People Who Do Something About the Weather

Weather Modification, Part 1

Weather modification is often debunked or characterized as misinformation, which, of course, means that it is true. Although it’s better known by its government euphemism of “geo-engineering,” weather modifcation has been going on for decades. In fact, the United States (U.S.) has already weaponized it. No wonder they tell us it’s not real.

Geo-engineers are typically rabid advocates of climate panic and warn us that merely controlling emissions will do nothing to avert inevitable climate collapse of the world. And they tell us that geo-engineers are not really interested in modifying the weather, it’s all about deflecting atmospheric heat away from the earth. That’s why the National Academies of Sciences wants to take $100M of our tax dollars and spend it on geo-engineering.

A Short History of Stuff that Never Happened

Let’s call it what it is: weather modification. It’s real, we’ve done it, and it’s not a conspiracy theory. Here is the timeline as best it can be pieced together—this information is strewn all over the internet in a “hide in plain sight” sort of motif.

• Let’s start with October 13, 1947, which is the first time the U.S. government tried to manipulate a hurricane. This traces back to Project Cirrus, the brainchild of the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Air Force, and General Electric. The hurricane—which was headed out to sea—was seeded and then abruptly changed course and hit Savannah, Georgia. People blamed the government, and Project Cirrus was “closed down” (the same way “MK Ultra” was closed down). Lawsuits were filed, but the court found that since another hurricane had taken a similar route, it could not be proven the government was responsible.

• From 1948 to 1965, the government denied it seeded hurricanes. Or at least some hurricanes.

• In 1955, the US Weather Bureau’s National Hurricane Research project (NHR) was officially started to see if they could modify hurricanes, you know, that thing they weren’t doing.

• In 1958, the NHR tried to manipulate a naturally occurring storm, Hurricane Daisy, by dropping flares into the eye, but the equipment malfunctioned and the mission was a bust.

• In 1961, the NHR tried again with Hurricane Esther and weakened winds by 10%.

• By 1962, the NHR experiments led to the creation of Project Stormfury which lasted to 1983. They seeded clouds with silver iodide to supercool hurricanes with the goal of causing them to fizzle out. This did not work well. Successes were modest; most results were inconclusive.

• Also in 1962, Project BATON was trying to manipulate thunderstorms.

• In 1963, Project Stormfury seeded Hurricane Beulah, which had a disorganized eye. A couple of attempts were needed until they could reduce winds by about 20%.  Many more attempts were made with modest to inconclusive results.

• From 1967 to 1972, the U.S. government weaponized weather control in Operation Popeye.

• In 1976, Project Stormfury guys were looking to seed hurricanes around Guam. China said it would be highly displeased if a deflected storm did damage to China.

Operation Popeye

Weather modification was used as a weapon by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Vietnam, like other Southeast Asian nations, does not have seasons in the sense of temperature changes. In Vietnam, there is the dry season and the monsoon season, when daily downpours are common. The monsoon or rainy season lasts from May to October and Vietnam can get from 55 to 94 inches of rain a year. House flooding is not uncommon during the monsoon season, and street flooding, even road closures, are a fact of life.

As the U.S. was engaging in the war in Vietnam, it was observed that rain often shut down the various supply lines that the North Vietnamese used to bring supplies into war zone. The U.S. military strategy was to increase the rainfall and/or extend the rainy season to keep the roads impassable or at least slow supply chains down to a crawl in the mud.

Operation Popeye got its start in 1966 in an area of Laos. During the test runs, they seeded 50 clouds and 82% of the cloud seeds resulted in rain. This led the scientists to think this had possible military application.

From Laos test runs, they moved on to Vietnam, but sometimes the clouds they seeded in Laos did the traveling for them. In at least one test in Laos, a cloud moved from Laos into Vietnam and kept raining. A memo from then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk announced with some pride, “The U.S. government has realized a capability of significant weather modification.”

The program had some military advantages because it was highly successful, required limited personnel, and costs were “so low as to be insignificant.” According to reports, Operation Popeye increased the rain by 50% for 30 to 45 days of the rainy season.

Operation Popeye in Vietnam caused damaging monsoon rains to wash out roads and facilitate U.S. military operations. This really happened from 1967 to 1972. The government kept it top secret at the time and even today, you’re accused of being a conspiracy theorist if you say it even happened. Operation Popeye was born of Project Stormfury, another weather modification program that was pioneered in California and seeded clouds.

