ORAL HISTORIES
TOM BAILE
HANFORD FARMER
March tenth 1947, Pasco Washington, Lady of Lourdes Hospital; born to Laura Lee Small and Maynard T. Baile. My mother Laura Lee, when she graduated from high school, went to work for the Corps of Engineers Manhattan Project that built Hanford. She was transferred to California where she was a stenographer for Robert Oppenheimer.
My father came out of the Army, a little private. He was discharged out of the Army, met my mother at a family picnic family reunion, they fell in love and got married. And they set up their wheat farm about three miles away from the Hanford perimeter fence, on the east side of Hanford. And that's where I was taken home to from the hospital. I was a sickly baby, my mother told me I was very, very sick and almost died several times; I had rickets, and birth defects... We farmed up there until July 1950. Then we moved down off the hill to where I am now: into the "Death Mile."
In 1956 the government distributed land to farmers who could meet their criteria of being a veteran and having children, and let them each one have eighty acres. They bought the land from my family for fifteen dollars an acre. And they sold it to the veterans for thirty... All these people showed up in 1956 from all over. There was originally three kids in the first grade at the Eltopia school. When we graduated there was eighty nine kids graduating from the eighth grade.
Veterans: none of them were farmers, they were veterans with children, came here, and proved up on their homesteads.
Thirty years later, if you drive around, they're all gone: all the families are gone. Out of twenty-seven neighbors, everyone's family had cancer or birth defects, or thyroid problems. And it dawned on me that Hanford could be the problem.
So there was this constant cleansing of the sick people. Anyone who got cancer who was a breadwinner was moved off the farm and out of the house within one year. They'd go back to where they came from: Texas, Arizona, Florida... remember they came from all over.
They were enlisted military veterans. No officers were granted a farm here. I repeat: no officers drew a piece of land. All enlisted personnel.
I grew up with the most incredible war stories that any young man could ever hear. All around you were these men that were combat veterans from the Pacific war, from the European war theater... Do you know what USS Indianapolis is? You do! Keith Standridge, my next-door neighbor, was one of the guys that survived. He was on the crew of the USS Indianapolis. He survived all that time in the water, he saw the shark attacks. He delivered the atomic bomb made here at Hanford to Tinian Island. And then he came here, and he drew a unit, and he died of cancer, and his wife died of cancer. His daughters both have thyroid cancer. But that's just an example of all these wonderful old veterans that this guy got to know; I got to meet them all.
See one of the reasons we always trusted Hanford and believed in our scientific community across the river; they were always testing our water, they’d come and take milk samples every week from the cows, they’d pull vegetables, they’d pick up our dead animals…
And once a year, they would come to our school with a grey truck, and a grey trailer that said “Atomic Energy Commission” on the door. “Atomic Energy Commission Authorized Use Only.” And they had a trailer, they would put steps at the end of the trailer, metal steps, and there would be a lady standing atop the steps... She would let us kids in. She gave us a milkshake to drink, and then we lay down on this table and this machine would pass over us real slow: the “Whole Body Counter.”
We’d come out through the trailer after we’d get up, and there would be another lady sitting there; she had a stamping machine. She made dog tags for us kids: gave us a number, our name... We felt like we were soldiers, and she said we were helping win the war. We were her little warriors. The dog tags.
In the sixth or seventh grade, they invited us kids from Eltopia to go to the Richland Science Center, in the Federal Building. 1959 or ’60; Catherine May was our congresswoman at that time, and she met us all at the door. “Welcome children, come right in, and we’re going to show you about the miracles of the atom.” They had the displays all set up for us kids look at...
The judges for the Science Fair projects at Eltopia were also Hanford scientists. My project was a deformed Shetland pony fetus that I’d picked up out of our pasture, and I put it in a fishbowl with formaldehyde, and sealed it with paraffin wax. And that was my science project, talking about deformed animals. That’s true; that was my project. And I remember they there were all just aghast, and writing all this stuff down, and taking pictures of this deformed calf…
Well later, when we went on the tour of the Federal Building, they took us through it and they said, "Now, radiation is wonderful, it's safe, and Hanford is safe, we test everything, and you're safe." And when we left, they had a bubblegum machine, and inside it they had these round balls about half an inch in diameter, an inch and a quarter in diameter. They were glass balls. And they said, “You can each have one.” And we got to turn the thing, “click, click, click,” and it dropped out into our hand. And they said, “Inside that glass is radioactive waste. It’s safely encased in glass. And that's what we’re going to do with the waste from Hanford.”
Well we were just kids: we didn’t know there was any waste at Hanford.
All we knew about Hanford was we’d pick up the weather balloons that would land in our fields, and we’d take them to the post office to mail them back. They released weather balloons up into the atmosphere, and they’d land in our farms. we'd pick 'em up.
