Welsome discovered the experiments while sifting through documents at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque in the spring of 1987. The reports were "stiff with age and smelled of dust," and they identified the victims only by code names.

In July 1987, newly hired Albuquerque Tribune reporter Eileen Welsome was thumbing through declassified government documents on radioactive waste dumps at the local Air Force base when a footnote caught her eye. It was about plutonium experiments on humans.

Welsome's investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American history.

In November 1993, the Albuquerque Tribune published a series of articles by reporter Eileen Welsome citing a group of hospital patients who had been injected with plutonium as part of a Government-sponsored research study begun before the end of World War II.

In response to the October 3, 1995 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments report to the President, the Report on Search for Human Radiation Experiment Records 1944 - 1994 was prepared by the Department of Defense Radiation Experiments Command Center. This publication details the Department's search for records of possible human radiation experiments, studies or projects conducted from 1944 to 1994, based on available DoD documents.

Welsome found that footnote purely by accident while she was on the hunt for a different story. "I was doing a story about Kirtland Air Force Base, because someone said, 'Hey, there's explosives in the water down in the valley,'" she said. She tracked down an Air Force Special Weapons Laboratory official, who confirmed that animal experiments had been performed and allowed her to look through the documents kept in a basement.

This riveting report greatly expands on Welsome's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 articles in the Albuquerque Tribune, which told how 18 men, women and children scattered in hospital wards across the country were injected with plutonium by U.S. Army and Manhattan Project doctors between 1945 and 1947.

It was a footnote in a in a declassified document on animal experiments and what was then called the weapons laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. And it was a footnote. It was a footnote in it. And I was actually at the time looking into these radioactive animal dumps at the Air Force base.

Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of human radiation experiments to determine the effects of ionizing radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless. Much information about these programs was classified and kept secret. In the 1990s, Eileen Welsome's reports on radiation testing for The Albuquerque Tribune prompted the creation of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments by executive order of President Bill Clinton; it published results in 1995. Welsome later wrote a book called The Plutonium Files.

She made some telephone calls, learning that technical papers about the animal radiation experiments could be viewed at the Kirtland base. She tracked down technical reports, talked to scientists, used a federal law called the Freedom of Information Act to ask the U.S. Energy Department for documents. Welsome learned that 18 people had been injected with plutonium during the experiment.

The Roadmap summarizes the Department's search for records about government conducted or sponsored Cold War human radiation experiments. These once classified documents provide information on human radiation experiments during the early days of the Cold War. Users are able to view images of the original documents, replete with classification stamps, hand-written notes, and other marginalia.

The Report on Search for Human Radiation Experiment Records documents the Department of Defense involvement in ionizing radiation research with human subjects that occurred between 1944 to 1994.

This book delves into the numerous covert, government-funded radiation studies carried out on unaware Americans throughout the Cold War period. Welsome was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her pioneering research and writing regarding these experiments.

To date, over 200 radiation tests and experiments have been identified. Much of the documentation on these experiments was classified, and only in recent years have agencies begun systematic searches and declassification of records relating to human radiation experiments.

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome. It is a history of United States government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning series Welsome wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune. The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work.

Thousands of documents were declassified and several hearings were held. In 1995, the DOE released a report which detailed the experiments, made ethical judgments, and gave recommendations to Congress on how to proceed. These efforts followed growing public concern and investigative reporting that had revealed previously secret human radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War.

Denver-based journalist Eileen Welsome reveals how as a reporter for the tiny Albuquerque Tribune (circulation 35,000) she uncovered one of the country’s great Cold War secrets: the U.S. government had knowingly exposed thousands of human Guinea pigs with radiation poisoning including 18 Americans who had plutonium injected directly into their bloodstream. I noticed that in the document there were several radioactive animal dumps on this air force base.

In a series of articles for the Albuquerque Tribune that earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, Welsome had profiled five of eighteen hospital patients who had been injected with plutonium between 1945 and 1947. As Welsome concluded in her book The Plutonium Files (1999), “the story was much bigger than anyone had imagined. It turned out that thousands of human radiation studies had been conducted during the Cold War.”

Welsome's remarkable investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American history.

Pit By Dave McCoy, Director, Citizen Action New Mexico Bizarre and cruel tests performed at Sandia National Laboratories resulted in the deaths of thousands of animals, according to Freedom of Information (FOIA) documents obtained by public advocacy group Citizen Action New Mexico. The Department of Energy/Sandia records show that explosive tests and laboratory experiments created hundreds of toxic dumps and spread radioactivity and hazardous wastes into the buildings, soil, air and groundwater at Sandia and Kirtland Air Force Base (KAFB).

Welsome originally discovered the experiments while sifting through some documents at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque in the spring of 1987. What got her curiosity was a report on radioactive animal carcasses. The report identified the victims only by code names.

Welsome was awarded the prize for her articles about the government's human radiation experiments conducted on unwilling and unknowing Americans during the Cold War.

Early Cloud Penetrations – Human Experiment #133. Classified material has been removed in order to make the information available on an unclassified, open publication basis, to any interested parties.

In today's episode, I speak with Eileen Wilsom on her book, which started as a series of articles in a local Albuquerque newspaper and **ended with a government panel exposing decades of human radiation experiments**.[9] The host describes Plutonium Files by Eileen Wilsom as one of the key books on Cold War human radiation experiments.[9] This podcast episode reinforces that Welsome’s reporting unearthed long-hidden government experiments on humans through her document-based investigation.

In her book "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War," journalist Eileen Welsome describes how she first learned of secret plutonium injection experiments when she came across obscure Air Force documents at Kirtland Air Force Base in 1987. The documents, stored in a safe and stamped with classification markings, described experiments in which hospital patients were injected with plutonium without their informed consent.

Secretary O'Leary was referring to Eileen Welsome's research where she recounted the history of a project where eighteen people were injected with plutonium, most of whom appeared not to have known that they were the subject of experiments.[15] The page notes that O'Leary’s 1993–1994 push to locate and open human radiation experiment records was influenced by Welsome’s findings.[15] This provides additional context that Welsome’s discovery of Kirtland and other government documents described experiments that had not been publicly acknowledged before the early 1990s.