Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, cites the Swiss-born discoverer of the Lyme pathogen, Willy Burgdorfer, as saying that the Lyme epidemic was a military experiment that had gone wrong.
Burgdorfer, who died in 2014, worked as a bioweapons researcher for the US military and said he was tasked with breeding fleas, ticks, mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects, and infecting them with pathogens that cause human diseases.
Anyone remember Jesse Ventura?
Maybe. I'll go with conspiracy theory until evidence shows up.
@altschmerz No, it's not. That's why I said "Maybe." Still, ticks? Countermeasures against ticks are cheap and effective though, and ticks don't exactly seek out hosts. It seems like a poor choice of vector for a biological agent, your infection rate would be low to begin with, and almost nil if defended against. And it's neither a contagious nor debilitating disease, again an odd choice for a bioweapon. And before 1969 was long before DNA was fully understood, where did they even come up with this basically almost useless biowarfare disease? the more one thinks about it, the more unlikely it seems.