we will live with each other when we are not being manipulated by ETs, as we have been for the last 5,723 years.
I view demons as being hurtful thoughts or simply the
“mis-thinking mind” of a person, whether on this side of the grave or the other. For the state of
mind is the person and where they are living – for some it is hell. For those who wish to see a historic rundown of demon names, however, the following is a list of demon names & rank of the various demons of the underworld as classically taught. – LC
Abaddon : Hebrew root meaning “to destroy”, same as Apollyon
Apollyon (Abaddon) : The King of Demons Rev 9:11
Abigor : Christian demonology – commands 60 legions
Adramelech: Arch Demon whose name means, “King of Fire”
Agares : First Duke of the East, commands 31 legions; appears willingly
Alocer : Strong Duke commands 36 legions; lion’s face, dressed as a knight on a horse
Amduscius : Great Duke, governs 29 legions; looks like a unicorn
Andras : Marquesse, commands 30 legions; bird head with angel-like wings
Asmoday : Prince of demons; thought to be the serpent that deceived Eve
Asmodeus : Demon of wrath, banished by Raphael in the Book of Tobit 8:3
Astaroth : Strong Duke over 40 legions and the treasurer of hell
Aym : Great Duke, who commands 26 legions; from christian demonology
Ayperos : Prince, commands 36 legions; from christian demonoly
Azazel : Chief of the goat-demons or “hairy demons”
Bael : Head of the Infernal Armies of 66 legions
Balam : Terrible king with three heads and commands 40 legions
Beelzebub : Prince of Demons, aka Lord of the Flies, former highest ranking angel in heaven
Belial : Chief of all devils, brings about wickedness and guilt
Belphegor : Demon or “god” of the Moabites, Numbers 25
Berith : Great Duke of hell who governs 26 legions, appears as a red soldier on a red horse
Bifrons : declares the understanding of geometry, astrology and other arts
Botis : Appears as a viper, and proclaims the past and future
Buer : President of hell, of the second order, and commands 50 legions
Caym : Great President who takes the shape of a thrush; rules 30 legions
Charon : The boat man who brings souls across the river Styx
Cresil : Demon of impurity and laziness
Crocell : Grand Duke who appears as an angel, and governs 48 legions
Deumos : Female demon with 4 horns and a crown
Eurynome : Superior demon who feeds on corpses; the Prince of Death
Focalor : Grand Duke who drowns men and overthrows ships of war
Furfur : Count of hell, commands 26 legions; appears as angel with a flaming tail
Gaap : Prince of hell, intensifies love and hatred; transporter demon
Geryon : Giant centaur, guardian of hell
Haures : Strong Duke of hell, commands 20 legions and is very frightful with eye aflame
Ipos : Demon count of hell who commands 36 legions; looks like a lion-headed angel
Jezebeth : Demon of falsehoods and lies
Kasdeya : From the “Book of Enoch”, the 5th Satan
Kobal : Demon of hilarity
Leonard : Master of black magic and sorcery
Leviathan : Dragon of the Sea, the Crooked Serpent of the abyss
Lilith : Demon of waste.
Lucifer : Light bearer, son of the morning; former seraphim cast out of heaven
Malphas : Grand president of hell, commands 40 legions; appears as a raven
Mammon : Demon of avarice
Mastema : Leader of fallen angels whose job is to tempt men to sin and accuse them before God
Melchom : Demon who carries the money purse; payer of servants
Mephistopheles : Another name for the devil in the Middle Ages
Merihim : Dark Prince of pestilence
Moloch : Demon worshipped by the Israelites through child sacrifice
Mullin : Demon lieutenant of the demon Leonard
Murmur : Great Duke, comes with trumpets sounding and rules 30 legions
Naberius : Strong demon in charge of 29 legions, a Marquis of hell
Nergal : Second order demon, commands the secret police
Nicor : Water demon known for drowning humans; can cause hurricanes, tempests and the like
Nybbas : Manager of visions and dreams, inferior order charlatan
Nysrogh : Second order demon, chief of the house of princes
Oriax : Marquis, demon who commands 30 legions; teaches astrology
Ornias : name of the harassing demon
Ose : Great President, governs 30 legions
Paymon : a king of hell, master of ceremonies; governs 200 legions
Philatanus : Demon who assists Belial in sodomy and pedophile behaviors
Proserpine : aka Persephone, princess of hell
Pruflas : head of 26 legions, has the head of an owl; provokes wars and quarrels
Pyro : Prince of falsehoods and lies
Raum : Count or Great Earle, commands 30 legions; seen as a crow
Rimmon : aka Damas, an ambassador from hell
Ronove : Marquis of hell, commanding 19 legions, teaches languages
Ronwe : Inferior demon, commands 19 legions
Samael : Demon angel of death, prince of the power of the air
Semiazas : Chief demon of fallen angels
Shax : Duke of hell, commanding 30 legions, deceitful thief; appears as a stork
Shalbriri : Demon of blindness
Sonneillon : Demon of hatred
Stolas : High prince of hell, commanding 26 legions; teacher of astronomy and plant properties
Succorbenoth : Chief eunuch, sexless, demon of gates
Thamuz : Ambassador of hell, demon master of big weapons
Ukobach : Inferior demon who maintains the fires of hell; appears ablaze
Uphir : Demon physician
Uvall : Duke, commanding 36 legions, knows the past, present and future; strong and scary
Valafar : Strong Duke, commands 10 legions, appears in the shape of a lion
Vepar : Grand Duke, strong; guide of waters, like a mermaid
Verdelet : Master of ceremonies
Verin : Demon of impatience
Vetis : Demon of corruption
Xaphan : Second order demon, former fallen angel, fans the furnace flames
Zagan : Demon King, deceitful, commands 33 legions
Zepar : Grand Duke, appears as a soldier, commanding 26 legions