For 100 years Porton Down has been the hidden-away base where research on the latest weaponry – and, some claim, the bodies of aliens – has been carried out.
Grey-green clouds of a foul-smelling gas first billowed over the Allied trenches during the second battle of Ypres in April 1915. The soldiers unlucky enough to inhale it died a horrifyingly painful death as the gas reacted with the water in their lungs to produce hydrochloric acid and the burns that ensued caused suffocation and death.
In that first attack alone 800 men died. After gas masks were distributed to troops on the front line, chlorine became largely ineffective and so the Germans resorted to mustard gas, which soaked into the soldiers’ woollen uniforms and caused terrible blisters and a lingering death.
“Devilry, thy name is Germany,” was the headline in one newspaper and it neatly encapsulated popular revulsion on the Home Front at the use of such a vile weapon. No one was more angered than Britain’s Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener.
Caught unprepared, he immediately ordered the creation of a chemical weapons laboratory at a remote location in Wiltshire. It was called the The War Department Experimental Research Ground, Porton – but is better known today as Porton Down.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of a facility that has attracted much controversy over the years as it experimented on both humans and animals in order to unravel the secrets of the most hazardous chemical and biological agents of our age. Its reputation as the most hush-hush military base in the country even led “UFO believers” to allege that the bodies of aliens were taken there in 1974 after their craft crashed in Wales.
To read more, click here.