5 Massive Military Spheres They Aren't Telling You About

It looks like a relic from another world—a four-story steel orb, half-buried behind chain-link fencing in Maryland. Locals call it the Eight Ball. Once, it was the beating heart of America’s secret biological weapons program, a million-liter sphere built to test the deadliest substances on Earth. The sphere—131 tons of carbon steel, walls an inch and quarter thick—was engineered to survive a biological bomb blast from the inside. Inside its hollow lung, clouds of pathogens once bloomed in controlled darkness: anthrax, tularemia, Q fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis. Here, in the heart of Fort Detrick, the air was weaponized. It began in 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt quietly approved biological warfare research. What the public didn’t know was that the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service had already started experimenting in secret...