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Please do not suffer in silence.

There's another national economic story today.

It concerns a tiny insect which is threatening the health of California's multi billion dollar agricultural industry.

Today, efforts got under way to try to prevent the spread of the destructive fruit fly.

The Mediterranean fruit fly, better known as the medfly, is about as unassuming as an insect can get.

Barely a quarter inch long, yellow brown with speckled wings and irridescent little blue eyes doesn't look like much, but, as men everywhere will assure you, size doesn't always tell a full story.

A single female medfly can lay hundreds of eggs just under the skins of fruits and vegetables, and when those eggs hatch, the larva chew through the flesh until there's nothing left but rot.

What starts as one tiny bug can quickly turn into a plague.

Native to sub Saharan Africa, the medfly doesn't belong in the Western Hemisphere at all, but it does have a bad habit of hitching rides in luggage and on imported produce, occasionally slipping into places like Florida, Texas, or California.

And when it does, the steaks are enormous.

This isn't just some backyard nuisance.

Medflies can infest more than two hundred plant species citrus, peaches, grapes, tomatoes, peppers, you name it.

For farmers, they're a nightmare for California, with its sprawling orchards and vegetable fields, they're closer to an existential threat.

That's why state officials treat every medfly sighting like a five alarm fire.

Even a handful of flies in a neighborhood can trigger quarantines, crop restrictions, and multimillion dollar eradication campaigns.

California has been fighting these invasions since the mid nineteen seventies, but in nineteen eighty nine something different happened.

Los Angeles and surrounding counties suddenly lit up with infestations, not just a few neighborhoods, but a whole patchwork of communities.

The flies weren't spreading the way they normally do.

They were appearing in clusters, as if placed there on purpose.

And then came the letter from a group calling itself the Breeders, claiming responsibility for what they called an act of ecological retaliation.

This wasn't just another outbreak.

It was California's first brush with something scarier, eco terrorism.

This is the story of the California medfly attack.

This is the army California is sending into the suburbs south of San Francisco to route the invader, threatening the state's twelve billion dollar agricultural industry.

Five hundred conservation workers are going house to house, stripping the trees of all fruit, which serves as the host to the Mediterranean fruit fly.

The medfly, as the pest is called, plant its eggs under the skin of the fruit, where the contamination is invisible as the maggot devours the fruit from the inside.

The state has tried to kill the species with ground spring of pesticides and even mating sterile males with females.

Nothing has worked.

Soldiers in the latest attack were given a sendoff by Governor Jerry Brown, who predicts that if the infestation spreads, the impact could be nationwide.

It could mean several hundred million dollars in economic loss.

And it can have a major impact in the availability of fruits in vestments.

And of course, California produces twenty five to fifty percent many of the US to be belie throughout the.

Country of local governments here have prohibited aerial pesticide spraying, so for the next month, these workers will try to remove and destroy every single piece of root in this contaminated area.

To understand why the state panicked, you have to understand California's relationship with agriculture.

By the nineteen eighties, the state had become the nation's produce aisle, its Mediterranean climate and vast irrigation networks, turning out everything from oranges and peaches to lettuce and grapes.

Farming was worth tens of billions a year, and when you counted the ripple effect shipping, processing, exports, etc.

It powered a huge chunk of the state's economy.

A pest like the medfly threatened all of it.

The insect could ruin at least twenty two of California's stable crops, effectively turning orchards and vineyards into compost piles.

Worse, if the fly ever became established permanently, the fallout would not stop at the farm gate.

Other states and counties would slam the door on California's produce, fearing the bug would hitch a ride in shipments.

The result would be constant infestations, endless pesticide use, and potential trade bands that could gut the entire industry.

For that reason, California's policy was simple, zero tolerance.

Any sign of a medfly meant an immediate and aggressive eradication effort.

Most of the time, the flies probably arrived the same way they still do, smuggled fruit or travelers unknowingly carrying infested produce in their luggage.

Throughout the late nineteen seventies, inspectors caught small infestations almost every year.

The state would set traps, impose quarantines, and deploy countermeasures.

One of the main tools was the sterile insect technique, where labs turned out male medflies, sterilized them with radiation, and then released them in massive numbers.

The sterile males mated with wild females and no viable eggs were produced.

Slowly but surely, the population would collapse.

But by nineteen eighty California faced something much bigger.

That summer, both the Bay Area and the Los Angeles regions saw infestations spiral out of control.

By nineteen eighty one, millions of larvae were turning up in backyard fruit trees.

The thread of embargoes on California crops loomed.

Losses were estimated in the tens of millions.

