Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Yellow Rain

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

After the Vietnam War, the Hmong people told the world a toxic weapon was being used on them. Thus began a mystery that still remains today, which might have been solved when it was chalked up to bee poop. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Josh over there, and this is short stuff.

Giddy up, Chuck. All right, we're gonna go to the late 1970s. I love the 70s. The Vietnam War is well over. Yeah, well for America at least. Well, that's true. But Vietnamese and Laotian people started noticing over there that periodically there would be a sticky yellow rain

when it was really sunny out coming down, and that this substance killed plants and made people sick, especially among the, among the Hmong, which is to say H-M-O-N-G, which were people in Southeast Asia who fought with France against the communists since the 1950s. Yeah, they were mountain people in North Vietnam

and in Laos. Yeah, I think they probably, oh, never mind. I was about to discuss a deleted scene in Apocalypse Now, but we don't have time for that. Are they the ones that they dine with? They have dinner with them? I think so. I think there were French and Hmong, but...

It would make sense because the Hmong cast their lot with the French, and then later on, the Americans when the CIA showed up, because remember, we've talked about this in multiple episodes. One of the things the CIA did is they would drop behind enemy lines and say, oh, you hate the people we're fighting to?

Well, let's assemble a guerrilla army, and the Hmong fought with them. Well, that led to big time trouble for the Hmong after the Americans withdrew, and I believe 1975, because that left the Hmong holding the bag. Everyone knew that the Hmong had fought against the communists, and the communists had just become successful in the Vietnam War,

and so the communists turned their ire against the Hmong people who no longer had any American backing. So as they were kind of driven from their homes and to refugee camps across the border into Thailand, they were harassed by the communist government, and from that experience, this idea that something was being sprayed on them kind of took root, this yellow rain,

that was thought to be some sort of biological weapon that was being deployed by the Vietnamese government, and the Americans took it quite seriously and got their hands on some samples, and in, I think, 1981, Alexander Haig, who was Secretary of State at the time, said, yep, it's some sort of biological weapon. We think it's trichothocene, which is a mycotoxin,

and we think that the Soviets are supplying it in flagrant violation of anti-biological weapons conventions that have been around since 1925. You didn't do your Alexander Haig? That was my Alexander Haig. Okay. It didn't come through. The whole thing was. Oh, well, goodness, sorry, Al.

Can you do one? Let's hear yours. Oh, I would just have said something about the Soviet Union like that. That's Henry Kissinger. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Alexander Haig didn't talk anything like that. I was totally thinking Kissinger,

and it's funny, as soon as you said that, I got a mental picture that went from Kissinger to Haig, because I totally remember Al Haig now. Yeah, for sure. All right, maybe he liked to impersonate Kissinger. Everybody wants that. Yeah, behind his back, and it wasn't very flattering. All right, so, and we're gonna leave that in there,

even though it's short stuff, I don't care. That was a classic SYSK moment, my friend. So, first of all, we should point out that this idea that it would be something like that after we had dropped Agent Orange all over the place for 10 years, you can't blame them for thinking something like that is going on. However, something kind of smelled hinky

in the nose of one, Matt Messelsen, who was a biologist at Harvard University, and he said, this doesn't really make sense to me. So, a couple of years later, in 1983, he got some samples, and he said, you know what's in here? It's really weird. He said, there is a lot of hollowed out pollen that's indigenous to this area,

and this would mean that the Soviet Union is taking pollen, hollowing it out, filling it with poison, and bringing it back, and dropping it down on sunny days like it's rain. It's a very bad idea, it's very outlandish, it's not a very effective dispersal method, and the concentration of mycotoxins in there anyway was not really any different than samples of leaves

and plants anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Right, his position was like, yes, these people are being harassed, but I don't think this yellow rain is actually a biological weapon being supplied by the USSR, that there's something else going on. It's like you said, it's just too outlandish what the process would require for this to be what it was.

So, he was a biologist, like you said, and he knew enough to know that bees, specifically giant Asian honeybees that lived in the area, actually will eat pollen, but they don't eat the outer shell of the pollen, they eat the protein inside the pollen. So when they poop, they poop out regular pollen, or they poop out hollowed out pollen, okay?

Yes. So he said, I think this might just be a case of honeybee poop. I think that's what everybody's freaked out about is it's just honeybee poop. But people were saying, okay, yeah, that's true biologically, but what you're talking about, for that for something that looks like yellow rain

to be produced would require a mind-boggling number of bees to all poop at once in the same area. So explain that, Mr. Messelsinn, Mr. Harvard-trained biologist, you can't, can you? Then he said, I will, right after this message break. And he said, I will, right after this message break. And he said, I will, right after this message break. And he said, I will, right after this message break.

