Ticks of War: Plum Island and the Lyme Conspiracy

A mysterious outbreak. A government lab on an isolated island. And a growing number of people who believe the U.S. may have accidentally—or deliberately—unleashed a biological weapon on its own soil.

This episode of Unsettled: The Hidden Record investigates the origins of Lyme disease and its suspected link to Plum Island, the U.S. government's top-secret animal disease research facility just off the coast of New York.

Through declassified documents, congressional testimony, and decades of silence, we examine the theory that Lyme disease may have started not in nature—but in a lab. Was it part of Cold War-era bio-weapons research? An accident covered up to avoid scandal? Or just a tragic coincidence?

The answers are murky, the records incomplete—but the pattern is disturbingly familiar. What began as rumor now bears the weight of buried evidence. This is not fiction. This is the record.