“First the sheep died. The sheep were surrogates for humans. They should have been regarded as an early warning so that precautions could have been taken for people. Instead the AEC went to great lengths, including deception and fraud, to put blame for the sheep deaths and injuries on anything but radioactive fallout” (Fradkin, 147).
At the 1979 Congressional Hearings, Kern Bulloch recalled: "When they started to lamb, the lambs were born with little legs, kind of pot-bellied. Some of them didn't have any wool. And we started losing so many lambs that my father just about went crazy."
Bulloch said, "We'd be out on the range and the sky would light up. At first we didn't even know what they were doing. Then we heard that it was an atomic bomb at the test site. The army personnel came up to camp. They had gloves on their feet and on their hands and told them, 'You guys are in a hot spot here. You better get these sheep out of here. They finally radioed back to base and said, 'there's two sheepherders with a herd of sheep in an awfully hot spot. What are we going to do about it?' They were told, 'if there's only two guys forget about them and go up to the mine,' which is the Tempiute Mine, two or three miles away, and there was two or three hundred people up there. It took us 25 days to come in from out there with the sheep. We noticed the ewes were aborting their lambs. We didn't know why. We had 700 or 800 yearling ewes that wouldn't have lambs. And the little lambs started to die. My dad was beside himself because so many sheep died, most of our lambs and a fourth of our ewes. Some of the lambs would be born with their hearts outside of their bodies, skin like parchment so you could see right through to their organs. They died, so many of them that they were piled up right to the roof line every day. The AEC came to the pile of bones later. They took the Geiger counter and put it down on these sheep and that needle would come over there and hit that post. I remember the guy saying, 'Is it hot?' and the other guy would say, 'Is it HOT? It is so hot this needle just about jumped the pole!' This was months after they died and he just put that counter by the pile of bones. At first they said it was radiation. {Then} they said it was malnutrition, that it had nothing to do with radiation. Poor management is what they said killed the sheep. They told Doug Clark, 'You're just a dumb sheepherder. You wouldn't have understood if we explained it to you.' "
"From the day the Bulloch case was filed, the single-minded goal of the government lawyers, scientists and physicians was to win the lawsuit by fair means or foul." -- Stewart Udall (Secretary of the Interior in the Kennedy Administration, and the attorney for the Utah residents who later filed suit)
In 1982, Bushnell reopened the case and charged that U.S. officials had perpetrated a fraud on upon the court. "The distinctive facts surrounding this motion converted it into a landmark of American law." -- Stewart Udall |
By 1953, “Of the 11,710 sheep within an area up to 40 miles north of the test site and 160 miles to the east , 1,420 lambing ewes and 2,970 new lambs died” (Frandkin, 148). Angry about their financial losses the Bulloch's and other sheep farmers in the area, knew it was from the fallout and took the government to court. In his 1955 ruling, Judge Sherman A. Christensen to concluded that "the maximum amount of radioactive fallout in any area in which the sheep could have been, would have caused no damage." |
Judge Christensen agreed. In 1986, he ruled: "I set aside the earlier judgment because I was convinced that fraud was practiced by the withholding of evidence and that this was of transcendent importance from the standpoint of judicial administration, trial advocacy, and the integrity of judicial proceedings."
He found:
" * false and deceptive representations of government conduct.
* improper but successful attempts to pressure witness
* a vital report intentionally withheld
* information in another report presented in a deceitful manner
* interrogatories deceptively answered
* deliberate concealment of significant facts with reference to
possible effects of radiation upon the sheep" (Ball, 209).
"In his decision, Judge Christensen concluded that in the original trial Government witnesses and officials made intentionally false and deceptive representations, attempted to pressure witnesses not to testify as to their real opinions, intentionally withheld information in a manner that was misleading and deceitful, and answered questions in a deceptive fashion" (Schmidt, 1982).
Stewart Udall called it, "a grotesque episode of American jurisprudence, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver rejected Christensen's findings and canceled the new trial he had ordered."
He found:
" * false and deceptive representations of government conduct.
* improper but successful attempts to pressure witness
* a vital report intentionally withheld
* information in another report presented in a deceitful manner
* interrogatories deceptively answered
* deliberate concealment of significant facts with reference to
possible effects of radiation upon the sheep" (Ball, 209).
"In his decision, Judge Christensen concluded that in the original trial Government witnesses and officials made intentionally false and deceptive representations, attempted to pressure witnesses not to testify as to their real opinions, intentionally withheld information in a manner that was misleading and deceitful, and answered questions in a deceptive fashion" (Schmidt, 1982).
Stewart Udall called it, "a grotesque episode of American jurisprudence, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver rejected Christensen's findings and canceled the new trial he had ordered."