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by
Tim Swartz
2005 could be called “the year of the hurricane,” as more tropical
storms developed in this year than in any time since recorded history.
In fact, there were so many storms that by October, the hurricane name
list had been depleted, forcing officials for the first time since the
early 1940s to start naming storms after letters from the Greek alphabet.
Because of the the massive destruction caused by hurricanes
Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—along with the unusual abundant rainfall
on the East Coast that caused record flooding in some places—suspicions
have been aroused that these storms may have been the result of weather
manipulation by various secret government agencies. While many scoff at
the idea of weather control, the tremendous military applications that
could result from the ability to control the weather cannot be ignored.
With the wild storms that have occurred across the globe over
the last several years, some are now beginning to wonder if someone has
already developed this technology. At one time, such a suggestion would
have left most people doubled over with laughter. But even if the general
public believes that controlling the weather is nothing more than a worn-out
plot device used by super-villains in spy movies, many scientists are
now taking the subject seriously.
Weather has played an important role in the early development of
man. For instance, humans probably first harnessed fire after lightning
struck a tree and caught it on fire. Droughts undoubtedly drove people
to migrate in search of wetter climates, and fierce storms may have forced
ancient people to use their brains in new ways in order to survive. People
first learned that caves offered protection from the elements, which led
to building better and more complex structures in which one could weather
out storms.
Not surprisingly, myths and superstitions quickly developed
about the weather. For instance, Native Americans had rituals and dances
that they believed could induce rain in times of drought. The Finns, on
the other hand, were believed to have the ability to control the weather.
Because of this, the superstitious Vikings refused to take along Finnish
warriors on their raids by sea, as they feared that the Finn’s supernatural
powers would bring the ship bad luck with weather. In fact, remnants of
this belief lasted well into the modern age, with many ship captains being
reluctant to accept Finnish sailors as part of their crew, believing them
to be unlucky.
In the industrial age, people noticed that rainstorms often
followed the firing of cannons and other firearms. Using this observation,
19th-century rainmakers traveled the countryside setting up smoke pots
and vats of chemicals in areas suffering from drought, in an attempt to
induce rain. Interestingly, the rainmaker’s methods were not entirely
without merit. We now know that rain falls when molecules of water collect
around specks of dust in the atmosphere. So if enough smoke and dust is
sent up in the air under the right conditions, it will produce rain.
This theory worked spectacularly in 1916, when in January,
the city officials of San Diego, CA offered rainmaker Charles Hatfield
$10,000 to end their local drought. Hatfield proceeded to set up a series
of 24-foot-tall towers that were topped with boiling vats of a secret
combination of chemicals. Nearby, farmers heard explosions and saw flames,
as smoke filled the cloudless sky and chemical smells permeated the air.
Soon the clouds opened up and it began to rain. Not only did
the reservoirs fill but the rivers flooded, several dams burst, and dozens
of people died. Although Hatfield fulfilled his promise, city officials
blamed the deaths on Hatfield and ran him out of town, without paying
him.
Further
Attempts at Weather Control
Another early attempt to modify the weather happened in 1924, when Prof.
Emory Leon Chaffee of Harvard University dropped electrically charged
sand from an airplane to try and make it rain. Then in 1930, Dutch researcher
W. Veraart dropped dry ice into clouds, also hoping to induce precipitation.
And in 1938, Prof. Henry G. Houghton of MIT sprayed hygroscopic solutions
directly into fog banks in an attempt to dissipate them. However, none
of these early experiments were successful, mostly because the scientists
had inadequate financial support to continue their research.
In fact, it was not until 1946 that there was any verifiable
progress in weather modification. In that year, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (author
Kurt Vonnegut’s brother) discovered that microscopic crystals of
silver iodide caused water vapor to form ice crystals. More than 60 years
later, Vonnegut’s method of using silver iodide to seed clouds to
produce rain is still being used by governments and private companies
worldwide.
However, the Earth’s weather has proved to be extremely
complex, with contributing factors that are often subtle and practically
unobservable, even with the best software for predicting consequences.
Due to this, it has become apparent that weather control is not without
its dangers.
Project
Cirrus
In 1946, while working at the General Electric laboratory in Schenectady,
NY, Dr. Vonnegut, along with Dr. Irving Langmuir, released from an airplane
dry ice into clouds on four days during November and December. The last
day of seeding coincided with the heaviest snowfall of the winter in the
Schenectady area, which worried GE’s management about the possibility
of cloud seeding causing harmful weather.
Because of these concerns, GE decided that they could not
risk conducting further experiments on the weather without the U.S. government’s
sponsorship. So two months later, the U.S. Army Signal Corps contracted
GE to continue their cloud modification experiments, under the name Project
Cirrus.
