Summary
➡ A secret project was carried out to control the weather, mainly to cause rain during dry seasons. This was done by nurturing small clouds until they grew large enough to cause rain. The project, which started in 1966 and ended in 1972, was kept top secret and was only revealed to Congress in 1972. The project was successful and could potentially be used anywhere in the world, but was only used in Vietnam.
➡ The text discusses the potential of hurricane modification, a process that involves seeding hurricanes to reduce their intensity and potential damage. This method was tested in the past with promising results, but concerns about legal liability and lack of political or economic motivation have hindered its implementation. Despite these challenges, the author argues that the benefits of hurricane modification, such as significant damage reduction, outweigh the potential risks. He also mentions that other countries are already using weather control for their benefit, suggesting that the U.S. should consider doing the same.
➡ The text discusses the idea of using aircraft to reduce the damage caused by hurricanes. The aircraft would carry units that could potentially weaken the hurricanes before they reach land, protecting homes and lives. Despite the potential benefits, the government has not shown much interest in this approach. The speaker, who has been recognized for his work in similar projects, believes this method could be effective and is advocating for its implementation.
Transcript
And by putting a small amount of silver iodide in there, we got them to collect and start to build. And as they built, we just worked on the largest tower in the group until, in such a very short time, we had clouds that were. You told me this cloud got 14 inches of. Well, this cloud, of course, this is all the same cloud. Both cleared, top secret, eyes only, as high as you could get. I got interested in weather modification when I was a farm boy. I never could understand why the clouds wasn’t bigger, had a little more shade and was chopping that cotton.
So I got in the Navy. I managed to get into meteorology school. And I think that’s really where I learned the most of my physics. I was assigned to the Typhoon Squadron in Guam, where I served for three years as a flight meteorologist and meteorological engineer. From there, I came back to additional school at Texas ANI University down in Kingsville. And from Kingsville, they sent me to the hurricane hunter squadron in Jacksonville, Florida. That squadron, of course, had just become involved in Project Storm Fury. So when I reported to that duty station as a meteorological engineer, I was immediately designated the military member of the StormFury Advisory Board.
We were doing quite a lot of testing work out over the test range at China Lake, California, where we dropped cloud seeding flares or silver iodide generators in the clouds or just wherever we wanted to, to see what the reaction was. And it was there when I learned for sure that you could really change a cloud by the amount of silver iodide you put in it and where you put it. This cloud here, from the time it started raining until it quit, it put out a little over 14 inches of precipitation. What did that do to the North Vietnamese? Well, it just washed all the roads out.
And there was a bridge attached to a mountain that bombed and could not get rid of it. This heavy rain washing down that river took that bridge out. So you guys finally got it done. This was on October 13th. These are, these are cloud seating dispensing units on the side of C130s. As you can see that these units held 52. These dispensers held 52 units. And under here on this F4, we had these camouflaged so they looked like they were. Did you fly those? Yes. You piloted the F4? Yeah. So you’re a jet pilot too, huh? Yeah, I did.
I did these for about seven years. You fly them all, huh? That’s neat. And these were our own airplanes. The airplanes I had in my, my commercial cloud seeing business. See they had a Duke and turbocharged Duke of course, and Satsung 310 and the Turbo 210. And we built the flyers that built them into the wings of our airplane so that they caused as little resistance as possible or drag as possible. And this right here, these are prior techniques that we’ve cut in sections and fused them so that they could burn either singles or a pair, or cut half in two or cut in three pieces or cut in five pieces.
So you can see obviously here, although these are dispensed in the vertical, they are essentially a horizontal cloud seeding device. That’s how we made these clouds like in Vietnam work. Because we could take a cloud take power technique like this had a little bitty piece in it and would fly by and just barely, just barely touch the cloud with one part. So that kept from blowing the thing apart, blowing the cloud up. But what we would do like in Carla or Rita, those kind of clouds we would maybe use. This is just one. This is one cloud seeding device here cut into five pieces.