The federal government began leaning on the state to do more, and so Governor Jerry Brown, not exactly known for his love of pesticides, authorized a desperate measure, aerial spraying of malathion.

Suddenly, California neighborhoods found themselves under nighttime air raids from fleet of helicopters missing a syrupy insecticide bait.

Officials insisted it was safe, but residents were horrified.

The smell hung in the air, cars were spotted with residue, and people complained of both headaches and nausea.

Protesters railed against what they saw as chemical warfare in their own backyards.

Lawsuits flew.

At one point, d official even drank a glass of diluted malatheon on camera to prove it would not kill him.

It didn't, though it also did not win over many doubters.

The campaign was controversial, but it worked.

After months of repeated spraying in the release of overall billion sterwile flies, the nineteen eighty one outbreak was declared over The price tag was estimated at roughly one hundred million dollars.

From then on, aerial spraying of malathion became California's go to response.

Whenever medflies showed up.

Throughout the nineteen eighties, infestations would flare, and helicopters would return, spraying malatheon over both farmland and suburbs.

By the late nineteen eighties, the whole process felt routine.

The flies appeared, the state, sprayed, crops were saved, and everyone moved on.

But in nineteen eighty nine, the routine broke down.

What started as a few trapped flies in Los Angeles soon ballooned into a sprawling, illogical outbreak that left scientists baffled and residence furious.

At first, nineteen eighty nine did not look much different from the other years.

In early summer, inspectors checking traps in Los Angeles County started finding medflies.

A few turned up near Alesian Park, just north of downtown.

By July, thirty four had been captured in that area alone, not a massive number, but enough to set off alarms.

State officials quickly declared a seventy square mile quarantine zone and brought back the helicopters.

One night in August, the low thrum of rotors returned as malathion bait ranged down over fourteen square miles of Los Angeles.

Forty million sterile medfly mails were released to follow up.

For Californians who had lived through the nineteen eighty one crisis, it felt like deja vus.

The drill was familiar.

Find the medflies, spray the neighborhoods, rolled out sterile inside, lift the quarantine, and the clear victory.

There was no reason to think nineteen eighty nine would play out any differently.

But the summer dragged on, and instead of subsiding, the problems spread.

By late September, inspectors had trapped a medfly in Whittier, miles from the original Alesian Park cluster.

Then more flies appeared across the Los Angeles basin.

By October November, they weren't just in La anymore.

They had crossed over into Orange County.

Every time a new cluster was detected, the helicopters expanded their grid, inspectors, stripped fruit from trees, set out more traps, and tried to stay ahead of the spread.

Before long, the outbreak wasn't a cluster at all, but a region wide invasion.

At its peak, more than two hundred and thirty square miles across Los Angeles and Orange Counties were under both quarantine and repeated pesticide drops.

By year's end, as the Los Angeles Times put it, the battle against the Mediterranean fruit fly had become an open war for farmers and agricultural officials.

This was a worst case scenario.

Eradication costs were exploding.

By the end of the campaign, the state would spend around sixty million dollars, making it the second most expensive medfly fight in history.

Even worse was the possibility that California might lose control completely.

If the fly became established, it could cripple trade, force farmers to soak their crops in pesticides, and leave the state's billion dollar produce industry in tatters.

Meanwhile, southern California residents were once again enduring nightly flyovers and chemical mists.

Public meetings grew tense.

Officials repeated that malathion in its diluted form posed no health risk, but many people weren't buying it.

They had lived through years of these air raids, and patients was already thin.

The parents worried about their children breathing in the spray.

Gardeners claimed that their coypons and backyard pets were dying, and a creeping distrust began to set in.

They began to wonder was this cure worse than the disease.

On the other side of the debate, growers and farm groups were furious that the state wasn't being aggressive enough.

They demanded faster, eradication, harsher quarantines, really, whatever it took to save the spring nineteen ninety harvest.

Agriculture was too important to gamble with, they argued, and the medfly was too dangerous to let linger.

By December nineteen eighty nine, one thing was clear.

This outbreak was unlike any the California had ever seen.

Hundreds of adult flies had been trapped, as many as in the previous fifteen years combined, and yet field crews searching trees and fruit baskets kept coming back empty.

Normally, a medfly invasion would leave plenty of evidence fruit teeming with maggots, but in nineteen eighty nine, larva were strangely scarce.

Inspectors would pull apart fruit from infested neighborhoods and find nothing.

Even more puzzling was the sex ratio.

Traps were catching mostly females when normally they would be pulling in more mails, and the flies weren't showing up randomly.

Time after time.

They were caught just outside of boundaries of areas that had already been sprayed.

