In the 1950s, the U.S. Army sprayed a chemical fog over St. Louis without telling residents. It was part of the secret Cold War experiments that are now tied to decades of illness and cancer in the community. Survivors of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project say they were treated like test subjects — and they’re still demanding answers.

Newsnation spoke with witnesses of the event, who recalled what it was like to live in the town while it was polluted with the chemical. 

“It was summertime, it was hot, we’d run through it as fast as we could and try to just cool ourselves off. It stuck to you,” James Caldwell told the outlet. He was a child living in the town at the time. He also described seeing men in protective suits on rooftops. “As far as the guys on top of the buildings, they tried to portray them to us as maintenance workers, but what are the maintenance workers doing in a hazmat suit? They had masks and goggles.”

For Jacquelyn Russell, the memory was just as vivid. “It was such a sickening, nauseating … it was horrible. It would drive real slow. …You couldn’t see through it, that’s how thick it was. It’s a sickening smell, it’s something chemical.” She later developed headaches and nausea. Others recalled worse. “That’s what I remember, it made me sick,” said Cecil Hughes. “My momma had to take me to the emergency room.”

According to NewsNation, declassified documents reveal the U.S. Army carried out Cold War-era experiments, spraying zinc cadmium sulfide — a compound containing cadmium, now known to be a carcinogen. St. Louis was chosen because it mirrored Moscow’s geography and density. Residents, many of them Black and low-income, were never informed.

Ben Phillips summed up the betrayal: “It was a lose-lose situation for us in Pruitt-Igoe. We were subjects, we were subjects.” Hughes added, “They didn’t ask our permission. We didn’t ask for them to spray us. My government used me like I was a Guinea pig.”

Today, survivors question whether cancers and chronic illnesses trace back to those years under the fog. “I lost my two older siblings to cancer. I lost a brother last month,” Russell told the outlet. “Now all of a sudden, [residents] have kidney cancer? Brain cancer? Eye cancer? Any kind of cancer you can put anywhere, people have been dying from that from Pruitt-Igoe.”

Despite these accounts, the Army has maintained there was no health risk. A 1997 National Research Council review concluded there was “no evidence” of danger, though it admitted not all records were available, according to a statement submitted to NewsNation. Some files remain missing or classified. “They’re waiting us out,” Caldwell said. “They’re waiting on all of us to die,” Phillips added.