But in one like this, you may be flying 350 miles an hour, kicking one out every two or 300 meters and just essentially seed the whole area on the horizontal and the whole top will blow away. Amazing. We were the first ones to fly into hurricanes for the purpose of modifying them, if you will. That was Project Stormfury. I began to be extremely confident that we could do about what we wanted to with a hurricane. The Project Storm Fury had been going on since 1961 and they had already done or had done two experiments, one in 61 and 63.
Well, by 1964, when I was there in 1964, I wrote the plan and started to have a track and a mission for every flight. It was on the hurricane cloud cheating experiments. So we had documentation for everything. Operations and products turned fuel are very positive. His report said that we claim they should consider. Now if a hurricane heads straight towards Miami. Some wanted to continue hurricane reductions and the other part did not want to. It was a political football and there are people that were wanting to do more pure research and less applications. Engineering wanted to kill Project Stormfury, so they built up an artificial barrier that prevented hurricanes from ever qualifying to be experimented or seeded for damage reduction.
NOAA research people came up with data that suggested that if a hurricane went through a certain little geographical area, there was no history in 100 years that a hurricane had been through that area ever reached land. So they made a requirement that the storm must go through this area of, I call it an area of improbability before it would qualify for hurricane damage reduction attention. So after about 10 years, no hurricanes went through there. And the people, that is the scientists who didn’t want to spend money on aircraft reconnaissance decided, well, it’s just too expensive, we can’t wait any longer.
So they kill the project altogether. I am terribly disappointed that the government have decided a long time ago not to do the hurricane damage reduction anymore. They can talk about the scientifically rigorous data, the inability of civilian aircraft and so forth to collect this data and poo poo the empirical observation that you make just by looking out the window or watching your instruments, saying it has no value. In order to change the weather and know that you’re changing it, you must have implementation to document it. So my line of business really was to design and make equipment that would document changes in the weather.
You take a cloud that Mother Nature or God has provided and you alter that cloud. Well, the reason the cloud doesn’t expand on its own in most cases is the fact that there’s a lot of moisture, but there’s no nuclei. There’s nothing for the moisture to stick to. So when you provide the silver iodide nuclei, it causes the water to coalesce to that nuclei. And when it does, it releases heat, which means everything starts to rise. If you produce enough nuclei at the right places in a cloud, there’s essentially no limit to how fast and how far it’ll grow because it just keeps releasing heat as it goes up.
And of course the heat keeps trying to rise. So with the nuclei, it’s very small and they’re put off by these flares. But then water starts attracting to it and then it builds condensation. Well, you put out a G into these, put out a G into these silver iodide nuclei and they attract water. They just sponge it up. Well, when they do that, water condenses and it releases what they call the latent heat of condensation, the heat comes out of it and the whole thing starts rising. If you’re in the business of trying to kill clouds, then of course you go up to the area where there are some vertical shear, the wind blowing some direction or other, and you provide the nuclei at a level above where the raindrops are.
They are then so light that the wind, vertical shear merely blows the top of the cloud away. Then there’s no place for the coalescence or the nucleation to take place. Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been wishing for quite some time in terms of years that they had some way of slowing the truck down in Vietnam. That led me to advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff that we had a potential weapon system. And so I was asked to start to put together a top secret operation to go to Vietnam to see if we couldn’t make it rain more over there as a military operation.
All the roads over there were dirt roads, and when it rained it caused them a lot of problems. So that during the monsoon season there was so much rain and water in the roads that the trucks really couldn’t move very freely. Our mission was to make it rain during the dry season. On that particular day, the clouds were very small. There just weren’t any real big thunderstorms or anything like that. But I picked a cloud that was sitting out essentially by itself with a number of small clouds. I’m talking about clouds who stops were somewhere near the freezing level, but not high enough to really grow.
And I nurtured one of those clouds until it finally got it well past the freezing level. And then the cloud developed a lot of convective activity and it started sucking clouds into it, just building up and building up. And I took a series of pictures where I called for 41 minutes. By the end of 41 minutes, we had flown up to over 65,000ft and we still couldn’t reach the top of the cloud. So we knew we had a barn burner there. And by the next morning we had washed out everything in the world and did a lot of damage to people and all that sort of thing.