And the fires: every year there was a fire that would burn and burn and burn and burn. All the smoke would go up in the air and come and land, particles of sagebrush and cheatgrass would land in our farms. They would burn it off [because the plants suck up radionuclides].
There used to be rabbits here... But the rabbits were eating the grass, I read a report: the rabbits would eat the Cheatgrass, and then they would poop out pellets, and the pellets were radioactive, because the plants suck up radionuclides. Well, then the coyotes would eat the rabbits, and the hawks would eat what was left over, and all the animals started dying. We’d see hawks hanging upside down on the telephone wires, and coyotes with their hair falling out, running around.
So what they did (and I don't know this for a fact, but I read an article): they brought in a disease from Australia, a biological weapon that they used on the rabbits. One year we had thousands and thousands of jackrabbits here, the next year there was not a jackrabbit to be found. It’s the same way today… And the disease that they introduced into the rabbit population is called “Myxomatosis.” Brought in from Australia. Then there weren’t so many fires, after that.
And the swallows: they would make their nests in the tops of the reactor buildings... This was all reported in the newspapers, what I'm telling you.
And then we used to hunt pheasants. We had pheasants, and ducks, and geese, here, and waterfowl here all the time. They would land on lakes over at Hanford and then they’d come over here to eat. And the Hanford people would ask us to save the legs and the heads from the birds that we’d clean. We’d put them in a sack and put them in the freezer; they’d come pick them up, said they wanted to test them. Well now I know they were landing in a radioactive lake out there. The solution to the radioactive lake is they back-filled it with dirt, and filled the lake up. On the other side Gable Mountain.
We grew up driving these roads, shooting pheasants and ducks and geese and then, I think about 1963, we had an outdoor newspaper reporter come over and he was hunting with us. And for some reason, these two guys who had been hunting over here took the pheasants back to Seattle, and laid them on the garage floor to clean them. And they had a Geiger counter there. And the Geiger counter went off. These birds were hot... These rooster pheasants were hot. That was my sport; that was my fun thing, as a child...
The weather balloons: there were three different typs. The first ones in the forties were made out of wood and tin, and they had a balloon above them... almost like a parachute, but the balloon was inside the parachute. Those were the first ones. Then the next ones: white plastic. They were light, and they had an opaque balloon attached to them, and a transmitter with an aerial coming out the bottom. Then the last ones were really heavy, they were about ten to fifteen pounds, and they had batteries inside them.
And I destroyed government property once. i took it into the shop, one of the plastic ones. It said: “Return to the nearest post office,” “Do not destroy under penalty of prison or jail...” I took a hammer and I broke it open, and I had to laugh: there was nothing inside except fly paper! ...
Of course I learned later is, every time they would process at 200 Area, they’d release what’s called a “thiodolite balloon.” And the flypaper would go up the stack, and it had the same temperature in the balloon as what was coming out of the stack, and it would stay in the plume, and swing around in the plume, and follow the plume… And as the plume cooled it would drift down where the plume drifted down into the field with the radio-nucleides in it.
And to answer the question of the flypaper, the particles, plutonium and uranium dust, were stuck to the flypaper. So if you were at an accounting lab at Hanford, you’d simply open up the box... and start counting… It was called “throw put,” I learned later on.
See after I asked these questions, all of a sudden, organizations like The Institute for Policy Studies, they started teaching me things. They'd send me correspondences and I'd read them, they flew me to New Yorkfor a conference, and I started going to conferences. I started learning and all these non-profits had me come tell the story about living down-wind...
I didn’t know that there were all these accidents taking place, I didn't know there were other people getting sick and getting cancer… I started learning stuff, and that's when I started putting two and two together about the balloons. This was in the '80's.
I became the darling of the anti-nuclear movement. I was not anti-nuclear... I was the most patriotic little Forest-Gump dumb-ass type kid you would ever want to see. I couldn't wait to go to Vietnam. They turned me down, because of my health problems.
Now here's a picture of the hotspots, at Hanford. You're sitting right about there, where we’re sitting right now. I don't know… Plutonium lasts twenty-two thousand years right? Half-life. We farm them… This is all farmland...
Remember I told you the story about seeing the space men from Hanford: the guys in the suits, with soldiers behind them, shoveling, and gunnysacks, that was in ‘49 or ‘50.
I was just only three or four years old. I was out playing in the backyard and I looked out across the wheat field, and the “Summer Fallen,” which is barren fields; “Summer Fallen” means nothings growing there. And here come this line of people. And there were no people ever around, where I lived. I lived at the end of the world… It was a dirt road, to the house.
And they came in from the west side, and nobody came in from the west side, ever. And they got closer; they were like space guys, in suits, and they had a stick, they’d wave it out in front of them going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth… And then they would hold it at a place… Obviously a Geiger-counter.
