John Wayne Long

‘The Conqueror’ is a Hollywood movie. It was financed by billionaire Howard Hughes. It stars John Wayne as Temujin aka Genghis Khan.
It didn’t do very well at the box office but it’s a decent movie.
‘The Conqueror’ though has terrible legacy.
Most of its stars died earlier than one would expect. Pedro Armendariz died of suicide and Lee Van Cleef of natural causes. I’m not talking about them. Three leads and its actor turned director died - Susan Hayward, Dick Powell, Agnes Moorehead and the duke himself, John Wayne, all died from cancer.
Only a coincidence or was something else the cause?
The movie was made in 1954 in St. George, Utah.
Hollywood dollars took the town's mind off of other recent problems.
Local prospectors reported radiation readings from geiger counters that indicated large caches of uranium. Only when the miners went to dig – they didn’t find any uranium.
Local ranchers had reported a rash of mysterious livestock deaths.
Many suspected the livestock losses were caused by atomic bomb tests at nearby Yucca Flats in Nevada. The Atomic Energy Commission assured locals the tests were perfectly safe. Any fallout would be minimal and dissipate quickly.
Alien encounters?
Not quite.
The "Dirty Harry" 32 kiloton atomic bomb was exploded May 19, 1953.
This is the bomb that tainted Snow Canyon movie location.
The bomb exploded about 100 miles away from St. George. It was just one of 126 exploded on the Nevada range from 1951 to 1963.
Cedar City and St. George had been pummeled by 1230 times the permissible fallout level and had stayed that way for more than 16 days.
Sheep began to die. Cattleman were alarmed.
The AEC gave Utah Congressman Douglas Stringfellow a tour of the 1350 square mile test site. Stringfellow told residents the tests posed no danger to the citizens of southern Utah.
The day after Dirty Harry, downwind residents barraged the AEC with complaints. "Reverberations from the atomic tests in Nevada Tuesday echoed in Washington Wednesday as Southern Utah residents protested to Representative Douglas R. Stringfellow (R-Utah) about radiation contamination in the area," narrated The (Salt Lake) Tribune.[93]
Congressman Stringfellow followed up by asking the AEC to stop the Nevada test program because of fallout. The AEC refused.
Stringfellow had been elected in 1952 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican. His candidacy lay in his decorated past as a hero during World War Two. He used this past during his revival-style campaign speeches.
According to him, he had served as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war. This was the agency that later turned into the CIA. He claimed that at one point he had participated in a top-secret mission to rescue a German atomic physicist, Otto Hahn, from behind enemy lines and transport him to England. He also claimed that he had been captured by the Germans and held in Belsen prison, where he had been brutally tortured, causing him to become a paraplegic. He said that while lying wounded he had undergone an intense religious experience, and it was through this new-found faith, as well as the aid of the anti-Nazi underground, that he had escaped from the prison. He claimed the Silver Star for his services.
He was widely acclaimed in the media. It even aired on the national television show ‘This is Your Life’. Stringfellow also frequently travelled around Utah preaching about his wartime religious experience with the blessing of the Mormon church.
When running for reelection in 1954 his past was exposed as a fraud. They revealed that Stringfellow actually wasn't a paraplegic at all. He had been wounded from a mine explosion during a routine mission in France and could walk with the aid of a cane.
Stringfellow had not worked for the OSS. He had been a private in the Army Air Forces, and he had never won the Silver Star. Nearly his entire military career was made up. Stringfellow claimed he attended Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, but neither institution had any record of his attendance.
The Mormon church ordered Stringfellow to make a public confession, which he did. He was replaced just sixteen days before the election by Henry Aldous Dixon.
He ended up as a radio announcer and died at the young age of 44.
When producers considered shooting The Conqueror in southern Utah they were concerned about about nuclear fallout. Government experts assured Powell and the producers that radiation levels were safe. The script called for several giant battle scenes. Electric fans were set up to insure the fight scenes had a certain wind-blown realism. The film-makers did not want to cover the cast and crew with radioactive dust.
Hayward brought her nine-year-old twins. Wayne arrived with his two sons, Michael and Patrick. Cast and extras rolled in the dirt, and were hit by dust clouds from the giant wind machines. It was such a constant that the food provided by craft services (a kind of traveling cafe for the crew) was coated with dust. Because of the seal of approval, no one worried about the soil. It seemed to work its way into the hair, clothing and bodies of everyone working on the film. It contained Strontium 90, cesium 137, radio iodine, and plutonium.
Some shots needed to complete the movie after shooting in St. George finished. To match the location, Hughes shipped over 60 tons of Utah dirt to Hollywood, contaminating some Los Angeles studio.
And now – the death parade :
Pedro Armendariz was guest of honor at a June 9 party given by the film producers. Nine days later, Armendariz shot himself in his bed at the UCLA Medical Center. The actor had committed suicide rather than face a protracted death from lymph cancer. Armendariz had co-starred with John Wayne in The Conqueror.
Six months earlier, Dick Powell had succumbed to stomach cancer. The popular actor had served as director on The Conqueror. He was producing the popular TV show that bore his name at the time.
Agnes Moorehead died of uterine cancer in 1974.
Susan Hayward contracted brain and lung cancer in 1972. She would battle the disease until finally dying in 1975.
John Wayne spent many years battling lung cancer. He had his first cancer operation in 1964. Having thought he beat "the big C," the Duke would go onto to make films for a decade and a half. Ironically, his last film was "The Shootist." Made in 1976, it was the story of an aging gunfighter who discovers he has cancer. Wayne finally gave up the ghost on June 11, 1979, the last of the major players from "The Conqueror." Wayne had smoked four packs of unfiltered Camels a day, while Hayward had a two-pack-a-day habit. However, the release of AEC documents through the Freedom of Information Act shed more light on the cause of all these cancer deaths.
The southern Utahn downwinders suit against the AEC caused people to take a second look at "The Conqueror." A 1980 report reveals that 91 crew members contracted cancer and nearly half of them had died from the disease.
This doesn’t include the indian extras that had subbed for the Mongol horde. No one has ever studied their cancer death rate.
The Atomic Energy Commission spent years covering up the alarming cancer rates around the Yucca Flats test range. Over 15,000 cancer deaths could be related to the 11 years of open air atomic bomb tests in Nevada, according to a recent Department of Health report. Another 20,000 non-fatal cancer cases may also be related.
The toll was not only among the stars of "The Conqueror." Wayne's sons, Michael and Patrick also developed health problems that may be related to the tests. Patrick had a benign tumor removed and Michael suffered, but recovered from skin cancer. Both were instrumental in setting up the John Wayne Cancer Institute. On April 5, 2003, Michael Wayne died following a operation. He had the disease Lupus. "The Conqueror" death toll keeps mounting.
John Wayne once noted, "land and money, the two things that drive men mad."
Take a look at some movies of what the United States Department of Energy considers to be good science :
Office of Scientific and Technical Information
http://www.osti.gov/historicalfilms/filmlist.html