But it was a real success as far as blocking the roads off with just two of us involved, myself and a civilian. But we conducted that operation with aircraft, military aircraft, mostly from the Marine Corps. And then shortly thereafter we started involving the US Air Force. Well, we actually began the 3rd or 4th of September, and by the 13th of October, we had a couple of storms that had actually washed out bridges. And the results were so Successful until I was called down to Saigon to brief the generals, the Air Force generals, the army generals down there.
And they suggested that I need to go make this report to President Johnson back in Washington D.C. they were excited about it, but they had no authorization, if you will, to use this as a military weapon system. I was there in very top secret classification as a research project. That’s the way we were able to conduct a mission without the international community, if you will, being apprised of what we were doing and how we were doing it. It was kept top secret for a long time. It was first reported that this was going on in 1972.
That’s the first time that Congress ever heard about it. So as you can see, it was not something everyone knew about for a long time. It must feel good, though. You’re the father or something. You used weather weapons first. Well, it’s okay. And for all we know is that the only time they’ve been used. Well, that same project. That same project went on through 1972 when we got out of Vietnam, but the Air Force was still doing it. But was it only used in Vietnam, never anywhere else? No, it’s the only place ever we’ve had no requirement for anywhere else that I can think of, but it could be used anywhere.
You. Did you ever do any testing in the US Did I? Oh, yeah, a lot, yeah. You were the head of what base? You were the head of. Acting commander of what base? I was the acting commanding officer at the Corona Naval Weapons Research Center. And they worked on a lot more there than just weather weapons, didn’t they? Yes, they do. But my main contribution at Corona was to write a plan for weather modification control for the whole world. At any given time, we could send a number of airplanes with materials and dispensing equipment we had and probably control the weather all the way around the world.
Why? Because you said it’s on several major, seven major front lines. Well, there are only from five to seven major troughs around the world at any given time. And they undulate just like ocean waves, move back and forth and back and forth. And at any time there’s a front associated with those where all the thunderstorms are located and with having a few airplanes, a couple of airplanes at the right place, you can run down that, that line of thunderstorms and do whatever you wanted to with them. This is out of the June 1974 Science magazine. And this article was actually written in 19.
Well, it says written 1974. Yeah, it was 1974. This is when the Senate got wind that something had been going on in Vietnam that they didn’t know about and they wanted to know about it. Well, it’s interesting to note that this project ended in 1972. It started in 1966. So you can see the secrecy. Senator Pal was a kind of aggressive senator about people doing things the Senate didn’t know about. He got wind of it and he asked for a briefing. And a Colonel Sasser, I believe his name may have been something else, but a colonel, Air Force colonel, gave them a briefing, gave his committee a briefing and told them it had been going on since 19 in research configuration from 1966 to the present time.
President Johnson was very mild. It turned out that he had known my father. So we had a little old homecoming there for just a few minutes and then he asked me what I was doing and told me he had read and been briefed on what we were doing and how we were doing it. And he asked me my opinion of it and asked if I thought that we could continue that. I said, well, I don’t see no reason why we can’t continue it because we’ll have the same kind of weather coming up again in March of next year and we can seed and my grain right into the monsoon system and we can then extend the monsoon system well past this August end to maybe the first week in November.
He didn’t say a whole lot about it except he thought it was, he thought it was real weird, if you will, that people could take a little, a little weather modification changed the whole climate of the country. When I came back to the States where I had time to do something as far as weather modification was concerned, I went back to my duties, if you will, as being the military member of the Project Storm Fury Advisory committee. Without getting anything classified. Can you tell us about some of the tests you did in China Lake? Well, of course in China Lake we had, we had different manufacturers of these cloud cheating devices.