Dr. Livingston, I Presume

The father of weaponized weather was Dr. Waylon “Ben” Livington, a man who got a master’s degree in cloud physics. Livington, a native of Midland, Texas, was the brains behind Operation Popeye. So secret was Operation Popeye that Secretary of Defense at the time, Melvin Laird, denied its existence when testifying before Congress; some say he did not perjure himself but was kept in the dark by his own military because Operation Popeye was too secret and dangerous. Operation Popeye was a new form of warfare and the government was not sure what would happen if it went public. Thus, “weather modification” became a conspiracy theory. After all, who could object to Operation Popeye, if it didn’t exist! (Yet there was plenty of evidence it did exist if you looked for it!)

Dr. Livingston briefed Lydon Baines Johnson (LBJ) about his work in the 1960s, at a time when hurricane control was one of LBJ’s “national priorities.” Livington founded Weather Engineering, Inc., and other ventures with his scientific skills. One of his clients was the Coors Brewery, when they hired Livington’s weather guys for “hail suppression” to assure a good barely crop for their beer. Livington died in 2022 at the age of 94.

Weather Or Not?

Among weather modification techniques that are easy to find out about are cloud seeding (to make rain), hail suppression, fog dissipation, and lightning reduction. There are also ways to suppress hurricanes and (in theory at least) to make a hurricane more powerful.

The military brilliance of Operation Popeye was not just prolonging and exacerbating the monsoons of Vietnam, it was doing it in a way that the enemy would not even notice. There is no doubt that it was a scientific success. It worked. Of course, they had to time their cloud-seeding expeditions to cloud formations for maximum effect and they had to do their missions in ways that would not draw attention. Whether the missions were worth doing or not is another question—but they could control the weather.

What is not known were the long-term effects of Operation Popeye.

• Did the cloud seeding have after-effects?

• Did it change regional climate patterns?

• How did it impact agriculture and the water table?

• Could they lose control of their efforts, that is, could they accidentally wind up making too much rain?

• How far do seeded clouds travel? Can that be controlled?

No one knows.

A bigger question is the ethics of it all. Was it ethical to fight war in this way, or does “all’s fair in love and war” include weather modification? Should there be international guidelines on this topic?

Yes, Weather Modification Exists

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a section on its website about Weather Modification Project Reports. And if you say it doesn’t exist, let me refer you to the Weather Modification Act of 1976 (Section 15 of CFR 908) which says that if you do this kind of thing, you have to notify NOAA about it at least 10 days ahead of time. NOAA even runs a Weather Program Office to make that convenient, which suggests to me they get more than sporadic requests for permission to change our weather. In fact, this year, NOAA has $12.8M to dish out in grants for weather modification stuff. When people say weather modification doesn’t exist, how come we have laws to regulate it and spent tax money giving grants to people who do it?

So here are some of the things that NOAA puts under “weather modification:”

• Cloud seeding (produces rain or ice or snow)

• Fire (to evaporate fog or influence convective circulation)

• Modification of solar radiation (using gases, dusts, aerosols)

• Modification of land or water surfaces (powders, liquid sprays, dyes, others)

• Releasing electrically charged or radioactive particles or ions into atmosphere

• Shock waves, sonic energy, acoustic sources into the atmosphere

• Artificial wind generation

• Lasers or other sources of electromagnetic radiation (EMR)

• Other activities….

NOAA says that if your weather modification activities do not affect the weather outside of the “area of operation” you don’t even need to report it. A ski lodge can generate its own snow, for instance, without getting the government involved. In case you think weather modification is a conspiracy theory, here is a slightly used NOAA form for reporting weather modification.

HAARP, oh!

The High-Frequency Active Auroral Resarch Program (HAARP) is based in Alaska as part of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Its purpose is to study the ionosphere, which is a layer about 50 to 400 miles above the surface of the earth. You could think of the ionosphere as the “skin” separating our atmosphere from outer space. HAARP operates high-frequency transmitters and other space-age toys that send signals into the ionosphere in order to “excite” a specific region of the ionosphere for study. They say it helps them study the weather because, in real life, weather events are random and may occur without warning, but with HAARP, they can be controlled.

In other words, HAARP helps control the weather so we can better learn how to control the weather, which, of course, we are not doing.

HAARP started in 1990 and its main goal was to study radio waves in the upper atmosphere. From 1990 to 2014, HAARP was run by the Air Force and the Navy, but in 2015, it was transferred to the University of Alaska under an “education partnership agreement.” HAARP works with many universities including Stanford, Dartmouth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Cornell, and University of Tulsa and others.