On the podcast, PayDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

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blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Messelsen takes a message break. You're right. Everyone's like, what's that?

You're right. And he said, I just had to use a bathroom. Oh, well, that's normal enough. But we don't call it message breaks. So there was, well, he used scare quotes, so. Oh, gotcha. So he said, there's some other inconsistencies here, too, because you interviewed a lot of people.

And there's a lot of people that said that there were no planes around when this stuff was raining down, which is a problem. Yeah, because I mean, that's how you disperse biological weapons, typically, is from a plane. So where's this, you know, where's the plane? How is this stuff happening if there's no plane? And he also said that, you know, all these health problems

that are going on, he said it's really probably just people with dysentery and nutritional deficiencies. And, you know, it seems like you're asking very leading questions to me. This whole thing really stinks at this point to Messelsen. Well, also check, there's one other thing. So I went back and I was reading some, like, an article in Science from the time.

And they were saying, like, there is indeed some sort of mycotoxic poison that is hurting people. And so that was a big reason why this is still yet resolved, because there was mycotoxic poisoning. Messelsen's position was, well, these people are living in refugee camps. It's not like they're eating top-of-the-line food. I'm sure some of them are eating moldy food

and are suffering ill effects from it. So that would explain this appearance of mycotoxic poisoning. And in that guy's defense, that trichothocene is supposedly was discovered in the USSR from people eating moldy food. That's how it was first found. Amazing.

Yeah. So a few years later, 1989, I'm about to graduate high school. And Messelsen teams up with some Canadian biologists to figure this whole thing out, because the whole idea of, like, why, you know, you know how many bees it would take to poop down yellow rain on everyone? Right. And they said, well, we're going to find out just

how many bees it would take. They realized that it was falling on hot, sunny days, which is a first big clue. And they measured the body mass of these bees before they left their hives, and then after they came back to the hives, and they found out that while they were gone, they lost 20% of their body weight on the return flight.

That is a big old poop. That's a big old poop. So they would leave together in these big giant swarms, thousands of them. They would poop. They would come back to care for their little larvae. And they said, this is also happening most frequently on really hot, sunny days.

So we think we've kind of figured this thing out. Right. So what they figured out was that the Asian honey bees, the larvae, as they're developing, if they overheat, they will deform, basically. They will develop incorrectly, I guess. And so to keep the temperature in the hive lower, especially on hot, sunny days, the bees in the hive

will fly out and excrete waste all at once, basically, or in one trip. And then when they come back, since they've lost 20% of their body weight, the temperature inside the hive is that much lower, because their weight is not producing that much more waste heat. So they actually figured out that that's what bees will do, at least Asian honey bees,

to regulate the temperature in the hive so that the larvae can develop normally. And they said, we think we just solved the mystery of yellow rain. That's right. More research in later years pretty much confirmed this. And everyone is basically on board, except for the fact that Kissinger and Alexander

Hague never came back and retracted their statements. So officially, I don't know if that stuff matters or not. But officially, we have never retracted that statement as a nation, that it was not the Soviet Union. I just got finished watching Chernobyl. Oh, I got to see it. I'm at a fever point of the truth and toxins, because the Soviet Union still says, or I'm sorry,

Russia still says, 31 people died. How many people did die? Oh, they don't know. Anywhere between 4,000 and 90,000 is what it said, depending on how you count cancer 20 years later and stuff like that. Should we do, I was talking to a friend, Blair, who is a friend of both of us, a photographer.

And he was like, you got to do one on Chernobyl. And I'm like, everybody knows about it now. Should we do one? Maybe. OK, because I'd love to. It's a fascinating topic, but if everybody already knows about it, it's like, what's the point? It was a heck of a show.

I'll say that. All right, well, at least watch that. All right, so to finish up here, though, the Hmong, for their part, things haven't gotten a lot better. They continue to suffer to this day. Very small amount of them made it over to the United States. Some people returned to Laos. Some people returned to Vietnam.

Like we said at the beginning, a lot of them were going to Thailand as refugees. But in 2009, the Thai government shut that down and sent away thousands and thousands of the Hmong. And it's really just sort of a sad situation. But as this article points out, the one silver lining is that this whole thing, anytime there's a new theory about what happened

or anytime it makes the news, the Hmong also make the news. Right, which I think is really worth pointing out for sure. One of the articles we used for this was called The Mystery of Yellow Rain. It was written by Jacob Roberts for Distillations, which is a blog of the Science History Institute, which is very good stuff. All right, well, that's it for short stuff.

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