We had different yields for them, we had different burn times on how fast we wanted to put all this nuclei out. And so we tested all those things at China Lake. We’d pick a cloud out in the middle of desert out there. We had 100 miles test range out there that belonged to weapons centers and we’d just pick a thunderstorm and go do what we wanted to with it. By 1969 we had all the latest state of the art equipment in a number of airplanes. And we also had aircraft equipped with dispensing equipment to put silver iodide into A hurricane.
The hypothesis for how to do this had been designed, developed by Dr. Joanne Simpson and her husband, Dr. Robert Simpson was the director of Project Storm Theory for a number of years. And we followed her hypothesis which said that if you seed enough clouds in a right front quadrant of a hurricane, where the energy sales are, you may build or a second second eye, or as a minimum, makes the original eye much bigger, which meant you have a reduction in wind velocity. Tell us again, Mr. Livingston, Ben, just exactly who Mr. Simpson is. Dr. Simpson, at the time Product Stormfury started, he was the head of the United States Weather Bureau.
With the funds being made available for Project Stormfury, they created a new department or new entity of government called the National Hurricane research center. And Dr. Simpson, Dr. Bob Simpson was director of that group. So he’s preeminent. He is preeminent. And his wife Joanne, I attended a ceremony for her induction into the national center for Atmospheric Research Laboratory Wall of Fame last summer, in which her name was placed on the wall as one of the five preeminent scientists in the nation in the 20th century. That’s his wife, Joanne, who was the head of Project Stormfury for the two years I worked with her for those two years.
And they’re saying right here that this is conclusive. So why aren’t we saving people hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives? This needs to be implemented. This book, Hurricane Watch here, is very important because it’s written by a person who’s a former director of the National Hurricane Center. So he’s had worlds of experience and research in these things. And I might add that I took Dr. Bob sheets on his first airplane ride into a hurricane in 1964. But he has documented a number of things that are important to the subject we’re talking about, in which he’s described every storm, the background to those storms, what was done to them and the results.
He’s also described Dr. Bob Simpson. He said, all in all, Bob Simpson undoubtedly has had more impact on hurricane research and forecasting than any other single person. And I might add the second most important person in this direction or this field is his wife, Dr. Joanne Simpson. Ben, what do you say to the folks that say, oh, well, if you mess with a hurricane, that might cause some unintended consequence, you know, as if that energy has to go somewhere. Doesn’t it just dump into the ocean as cold water? It may just spread out and blow across the ocean.
It may not go anywhere where anyone cares. And they’re certainly going to be if there Are going to be unintended consequences. You would know within an hour seeded a hurricane. You would know that something is not going right. We have to go do something different before it causes damage. So you’d have days to be adjusting. You’d have days the way we planned on doing it. We’d only have two days. We’d only work on a hurricane. This is a pretty exact science. Now, from Vietnam to the hurricanes you did earlier. Seems like you guys know how to knock them out.
Well, for the operation we hoped to get last fall, I wrote a flight plan for every flight, how far they would go, how many partakes they would take, and statistically how many nuclei they need to dispense. How many tons of nuclei would it have taken? You said two airplanes, but how many tons of nuclei would it take? How many airplanes to knock out Rita or Katrina? You don’t measure these particles in terms of tons. You measure them in terms of half pounds. So a cloud shooting device with 14 grams of several iodide mixture in it that produces 10 to the 13 nuclei per gram weighs about a third of a pound.
So 400 of those things weighs 120 pounds. The composition of a hurricane may have dozens of energy cells in it. And they’re like the pistons in an engine. They just chug, chug, chug. They get stronger and stronger and stronger because they feed off the warm air below them and they eventually turn into this thing they call a hurricane with all these energy cells in it. We know where those energy cells are. We know what makes them tick. We have the materials, if you will, to alter those energy cells. And decreased the maximum surface winds in a hurricane.
On August 18th. In 1969, Hurricane Debbie was seeded five times at two hour intervals and the maximum wind speeds had decreased 115 to 80 miles per hour. That’s a pretty remarkable reduction of more than 45% damage reduction potential. The cloud was left. The storm was left alone on the 19th and on the 20th went back and seeded that cloud the second time and decreased the winds again to just under 100 mph per hour, or about 24% more damage reduction potential. The results from the hurricane Debbie experiment seemed so positive that many individuals believed the project should go operational.
