BODY SNATCHING: The Shocking Untold True Story of Project Sunshine

A Cold-War Secret Buried in Bones

What if the greatest nuclear cover-up wasn't an explosion - but a grave robbery?

Body Snatching exposes Project Sunshine, the US-led program that harvested more than 1,500 corpses and ultimately catalogued 21,830 bone specimens - one-third taken from infants - to map radioactive fallout inside the human body. From morgues in Chicago to funeral homes in Australia, agents carved limbs from the dead, stitched the bodies to disguise the theft, and air-shipped the samples on dry ice to secret laboratories while heart-broken families mourned at funerals they believed were intact.

The Story Behind the Statistics

When Nobel laureate Dr. Willard Libby warned that strontium-90 would saturate every child's skeleton, the Atomic Energy Commission issued a chilling order: find a good body-snatcher. Surgeons, coroners, and even clergy joined the scheme as death certificates were destroyed and six-digit codes replaced names. Sunshine's covert spending - $218,300 in "hospital-modernization" grants - bought silence and bones alike. The data these specimens produced shaped US radiation guidelines, briefed President Kennedy in the Oval Office, and helped push superpowers toward the 1963 Partial Test-Ban Treaty.

Inside You'll Discover

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• The 1955 "body-snatcher" memo that green-lit global cadaver raids
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• Libby's radiological time bomb: how strontium-90 masquerades as calcium and turns children's bones into silent Geiger counters
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• The Baby Tooth Survey that mobilized 320,000 kids and dragged nuclear secrecy into daylight
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• Stolen infants, papier-mache stand-ins, and funeral directors sworn to secrecy - accounts too shocking for fiction
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• Modern echoes: from IRB safeguards born of Sunshine's shame to today's fights over DNA privacy, pandemic autopsies, and AI bio-surveillance
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Why You Can't Look Away

Blending investigative journalism, Cold-War history, and true-crime pacing, Covella crafts a narrative that reads like a thriller yet forces readers to confront science's darkest ethical compromises. Each chapter pairs forensic detail with human stories - such as the Manchester mother who learned years later that her baby's legs had been removed - proving how fear of annihilation can eclipse respect for the dead.

"Proof, in our own children's bones, of the invisible dangers we unleash." - President John F. Kennedy, 1963

Perfect For Readers Who...

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• Devoured The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or Killers of the Flower Moon
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• Seek shocking true stories that challenge the morality of science and government
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• Crave carefully sourced nonfiction that grips like fiction and sparks debate long after the final page
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Turn the page and decide whether humanity's darkest experiments have truly ended - or simply gone deeper underground.