Every time the helicopters declared his own clean, a new cluster would appear just beyond it, forcing the quarantine map to keep expanding outward.

Scientists began to admit what they hated to say out loud, that none of this made sense.

The spread wasn't natural, it did not fit the usual biology of the medfly.

Something or someone was influencing their pattern.

And just as those doubts were bubbling to the surface, a mysterious letter landed in the mailboxes of California officials and newspapers.

It was signed by a group calling itself the Breeders.

That's after the break.

On December third, nineteen eighty nine, as officials scrambled to make sense of this outbreak, a letter started showing up in mailboxes across California.

It arrived at the office of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, at the desk of a few state senators, and in the newsrooms of the Los Angeles Times and the Fresno b Two typed pages, single spaced, unsigned, except for a name at the bottom that felt almost like a punchline.

The contents, though, were anything but funny.

The writers claimed responsibility for the medfly invasion.

Whoever this was, wrote, state officials have probably noticed an increase as well as an unusual distribution of medfly infestation in Los Angeles County since March nineteen eighty nine.

This was no coincidence.

The mysterious letter writer said that this outbreak wasn't natural, It was sabotage.

This was a campaign of deliberate pest releases carried out by eco terrorist angry at California's malathion program.

According to the letter, the group had smuggled medfly eggs and larvae into southern California, or that year began rearing them in captivity and then released pregnant females across the region.

Their goal was to overwhelm the state's eradication campaign, bankrupting the aerial spray program and forcing California to abandon chemical warfare against the environment.

Their tone was mocking, even triumphant.

They wrote, our position is absolutely non negotiable.

Every time the copters go up to spray, we'll go into Virgin territory or old medfly problem areas and release a minimum of several thousand blue eyed medflies.

We are organized, patient, and determined.

The threat was clear, either stop spraying or will spread the flies into California's agricultural heartland.

And as I mentioned before, the letter closed with the simple ominous sign off the breeders.

The reaction was immediate.

Law enforcement headed the letter to the LAPD's criminal conspiracy section and to the FBI.

We are absolutely treating this as a threat, said LAPD tenant Helen kidder its extortion.

She said, whether the writers were pranksters or genuine saboteurs thread alone was a crime, but were they real That was the question.

Some officials were openly skeptical, calling this letter a hoax.

The outbreak had already been underway for months before the letter arrived.

Could a group of anonymous activists really be breeding and releasing fruit flies on such a large scale.

It seemed far fetched, and yet the outbreak's peculiarities fit uncomfortably well with the breeder's claims.

The pattern of flies showing up just outside of sprayed zones, the skewed toward females, the lack of larvae and fruit.

All of it was consistent with someone seating adult insects into the environment, rather than a wild population breeding on its own.

The letter even mentioned that they had been releasing pregnant females after spray missions, which lined up with what inspectors were seeing on the ground.

By mid December, California's own Medfly Scientific Advisory Panel US openly debating whether the infestation could have been human made.

Newsweek ran a story quoting officials who described the outbreak as illogical and defying explanation.

Suddenly, the idea of an agro terror campaign did not seem so outlandish.

The breeders, whoever they were, never followed up.

There was never a second letter, no phone calls, no manifesto, Beyond those two pages, they did not explain how they had gotten the flies, specifically, though smuggling them in from Hawaii or abroad would have been relatively easy in those days.

They did not claim ties to any known group.

They did not ask for money, just an end to the aerial sprang, and after that one December letter, which they mailed to officials and publications, they disappeared in early nineteen ninety Desperate for answers.

The USDA even placed to classify ad In the Los Angeles Times Personal section.

They wrote, breeders, if you're for real, send one of your little friends we want to talk, called John at US.

For those who found this, it was a bit of a surreal moment, federal officials essentially begging eco terrorist to pick up the phone if anyone ever did nothing about it was made public.

Once the Breeder's letter surfaced, the outbreak was no longer just an agricultural crisis.

It was a criminal case.

The LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section took the lead, with the FBI and USDA investigators in tow.

They started out with what was obvious, the letter itself.

Forensic labs combed over the pages and envelopes, for fingerprints, trace fibers, anything that might tie it to a center.

Officials were cagy about what, if anything they found.

Publicly, no leads ever emerged from that analysis.

Meanwhile, detectives tried to match the strange geography of the infestation with possible human involvement.

Surveillance was quietly deployed in neighborhoods where fresh clusters of flies kept appearing.

But how can you catch someone in the act of releasing insects?

Even if you had plainclothes officers on every block, it's hard to spot someone with a jar of flies in their jacket.

