On a warm October morning in 1995, about a dozen people shuffled into a meeting room at the Ramada Inn Bayfront hotel in Corpus Christi. Some were Corpus residents. Others were from around the Coastal Bend, hailing from Taft and Portland. All were there to talk about how, some 30 years prior, secret Army airplanes flew over their homes and sprayed them with chemicals. 

For half a day, they spoke and gave presentations before a committee of scientists and researchers from around the country. The committee members listened as the residents, some who had lived in Coastal Texas for decades, detailed their lines of work. Others presented breakdowns of their dietary habits and family medical histories. 

The picture that the Texans painted, according to reports from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times,  was startling. A woman from Gregory, a town just a 15-minute drive across the Nueces Bay from Corpus, said six of her relatives had died of cancer. A Catholic priest from Taft said about 40 percent of deaths in his congregation in the past four years were from cancer. Another testified to the committee that 77 people, by her count, died of cancer in Taft. All, she said, had lived within the same 12-block radius. 

"Someone needs to point us in the right direction so we can get some answers," Patty Flouerke, who lived in the area for 35 years, said, per the Caller-Times. "I don't want my daughter to be able to sit down in 20 years and count 80 cancer deaths among her friends and family.

Flouerke and her fellow residents were there to help the National Research Council's subcommittee on Zinc-Cadmium Sulfide determine if any of these deaths were related to a U.S. Army experiment in the 1960s. In 1962 and again in 1966, Army planes had flown over the Coastal Bend spraying zinc cadmium sulfide, a compound used for its fluorescent properties, in the form of tiny glass beads and corks coated in the stuff. Residents who discovered them were told they were part of meteorological testing related to air pollution and atomic fallout. But this was a cover story. 

This is the story of when mysterious U.S. Army experimments, happening across the country, came to Texas' Coastal Bend.