ASIDE FROM THE TRISTAN DA CUNHA ARCHIPELAGO, CONSISTING OF THE MAIN island of Tristan da Cunha, the Nightingale islands, Gough Island, and Inaccessible Island, most of the various other tiny chunks of rock in the South Atlantic Ocean are so small and insignificant that no one has ever bothered to grace them with proper names. Only about three hundred people have ever resided permanently on Tristan da Cunha at any given time, and most of the other islands are either wholly uninhabited by humans or populated only intermittently by small scientific or meteorological crews. The islands have been a territory of the United Kingdom since the early nineteenth century, and over the years have sheltered visiting fishermen, whalers, naturalists, fugitives, and even an occasional prince or other royalty.
On the morning of September 9, 1958, some of Tristan’s inhabitants were out on the slopes of the island’s long-dead volcano, tending their potato patches. One of them was G. Francis Harris, who also happened to be the official administrator of the island, officially appointed by the Foreign Office back in London. Suddenly, Harris and his fellow islanders glanced up from their planting, distracted by an unusual phenomenon in those parts: the sound of airplane engines.
Two planes with US Navy markings swept overhead, low enough that the pilots could be seen peering curiously below. The friendly islanders tried waving to them, but the planes responded by abruptly turning back out to sea. “This was thought odd and most unfriendly,” Harris later recounted, particularly since “the islanders had not seen an aeroplane for 15 years, apart from a helicopter, and so they were most surprised.”
Harris instructed the island’s radio operator to try to pick up any unusual signals that might help to figure out what was going on. He found the airwaves alive with enigmatic coded transmissions, but attempts to contact the senders were ignored. “All was in code, but we were able to advise the Royal Navy in South Africa about unusual activity, and quote to them the call signs of three or four American destroyers,” Harris said. From his account, the islanders were rather put out by the experience. It caused “a good deal of consternation,” he noted. “We were never told why they should have been in our area without telling us, or why they appeared so unfriendly, or why they did not pay us a social call!” he complained.1
Not until almost two years later, in July 1960, would Harris and the other residents of Tristan da Cunha find out the answers, when New York Times science reporter Walter Sullivan thought to contact them to ask if they’d happened to notice anything odd going on back in summer 1958. Barely two weeks before the decidedly antisocial US Navy airplanes buzzed the ancient volcanic island, in the depths of a cold and stormy South Atlantic midnight at the end of August 1958, an atomic bomb had been detonated about sixty miles south and three hundred miles above Tristan. Over the ensuing fortnight, two more burst in the night sky, the last only two days before Tristan da Cunha’s aerial flyby.
The islanders had enjoyed front row seats for what was then the most secret Cold War operation in the world, a massive undertaking that would later be revealed to the public as “the greatest scientific experiment of all time.”
And they had slept through the whole thing.