As part of the project, on October 13, 1947, the U.S. military
dropped 80 kg of dry ice into a hurricane off the eastern coast of the
United States. The hurricane changed direction and traveled inland, where
it did extensive damage to property in Georgia. To prevent the victims
of the hurricane from suing either the government or GE for their involvement
in altering the path of the hurricane, the U.S. military classified the
data from their experiment. And to avoid tort liability, attorneys for
GE censored Langmuir’s scientific publications, removing any mention
of GE’s involvement with Project Cirrus.
But the experiments were ultimately successful and by 1951,
ten percent of the skies over the U.S. were being commercially seeded
by a handful of highly specialized commercial firms, working under contract
to produce rain for a variety of sponsors, such as water agencies; municipalities;
hydroelectric dams; and even ski resorts.
It is probable that these early experiments were just the
beginning of continuing classified research conducted by the U.S. government
on weather control. After all, if dropping a little dry ice into a cloud
could cause such drastic changes in an area’s weather, what would
happen if an atomic bomb was exploded in the upper levels of the atmosphere
or if rivers were diverted from their normal courses?
Other
Black-Op Weather Projects
According to Spencer Weart, a physicist and science historian at the American
Institute of Physics, the Pentagon secretly funded classified climate
research in the 1950s and ‘60s, helping to create the models that
are now used in weather forecasting. Military strategists also spent time
dreaming up climatological warfare scenarios, such as laying down a blanket
of fog over an enemy’s airfield or causing a drought on an enemy’s
food crops.
One plan was even secretly implemented. From 1966 to 1972,
under the code name Project Popeye, the U.S. Air Force flew thousands
of cloud-seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, hoping
to cause enough rain to fall to muddy it into impassability. Even though
rain did increase in the area, it is unclear what difference this made
on the ground.
When the details of the plan surfaced in the press, the public
outcry led to an international treaty banning “military or any other
hostile use of environmental modification techniques.”
Even though the U.S. had been publicly implicated, it was
no secret that the Soviet Union was also interested in weather modification.
In the late 1950s, the Soviets proposed to dam the Bering
Strait and pump water from the Arctic Ocean into the Pacific. By doing
so, they hoped to draw warm water northward from the Atlantic to melt
the polar ice pack so that Siberia would become warmer and the Arctic
Ocean finally navigable.
But the leading Soviet climatologist Mikhail I. Budyko cautioned
against it, arguing that the ultimate effects were impossible to predict.
The project was never implemented, but it was just one of several weather
modification ideas considered by the Soviet government, including detonating
hydrogen bombs high in the atmosphere, in an effort to alter the jet stream.
Problems
and New Methods
In the late 1960s, publicly, the idea that the weather could be controlled
began to fall out of favor. And with the growth of the environmental movement
in the 1970s and ‘80s came studies that showed the results of unintentional
weather modification. It was found, for instance, that clear-cutting forests
decreased rainfall while smokestacks increased it. It also appeared that
the real threat was not that weather modification would fail but that
it would work.
For instance, in 1972, cloud-seeding by South Dakota’s
operational cloud seeding program (SDWMP) was followed by a violent rainstorm
that caused a flood in Rapid City, SD, that killed more than 200 people.
Meteorologists were uncertain whether or not the cloud-seeding was to
blame, but the incident became a threatening symbol for those who saw
weather modification as a modern Pandora’s box.
Even though the public had grown more wary of weather control,
several world powers were still actively experimenting with meteorological
control. In 1973, for instance, several airliners flying the Pacific route
from Anchorage, AK to Tokyo, Japan, were forced to deviate from their
flight plath when their pilots saw a huge, mushroom-shaped cloud shooting
high into the upper levels of the atmosphere. Far below, a violent but
short-lived downpour drenched a fleet of fishing boats that were trawling
the sea between Japan and the Soviet Union.
Nuclear tests and volcanic activity were later ruled out as
the cause of this event but scientists concluded that this was not a natural
phenomenon. More than two decades later, some now suspect that the stunned
airline crews and fishermen had witnessed a top-secret Soviet experiment
in which water from the Sea of Japan was blown into the air in an attempt
to create clouds and rain.
Since that time, other instances of unexplained, rapidly forming
clouds over the Pacific Ocean have been reported by both ships and jetliners.
These strange atmospheric events have led some researchers and scientists
to speculate that the Russians were using high-frequency electromagnetic
radiation in an attempt to modify the weather.