Seeding major hurricanes, hurricanes that threaten land. A team of scientists at Stanford Research institute at Stanford university did a decision analysis on all past seeding events, including the esther. That’s a 1961 and 1963 experiments. Dr. James Masterson of that group, reflecting their views, stated, we claim they should consider seeding now if a big hurricane come straight from Miami these signings said the government may have to accept responsibility for not seeding and thereby exposing the public to higher probabilities of severe storm damage and possible higher death tolls. A number of people, scientists if you will, who didn’t necessarily endorse applications engineering in these storms they thought they needed more scientific data.
They demanded that a third party investigate all of what Stormfury had done. Stanford University was the party or the institution that did this study of the activity Project Stormfury had done. In summary, the results of the hurricane DEB experiments seem so positive that many individuals believe the project could go operational seeding major hurricanes that threatened any landmass. And a team of scientists at Stanford Research Institute did a decision analysis on all past seeding events including the ones in 1961 1963. And Dr. Matheson from Stanford University, the head of the research institute reported that the government may have to accept the responsibility for not seeding and thereby exposing the public to higher probabilities of severe storm damage and possible higher death tolls.
It’s interesting that we were able to do that and have the results confirmed by Stanford University in 1969. Since 1947 the government has used the excuse, has used the logic of reasoning that liability is a killer for weather modification. But that’s not why Project Stormtree was killed and that’s not why they aren’t doing it now in my opinion the reason they are not doing it is well stated by a very senior official from the national center of Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. And he says even if a well supported theory of hurricane modification existed the potential legal aspects of weather modification on this scale argue strongly in my opinion against any such efforts.
Just a few of the many possibilities. A the storm is not modified at all but some people perceive that it is get hurt and sue the modifiers. The storm is modified according the theory but still does not significantly damage does significant damage and some people blame the modification on the damage even though the modification actually reduced the overall damage and impact. Third, the modified storm produced winners and losers and the perceived losers sue. For example, what if soon after the seeding the hurricane abruptly changed course? This happens all the time in nature. The people affected by the new course might well blame the modification effort and sue yeah, if you study the situation you may learn and very diabolically so that you don’t like to believe this but there’s a possibility and the economics of it verifies the fact that there is so much damage done that the Construction industry in general, all over the United States benefits because the cost of material goes up.
So the insurance company may or may not gain from having these damage reductions take place. As far as the energy industry is concerned, we all know that they get their money back almost immediately by increasing their price to product. And it’s not unheard of to believe that the actions performed by FEMA or the government is not a surefire way to buy votes. So there may not be any political or economic motivation on the government or some major industry’s part to reduce the damages of hurricanes. The material that we put in the atmosphere are not toxic and by volume there are nothing.
It’s my contention that we have a sure defense against those liability lawsuits. We place in our seeding materials a trace element of zinc or some other exotic material so that any rainfall that falls, it uses our nuclei to cause the rainfall or the hail, whatever comes out of it. All they need to do is collect some of that water, find some of our traces of some of our material, and we would then concede that we had something to do with it. And the other, of course, good defense is that we’ve had such horrendous hurricanes the last several years without any weather modification in the past 30, 35 years.
You sure can’t blame a weather modifier for causing damage. The other governments are using weather control for many purposes. And Indonesia for instance, Canada, Turkey, Greece, Russia, they’re all using weather control to their benefit. And we aren’t. Well, for several years the Russians have had weather control product as one of their national goals. They’re using weather control primarily to protect the large sites of the sites where large numbers of people are congregating for celebration, such as in Moscow or Stalingrad when they have these big military events there or parade, so forth. They bring their cloud seeding people in and their objective is to keep it from raining or to knock the clouds down.