HAARP also runs the Subauroral Geophysical Observatory for Space Physics and Radio Science (SAGO) to study the near-earth “geospace.”

Wouldn’t it be fun to go visit the HAARP facilities? Well, you can’t unless you can nab an invitation to one of their “annual” open house events. If you can find out when they’re being held, pretty much anyone can attend. The last one I know about happened in 2022. The problem is finding out when they’re having them. This place looks more interesting than Area 51.

How is this for even more fun? You can rent out the HAARP facilities on a pay-per-use model. Not being an evil genius intent on world destruction, I have no idea how or why a person would do this.

HAARP says it cannot control or manipulate the weather, since it’s looking at the ionosphere and weather happens in the more immediate atmosphere. For instance, the sun sometimes impacts the ionosphere, but those solar storms do not affect local weather, so HAARP cannot either.

Just the other day in October 2024, HAARP went on record to say that it cannot create hurricanes but the way it said it, it implied that hurricanes cannot be created. While it may be true that HAARP cannot create hurricanes, I’m not so certain the second sentence is false. I’m not so certain either sentence is false.

On October 9, 2024, the day Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida, Reuters did a fact check and pronounced that Milton was not the result of weather control. But how could Reuters know something this complex so quickly? Besides, it’s extremely difficult to prove a counter-factual (proving something is “not” something is nearly impossible). And one of the beauties of weather modification is that it can happen without leaving fingerprints. So if you ask me, Reuters is a little quick to be so certain.

And our mainstream media can take comfort in the fact that in 2014, NOAA said they weren’t working on hurricanes. So case closed.

Tinfoil Hat Time

They say we lack the science and/or technology to make hurricanes, but it is possible to seed clouds with nanoparticles that respond to frequencies. Then you use HAARP technology to send high-frequency energy into the ionosphere. This heats specific areas, changes electronic density, and boosts temperatures. This can influence pressure systems which can cause hurricanes. So in theory at least, it would be quite possible to create a hurricane. But what do I know? I don’t even have an undergraduate degree in cloud physics.

Then there are the NEXRAD towers. NEXRAD stands for next-generation weather radar. These NEXRAD towers are run by the National Weather Service, under NOAA. They normally scan the atmosphere to find weather patterns, but it is suspected they can help steer storms. They send out energy in pulses and these pulses bounce off raindrops or other atmospheric particles. This can increase moisture in the atmosphere and they might be able to influence stormy intensity or even guide storm movements.

And Forbes has just reported on Bill Gates’ plan to spray dust into the atmosphere to help block out the sun. It’s called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) and he’s in cahoots with Harvard. They plan on spraying calcium carbonate, which they say is nontoxic (heard that before) into the atmosphere. This material will then reflect the sun’s light back and cool the earth. Environmentalists are not crazy with spraying random chemicals in the atmosphere and meteorologists are worried that it will cause unforeseen events. There are many unknowns:

• Is this Bill Gates’ dust safe?

• Can we test it on Bill Gates?

• How much dust do we need?

• Who will study long-term effects?

• Will we live long enough to study the long-term effects?

• Can we control where the effects are felt and will it do damage?

• How much will the temperatures drop?

• What consequences will that have?

• How can we stop Bill Gates?

George Soros has also proposed something similar in 2023 at the Munich Security Council. Maybe they should call it the Insecurity Council. The arch-villain George Soros is in favor of brightening the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun away from the earth and, in that way, lower the earth’s temperature. It would involve positioning ships all around the Arctic that could spray salt water into the sky and help the clouds to keep the sun at bay. It’s less toxic than what Gates wants to do but it seems a little expensive to spray salt water into the air nonstop from here to eternity.

And it’s not just us. There is an Earth Observing Labortory in Kiruna, Sweden, doing some of the same stuff. Right now, they’re studying “cold air outbreaks” in the subarctic. These are those arctic blasts that sometimes do massive damage when they hit more temperate regions not used to subzero temperatures.

So what is going on?

• Many of the people involved in this, from crazy lunatics like Bill Gates and George Soros to politicians to the military to scientists stationed in remote Alaska, believe that technology is good and can fix things.

• The people who embrace global warming see it as an urgent world-wide crisis that demands an immediate and extreme solution. This fits in nicely with their desire for one-world government.

• Time magazine has suggested that some of these forces (like Gates and Soros) have led charmed lives—they’ve seen the things they’ve touched turn to gold and thus they assume all of their ideas will work.

However… if weather modification, I mean geo-engineering, is such a fine idea, why is everyone insisting it’s not happening?