The
Russian Woodpecker
In 1976, amateur radio operators reported picking up a powerful signal
that sounded like a sharp tapping noise. The signal, later called the
“Russian Woodpecker,” disrupted radio and utility transmissions,
and even aircraft emergency frequencies. Engineers estimated that the
actual broadcasting power of the woodpecker signal was around 40 megawatts,
which made it audible in every part of the world.
Triangulation indicated that the transmitter was located near
the town of Gomel in what is now Belarus, Russia. Western intelligence
agencies quickly announced that the signal had come from a Soviet over-the-horizon
radar, which was meant to provide Russia with an early warning of U.S.
missile launches by detecting alterations in the ionosphere caused by
the depletion of ions in missile exhaust. However, some researchers were
also concerned about the radio frequencies (RF) used by the woodpecker
signal, as it was believed that these signals could potentially alter
the weather.
In 1978, Dr. Andrew Michrowski of the Planetary Association
for Clean Energy described how Canadian monitoring stations had detected
that the Soviets had established relatively stable Extremely Low Frequency
(ELF) fields over North America. By using several directional radio transmitters,
the Soviets broadcasted ELF signals that were triangulated to converge
over the U.S and Canada.
Then in 1982, a report by Pentagon researcher L. Ponte noted that
the Russian woodpecker signal was creating layers of artificial ionization
in the upper atmosphere and that,
“The Soviets have made advances in bending the all-important jet
stream that sweeps across Siberia, to set global wind patterns.”
There have been numerous reports since then about strange
changes in the jet stream. Some scientists have even claimed that the
blocking of warm, moist air from the Pacific by the Soviet’s alteration
of the jet stream caused a prolonged drought in California in the 1980s.
By the mid-1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the beginning
of Russia’s economic problems, most of Russia’s over-the-horizon
radar systems had been taken off combat-duty and some of the equipment
scrapped. However, amateur radio operators still report receiving, on
occasion, the woodpecker signal.
The U.S. military, which apparently had been caught off-guard
by the Soviet’s RF weather experiments, quickly geared up their own
research on weather in an attempt to catch up in the perceived “weather
gap” with the Russians. The result was a technology taken from the
19th-century genius Nikola Tesla.
The
HAARP Program
Officially, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)
is a research station directed by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s
Space Vehicles Directorate. It opened in 1992 in Gokona, AK, to gather
data about the atmosphere and “radio propagation conditions.”
HAARP is comprised of a system of powerful antennas that are capable of
creating “controlled local modifications of the ionosphere.”
Their web site (www.haarp.alaska.edu) states that the program was created
to monitor the naturally occurring variations in sun, such as sunspots
and solar flares. However, there seems to be much more going on behind
HAARP’s public face.
The HAARP program is based on physicist Bernard J. Eastlund’s
1987 U.S. Patent titled Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in
the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and/or Magnetosphere. Eastlund’s
patent is based, in part, on the work of Nikola Tesla, who first suggested
that radio frequencies could transmit approximately one watt per cubic
centimeter to any point on the planet without the use of wires. Thus,
power could be generated on the ground and then broadcast through the
air to the ionosphere, which is located miles above the surface of the
planet. These high frequency radio transmissions could lift and heat up
the ionosphere, thus altering wind patterns and other weather phenomena.
Today, HAARP has 48 antennas that can broadcast up to 960
kW of power, and plans to expand to 180 antennas and 3.6 megawatts of
power by 2006. Even that is short of the thousands of antennas and hundreds
of megawatts of power that Eastlund figured would be needed to control
the weather or act as an effective missile shield. However, even at 3.6
megawatts, significant weather control experiments could be performed.
In fact, radio operators who routinely monitor HAARP transmissions
noted an increase in RF output from the Alaska station right before hurricanes
Katrina and Rita grew into dangerous storms. Though there is no proof
that the ferocity of these recent hurricanes are the result of climatic
tampering by HAARP administrators, Phillips Geophysics Lab, which is a
partner in the HAARP project, has contemplated the triggering of storms
and hurricanes for military use in an ongoing course on weather modification
at MD’s Hanscom Air Force Base.
Even if the HAARP program is experimenting with weather control,
their work could soon be surpassed by solar powered satellite-based systems.
NASA and the European Space Agency have been researching the possibility
of these satellites being used as an energy source, transmitting power
to Earth with concentrated beams of microwaves. With a fleet of these
powerful satellites, it is conceivable that the weather over any geographic
location could be modified within seconds at will.
The consequences of such aggressive tampering with our natural
environment are not known, which leaves humanity as an innocent bystander
in a possible secret war between world governments. This not only opens
up unimaginable physical possibilities, such destroying entire ecosystems
or permanently altering the planet’s climate, but could also threaten
our very survival, on a world where the weather is being used as the ultimate
weapon of mass destruction. z
from
issue #12
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