The Secret History of Weather Modification
Buried deep inside the infamous Pentagon Papers you can find references to weather modification by the United States Department of Defense going back to the 1950s and 1960s.
In truth, the US Gov has been engaged in weather modification since the 1940s.
Project Cirrus was the first attempt by the US Gov to modify a hurricane. It was a collaboration between GE, the US Army Signal Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and the US Air Force on October 13, 1947 — the target was Hurricane Cape Sable.
The experiment didn’t go as planned, and the Gov was even blamed for the storm turning and making landfall near Savannah, Georgia.
This didn’t end the experiments however. The Gov upgraded from Dry Ice to Silver Iodide and other chemicals. They upgraded how they inject the chemicals into the storm — moving from “dumping dry ice” to rockets and flares packed with various metals and other substances.
They even upgraded the targeting strategy for their modification attempts - trying to inject these substances in various places including on either side of the “eye” of the storm and inside various types of clouds, at different altitudes and other experiments.
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The Early Days
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of more systematic, albeit still rudimentary, attempts at weather modification. The U.S. Department of War experimented with detonating explosives in Texas, hoping to induce rainfall. These early experiments, while based on observations like the apparent increase in rainfall after battles, lacked a solid scientific foundation and yielded inconclusive results.
The mid-20th century marked a turning point with the development of cloud seeding techniques. Pioneered by scientists like Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, cloud seeding involves dispersing substances like silver iodide into clouds to stimulate precipitation.
Project Stormfury
This was clearly named before the US Gov became more creative with codenames.
The hypothesis behind Project Stormfury, a U.S. government project from 1962 to 1983, was that seeding the area around a hurricane's eyewall with silver iodide would release latent heat and promote the formation of a new, larger eyewall. This larger eyewall would, in theory, weaken the hurricane's winds due to a reduced pressure gradient. The project scientists believed that even a small reduction in wind speed would significantly reduce a hurricane's destructive potential. They based this belief on the understanding that a hurricane's damage potential increases as the square of the wind speed.
The idea of using cloud seeding to weaken hurricanes gained traction thanks to the research of Irving Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer. Schaefer had discovered that dropping crushed dry ice into a cloud could induce precipitation in the form of snow. His successful creation of a major snowstorm in 1946, however, led to legal concerns and the cancellation of the project.
Legal departments ruin all the fun.
…or so they think. Sometimes the operation just goes on elsewhere under a different codename.
Operation Popeye
Operation Popeye, a classified U.S. military project carried out from 1967 to 1972 during the Vietnam War, aimed to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by extending the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation, also known as Project Controlled Weather Popeye, Motorpool, or Intermediary-Compatriot, involved cloud seeding to increase rainfall and create adverse conditions.
The team had a few objectives:
Softening road surfaces: Increased rainfall would turn the roads into mud, making it difficult for trucks to transport supplies.
Triggering landslides: The heavy rains were intended to saturate the soil and make the terrain more susceptible to landslides, further hindering transportation along the trail.
Washing out river crossings: The operation aimed to flood rivers, making them impassable and cutting off supply routes that relied on these crossings.
Prolonging saturated soil conditions: The goal was to keep the soil saturated for an extended period, exceeding the typical duration of the monsoon season.
Overall, Operation Popeye sought to achieve these objectives to impede the movement of North Vietnamese troops and supplies, giving the U.S. military a tactical advantage. The operation was conducted from Thailand over Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. However, it's important to note that the sources indicate this operation was carried out without the authorization of the then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.
The End of Weather Modification?
The Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), also known as the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, is an international treaty that prohibits the use of weather modification for hostile purposes.
The convention was signed in Geneva on May 18, 1977, entered into force on October 5, 1978, and was ratified by the United States in 1980. The treaty aims to prevent countries from using techniques that manipulate the environment, including weather patterns, for military advantage or any other hostile purpose.
The ENMOD convention was established in response to growing concerns about the potential for weather modification to be weaponized.
Operation Popeye was directly cited as an example of the type of activity that ENMOD seeks to prevent.
This operation, and the subsequent revelation of its existence, fueled international discussions about the need for regulations to prevent the hostile use of weather modification technologies.
Of course, rumors remain that the US Gov branched out into other forms of weather modification. These rumors point to HAARP.
HAARP, or the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a research program that studies the ionosphere, the highest part of Earth's atmosphere. The program is based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is funded by the US Air Force, the Navy, and the University.
These rumors indicate HAARP is capable of ionizing portions of the atmosphere and influencing the flow of energy into and around weather systems. If true this opens the door toward storm steering, weather intensification and more.
I will keep scouring for new data sources to feed into AI systems so we can deepen our investigation of this topic. There are many other topics I will similarly be studying and sharing like this.
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