And it’s not just the Russians that do that. Our company, for instance, does the same thing in Calgary every summer. The idea is to keep the hailstorm and the heavy rain down so that the construction business can flourish. It’s a contract we’ve had for nine years. And every summer we send two airplanes up there or whatever it takes. And their only mission is to prevent hail and keep weather from doing damages in the city limits of Calgary. You’ve obviously been successful. Well, obviously, yes. It’s just one of those things that we, we know how to do.
And since the government hasn’t done it, the corporate people in America have just built the instruments, they’ve installed them in their airplanes. But we have to be just as sure of what we do as the government would like to think. They have to be. The men, the materials, the aircraft and all of the other support equipment you need are available today to reduce the damages of hurricanes very significantly, and I’m talking significantly as being more than 35 or 40%. The roof doesn’t lift off the house until about 105 miles an hour. If you reduce the damages in hurricanes by 35, 40%, you’re going to save 90% of the damages done by them.
Because once you get down below 100 miles an hour, there’s not a whole lot of damage occurs from the winds and hurricanes. The tact they’ve taken is that they’re willing to spend money they haven’t got to repair places that are not repairable, order people to evacuate and the people come back and our house is blown away. We think that’s foolishness. We think that we ought to be trying to save those houses. Let the people evacuate, but have them come back to a house with the furniture in it. Our aircraft can carry over 400 cloud shooting units.
Now, those back in Project Stormfury days could only carry 52. And the fact that we fly two and a half times as fast and we know exactly where we are all the time, we feel like we have a much better opportunity or better chance of reducing these hurricanes by even more than they were able to in Storm Fury Number One. We would have attacked Catina before she passed the southern tip of Florida, coming across the Gulf of Mexico, because there were a lot of people, a lot of lives at stake there. We may not have done anything with Cortina until she got out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, but from then on, and I mean the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I’m talking about to the eastern edge of the oil production.
When it got close enough to do damage to the oil drilling and producing platforms, we would have started working on Cortina right then. And we would have, we would have seeded those energy sales in there based on data from the satellite radar, satellite information, we would have picked the energy cells in that storm, and at least every 12 hours we would have been out there seeding those energy cells. Ben, why hasn’t there been a lawsuit against the government for not stopping these hurricanes? You know, I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer, but I really don’t understand why, because the government certainly has reneged on its responsibility to the citizens of the country to protect them.
They took unlimited steps in creating the Department of Homeland Defense and spent trillions or hundreds of billions of dollars on that thing. Yet a hurricane comes along that does more damage than that, and they acknowledge the fact that there’s some way to prevent it or slow it down. Well, the problem we have right now is that while we have contacted every senator in the US Senate, all 100 of them, we’ve had one mediocre response from one of them. You give the impression that they just don’t care what happens about the hurricanes. And we’re trying to. We have presented a proposal to them to do damage reduction, hurricane damage reduction for the year 2006, and it amounts to around $6,000 a month.
But we have enough airplanes, we have enough people in our company that we can do that. We need to be out there seeding these hurricanes. If we don’t get the results that we think we’re going to get, then we can say we’re not ready for it. But that’s not going to be the case. What’s this, man? This is a letter from the Secretary of Navy and it’s a commendation medal to me and it’s for meritorious services. From 28 September through 1 November 1966, as a member of the Scientific Operational Evaluation Team for the Naval Ordnance Test Station deployed to the Republic of Vietnam during this period, Lieutenant Livingston directly participated in project flights in a combat zone, in program planning and scientific data collection and evaluation, in material readiness of scientific recording equipments and in the daily preparation of weapons system under development.
Demonstrating outstanding professional competence, he and our procedures thereby improving their effectiveness. His unyielding demand for accurate and complete data collections, his relentless search for technical competence and his unwavering devotion to duty were major factors in the outstanding success of the project and were instrumental in the development of a unique major combat capability for the United States. Lieutenant Livingston’s outstanding performance was in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. Signed Paul H. Nitze, Secretary of the Navy. Visit infowars.com and prisonplanet.com when you’re on the site. You can also tune in 24 hours a day to my daily radio broadcast.
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