Recently revealed records confirmed that emergency services were secretly deployed in Disneyland, California, in 1995 after a suspicious VHS tape was mailed to the popular theme park, referencing “nerve gas” and “dead guest,” CBS affiliate News 6 reported, based on uncovered documents.
The secret tape saw counterterrorism investigations launched at the beloved family theme park, as federal authorities feared a potential connection to the Japanese doomsday cult, which took the lives of more than a dozen people on a subway only weeks before the tape arrived.
The tape also followed the detonation of a bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people.
Then-US president Bill Clinton had addressed the Disneyland threat during a conference on the bombing, but details were not released to the general public.
“There was one recent incident with which I was intimately familiar, which involved a quick and secret deployment of a major United States effort of the FBI, FEMA, Public Health Service, and Army personnel,” Clinton said. “We went to the place, and we were ready. We were ready to try to prevent it. And if it occurred, we were ready to respond.”
What was on the tape?
The tape revealed an unknown person wearing gloves handling jars of unknown liquids and removing unidentified items wrapped in foil from a freezer.
At the bottom of the screen, “nerve gas” appeared, and the words “dead guest” appeared over a video of the park’s parking lot. The video hinted at a potential attack on April 14, 1995, showing a calendar marked with the date and a clock displaying 9 o’clock.
While a copy of the tape was only recovered by News 6 after a freedom of information request in 2021, and received this year, a copy had already made its way onto YouTube years prior after the tape was discovered in 2019 in a bin full of VHS tapes at a Goodwill thrift store in Portland, Oregon.