And they’d motion a soldier up, he would come up and take a scoop of dirt, put it in his gunnysack, put the gunnysack back on his back and then they’d walk through the farm, and on through the fields, and down under the hill…
So that's how they found where the hot-spots are, probably. Soldiers scooped them up. That’s downwind! And we believe they cleaned it up that way...
We lamb at night, or we calve at night, and you have to check to see how the birthing process is going. So you’re up every two hours... you go out and see if the animal needs help: grab a leg, pull the calf out, whatever you need to do, right?
We had recently had a series of was called “animal mutations.” We had recently had a spate of those taking place. We had a heifer we found... she was dead out on the pasture, south of the house. Her lips had been cut off, her bag had been cut off, and the rectum and vagina had been cored out surgically. And she had no blood in her, and there was no blood on the ground... It was like she'd been dropped from the sky. There was a dent in the ground where she had been dropped, no motorcycle tracks, no tracks around her, no human tracks, nothing.
Well, old man Weinburger said that he was out checking his sheep, and he heard this whisper-noise, and he looked up; in the moonlight he could see a helicopter passing over him, very low. He could see the lights off the dash, glaring off of the pilot’s helmet and face-mask. That’s when we knew we had silent-run helicopters. That was in the '70s. If you look up silent-run helicopters,they’ve been around for a long time...
We haven't had any “animal mutations” here since Hanford quit processing.
And then you'd have to go tell FHA that your cow was dead, you didn't have any money to pay back the loan, they'd get made about it. If you lost your cow... Yeah: you have to report it. You have to report everything you do to the government.
And all the neighbors: nobody talks about any of the UFO's anymore. Nobody talks about the night-lights, nobody talks about the motherships. Nobody talks about it. Because you're immediately different from the rest of the flock. It's like asking questions about what’s going on across the river, and the weird things that you see…
I was immediately ostracized by the rest of the flock: my bank cut off, my operating line; FHA said I couldn’t borrow any more money, and they tried to run me out of the country. They impugned my patriotism, and they economically sanctioned me... The best way to get run out of this country is, become sick with cancer, question Hanford, and don't pay your FHA loans back.
I fought. I learned how to do it. Borrowed money from family members, ultimately filed Chapter Twelve, reorganization bankruptcy. They have weakened it, but what Thomas Jefferson set in place is still intact.
Ships: round flying ships, just like science fiction crazy stuff on TV. One time we saw them, they came in during the daytime, they came in from the west, hot and heavy and fast, they swerved around went down and landed at Hanford. But most of all the other sightings are night sightings. And all you could see was like Weinberger saw the helicopter: silhouetted in the night sky. Or recently the triangle ships are a big thing...: two triangle ships about three months ago came over our place real slow. Three neighbors called: "You see that?" Yeah, I see 'em. "What are they?" I say I don't know... We don't need to talk about it... It’s like they’re hanging in the air... Could be drones…
So downwind, we have the mutated cattle, the deformed cattle, the deformed sheep, the deformed human babies, twenty-seven out of twenty-seven families that were not genetically related to each other, they came from all over the United States, no farming experience… And the effects that they share in common are cancer, birth defects and thyroid problems in their families. Indiscriminate, what we call "indiscriminate breeders." That's cattle industry talk, ok?
And they're not all Downwinders. Most of the people... they’re are all dead... And the people who’ve come in and taken over their land, they don't want to know anything about it. And the people that come here are healthy people. They come out of California, a lot of them, mostly California refugees, because we have water here. They sell their land for a lot of money down there and come up here and replace it cheaply; they think its really cheap.
There’s a disgust involved with this, because we raised the question, we asked the question, and the government answered us: Yes. We did release things that would harm you. They were the largest releases in the history of the free world, and the conscious decision was made to keep it secret.
We won. We were right. They did cause the cancer, they did cause the problems, they did it deliberately. And they had a sealed settlement with the Downwinders. It’s all secret; no one can look at it. I don't even know the terms of the settlement. All I know is I get a call once in a while from someone that says, “$1,100 dollars?? Eleven hundred f-ing dollars? All those years… Eleven hundred dollars? That’s an insult!” And I assume that's what they got from the check.
But I don't have a claim. I don't have cancer. I don’t have a thyroid problem… Which would be my sister, my mother. My father, my uncle, my grandparents... all of them.
I think the end of my life project will be to memorialize these veterans and the families that came here and gave their lives to till the soil and be part of a science project for the Federal Government. And to tell their story. Tell the story of Hanford and what took place at Hanford. Tell a different version than what the government wants told, the human suffering part.
And usually the choir that you're preaching to, they usually don't have enough money to put a building together, how to fund it, to get a building, get the displays up...
Will you get them to stand still long enough to listen?