In late December nineteen eighty nine, LAPD Commander William Booth told the press investigators had made some progress, but refused to elaborate.

That vague hint only fueled rumors.

Was it an environmental extremist, a disgruntled agriculture employee, maybe a rogue student from one of California's many entomology programs.

The speculation spiraled.

What investigators did know was that the breeder's threats hid a nerve, Whether reel or fake, The letters forced officials to consider the unthinkable that someone might weaponize a bug no bigger than a finger nail to hold California's food supply hostage.

As one agricultural official later admitted, whether it was real or not, we had to respond as if it was real.

By early nineteen ninety, the medfly infestation was still raging.

Helicopters kept flying, quarantines kept expanding, and in February, the USD bought a classify that in the Los Angeles Times the one I mentioned a few minutes ago, it read like a plea more than a sting.

Authorities were essentially saying, will negotiate, Please call us.

If the breeders saw the ad, they did not take the bait.

They never responded.

No one was ever caught smuggling flies, no lab was ever exposed as a source, and no arrest were made.

In the end.

What ended the outbreak wasn't a breakthrough in the investigation, but a tactical shift in pest control.

By March of nineteen ninety, California finally gave up on the endless malathion sprang and leaned almost entirely on sterile insect technique.

Millions of radiation sterilized males were released over Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

Slowly, the medfly population collapsed by November of nineteen ninety, sixteen, exhausting months after it began, The medfly outbreak was officially declared over.

It was the last major medfly crisis California has faced to this day.

All incursions have happened since, but nothing on that scale.

The helicopters sprang malathion at night never returned in that sense the breeders, whether they were real or imagined one.

As for the criminal case, it simply withered away.

No suspects were ever publicly named.

The FBI backed away once it was clear no federal terrorism charges were coming, but California lawmakers did not forget.

In June of nineteen ninety, the state passed a bill making it a felony to deliberately import or spread the Mediterranean fruit fly before then believe it or not doing so was only a misdemeanor.

The laws spelt it out plainly.

Any person who wilfully and knowingly imports, into, or transports or ships within this state a Mediterranean fruit fly is guilty of a felony.

This was a direct response to the breeders.

Airports and postal centers beefed up inspections more fruit was seized at the borders, but the breeders never resurfaced.

We'll be right back after another quick word from our sponsors.

With the infestation beaten back, but the case unsolved.

The question has lingered for decades, who, if anyone, was really behind it.

Without arrest or hard evidence, the breeder's letter became a kind of Russ Shark test.

Investigators, scientists, and journalists of all floated theories, but none have led to any definitive answers.

One explanation is the most straightforward.

The breeders were exactly who they said they were, an eco sabotur cell small, secretive and furious about aerial malathion spring, and they decided to fight pesticide with pest.

The anomalies of nineteen eighty nine certainly fit their story.

The way medflies popped up just beyond spray zones, the overwhelming number of females being trapped, the scarcity of larva in the fruit, All of this could point to someone deliberately seating adult flies, especially pregnant females, and two targeted neighborhoods.

If that's true, then California was hit with one of the first successful acts of entomological sabotage in US history.

The breeders forced a sixty million dollars eradication campaign, drove the state away from malatheon spraying, and proved a point about how fragile the food system really is.

The problem is there's no hard evidence.

There were never any arrest, there were no labs busted, No one was ever caught red handed.

Entomologist noted that breeding and distributing thousands of medflies would have required skill, space, and an almost absurd level of luck.

As one USDA scientist said at the time, we don't see any hard evidence that the letter writer has the wherewithal to do what he has threatened.

It's one thing to boast in a letter, it's another to pull off a region wide outbreak.

So that brings us to the second theory that the letter was a hoax and the outbreak was natural, just strange.

Under this view, the breeders never existed.

They were just opportunists, maybe alone crank with a typewriter who took credit for a bad year.

Agricultural officials publicly blamed illegal fruit imports in nineteen eighty nine, the same culprit that they always cited travelers bring in a mango or guava from an infested region, it carries eggs or larvae, and suddenly Los Angeles has a problem.

Southern California is a bit of a hub for global travel.

It is entirely possible that multiple introductions happened at once.

Seating the widespread outbreak, and in fairness, medflies had shown up almost every year since the mid nineteen seventies.

Nineteen eighty nine was extreme, but not impossible.

Officials remembered a similar prank letter surfacing during the nineteen eighty one crisis, quickly dismissed as fake.

Why couldn't the breeders be the same thing, just timed better?

Years later, some analysts would argue exactly that that the letter was unlikely to have actually been carried out, and the medflies themselves had hardly been in hiding.

A third theory, perhaps more controversial, comes from UC Davis entomologist James Carry suggested the outbreak wasn't sabotage or a fresh import, but rather a re emergence of medflies that had never really left.

In his view, earlier eradication campaigns in the nineteen eighties might not have killed every last insect a few survivors could have persisted in backyard fruit trees, lying low until conditions allowed them to multiply again.

Carrie even mapped old infestation sites against the nineteen eighty nine hotspots and found that they overlapped suspiciously well.

He stated, is it just a coincidence exactly the same time, at exactly the same place.

I just can't buy it.

If true, that would mean that the medfly had established itself in California long before the state admitted it.

For years, officials insisted the pest was never resident, that every outbreak was an isolated incursion.

Admitting otherwise would have been political suicide.

But Carrie's theory linkers as a reminder that sometimes nature is more stubborn than paperwork allows.

There were some other, more exotic ideas.

Some wondered if an insider at a stere fly rearing facility had slipped up or even sabotage debatch so fertile flies were released instead of sterile ones.

Others mused about motivations outside of environmentalism, maybe a disgruntled farmer or competitor, or even a government ploy to justify more funding.

None of those ever really gained traction, so the debate still sits where it did in nineteen ninety.

Was the medfly crisis of nineteen eighty nine, the result of eco terrorist with a grudge, a hoaxer with good timing, or simply nature doing what it does best, reminding us that it doesn't care about our borders or our billion dollar industries.

By the end of nineteen ninety, the helicopters were gone, the quarantines were lifted, and officials declared victory.

The medflies were once again evicted, but the bigger question whether the INFAI station had been natural or man made, was never answered.

The breeders vanished as suddenly as they appeared.

It was as if they had dissolved into thin air, leaving only that one typed manifesto and a year of chaos in their wake.

California lawmakers tried to make sure it would not happen again.

In June nineteen ninety, the state made it a felony to deliberately import or spread medflies.

Inspectors at airports and postal facilities tightened their checks, agricultural departments doubled down on preventative trapping, and perhaps more significantly, California abandoned the idea of mass aerial malaffion spring for good, as I touched on just a moment ago.

From the mid nineteen nineties onward, the state has relied almost entirely on sterile insect technique and ground based measures, approaches that were less controversial, more sustainable, and frankly, more palatable to a public still bitter about the nightly chemical showers of the nineteen eighties.

In that sense, the breeders real or not, got what they wanted.

The helicopters carrying malathion never came back.

The case against this group has stayed cold, though yet the memory of the outbreak has linkered in agricultural circles as a cautionary tale.

In two thousand and one, after the anthrax attacks, federal biosecurity officials even revisited the breeder's letter as an example of how vulnerable the food system could be.

Agro Terrorism, a term barely used since nineteen eighty nine, suddenly entered the national lexicon, and the medfly mystery from California was cited as one of the few real world cases to point to.

Decades later, this story remains unsolved, where the breeders a genuine eco terrorist cell that has successfully forced a policy change through biological sabotage.

Were they pranksters exploiting coincidence, or were they never involved at all, with Mother Nature doing the dirty work while humans bickered about who to blame.

Without evidence, we may never know.

What we do know is that California, learned from the ordeal, built one of the most vigilant pest monitoring systems in the world, trapping millions of flies annually to catch even the smallest incursion, And in the year since, medflies have still appeared a handful in Dixon in two thousand and seven, a cluster in two thousand and eight, a few in Los Angeles as recently as twenty fourteen, but each was stamped out quickly.

None have ever again reached the scale of nineteen eighty nine.

Still, the specter of the breeders hangs over every new detection, because, whether they existed or not, they forced California to confront something that It doesn't take bombs or bullets to terrorize a state.

Sometimes all it takes is a handful of bugs.

As of this recording, the story of the nineteen eighty nine California medfly attack remains unresolved.

Thank you all for listening to another episode of Unresolved.

I'm going to keep the end credits brief again for this one because I was originally planning to cover another story, that of the three Decker girls who were murdered in Washington State, believed to be murdered by their father, Travis Decker.

I had a full script written, but a couple of days before I went to record, there was a major news update and that story maybe in the process of resolving itself.

So instead I pivoted to this one, which was in the process of being written and almost fully complete.

I kind of put it into high gear and finished it myself, but I hope you enjoyed it.

It was an interesting, strange mystery, and we should be back with another full length episode next week.

However, I would like to think Amelia White, who wrote and researched the brunt of this episode.

I've been your host, Michael Wheelan, and I will be back with another full length episode next week.

Until then, I hope you all stay safe, stay healthy, and I will talk to you.

Come and come.

And come.

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