There is a long and well-detailed history of efforts to control and modify the weather. The U.S. government’s first ENMOD efforts occurred from 1890 to 1892, with a $10,000 research budget allocated to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). [18]
As early as the late 1940s Dr. Wilhelm Reich was developing weather modification techniques at his Orgonon Research Center in Rangeley, Maine. Reich openly shared his findings with the U.S. Department of Defense, but while Reich apparently believed that the enemy of his enemy, Nazi Germany, was his friend, he was unaware that he was being targeted as a subversive for his pioneering futuristic work in numerous fields, weather modification included. (The U.S. Food and Drug Administration imprisoned Reich in 1954 for a minor interstate transportation infraction committed by an employee: Reich died in federal prison in 1957.)
Under the U.S. DOD Project Cirrus, on October 13, 1947 pioneering ENMOD scientist Dr. Irving Langmuir of General Electric Research Labs, Schenectady, NY, seeded a hurricane by dropping some 200 pounds of dry ice into it from above. The hurricane abruptly changed course, for whatever reason. Seeding of natural clouds with silver iodide was first tried on December 21, 1948, by GE Schenectady Labs researcher Bernard Vonnegut. [19]
GE’s Dr. Irving Langmuir was soon testing a commercial cloud seeder in Honduras, in cooperation with the highly repressive United Fruit Company. [20] United Fruit was a Rockefeller enterprise with close ties to the CIA, and Honduras was one of its Banana Republics. [21] Setting the precedent for coming military efforts to downplay ENMOD successes, hide promising results, and deny information about ENMOD programs to the newly manufactured Red Menace of the cold warrior imagination, the U.S. government, with the help of GE lawyers, downplayed Dr. Langmuir’s findings. His Project Cirrus report was initially classified, to his consternation, and when the report was finally released to the scientific community, it contained a highly skeptical assessment by a panel of “experts,” hand-picked by the DOD, who suggested that Langmuir’s experiments were inconclusive, at best, that his science did not meet acceptable standards. [22]
While publicly downplaying any conclusive evidence of ENMOD capabilities, however, the U.S. government embarked on a massive program of research and development. The liberal government funding, coupled with the explosion of ideas and research proposals, led to competing government agencies and overlapping programs.
The U.S. Navy and Air Force conducted numerous and systematic cloud seeding experiments from 1948 to 1950 and these demonstrated the initial promise of the ENMOD arena. [23] From 1951-1953 they conducted the Artificial Cloud Nucleation Project (AEN), a large-scale project in southwestern Washington. By the early 1950s, some 10% of the entire land area of the U.S. was under commercial cloud-seeding operations, with some $3-5 million being expended annually. Public utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and the Southern California Edison Co. maintained extensive programs throughout the 1950s and 1960s. [24]
By 1952 the White House had a special adviser on weather modification. President Eisenhower created the U.S. Advisory Committee on Weather Control in 1953. Captain Howard T. Orville (USN, Ret.) was appointed chairman of what became known as “The Orville Committee.” Orville had been on the steering committee of (Dr. Irving Langmuir’s) Project Cirrus, and his appointment was de facto confirmation of the success of Project Cirrus. [25]
As early as 1953, Herbert Appleman of the U.S. Air Weather Service noted that contrails – condensation trails -- formed by water vapor and other gaseous exhausts exiting the tailpipe of a jet engine can lead to cloud formation which may persist and spread out. Silver iodide generators mounted on airplanes took cloud seeding to new heights; unique but similar seeding results were attained after researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) used carbon (black) dust dispersed by planes. The carbon black dust method, dispersed by jet after-burners, is the same one suggested as one of the future tactical weapons of the future ENMOD arena. Recall, as noted in one of the AirForce 2025 excerpts included above:
Numerous dispersal techniques have already been studied, but the most convenient, safe, and cost-effective method discussed is the use of afterburner-type jet engines to generate carbon particles while flying through the targeted air. If this UAV technology were combined with stealth and carbon dust technologies, the result could be a UAV aircraft invisible to radar while en route to the targeted area, which could spontaneously create carbon dust in any location.
Commercial crop-duster pilots had previously been hired to seed with carbon black dust for the Air Force -- in the 1950s. [26] The Air Force has not failed to notice that the ‘solar absorption potential” of carbon black dust makes it an expeditious choice “to enhance rainfall on the mesoscale [atmospheric], generate cirrus clouds, and enhance cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) clouds in otherwise dry areas.” [27]
In 1953 and 1954, scientists at New York University seeded nineteen cyclones. [28] In 1957 the President’s Advisory Committee on Weather Control explicitly recognized the military potential of weather modification, warning in their report that it could become a more important weapon than the atom bomb. [29] In 1958 the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) was conducting cloud dissipation experiments in Georgia. Cloud seeding became a routine operation for United Air Lines (UAL) planes in the 1960s. [30] In 1959, the U.S. Congress established the Interdepartmental Committee for Atmospheric Sciences, a centralized command for ENMOD programs.
Project Corona is an exemplary model of a secret program that persisted in total blackout for decades. Born in 1956 under CIA Clandestine Services chief Richard Bissell (CIA director from1965), [31] Project Corona, the first major U.S. satellite reconnaissance program, involving scores of satellite launches, was not declassified until 1992. Corona was a CIA/DOD collaboration involving top brass under the highest national security classifications.
Under Project Skyfire in 1960 and 1961 the US Army pursued lighting suppression through experiments where millions of tiny metallic needles were released to ‘seed” clouds. (These bits of foil are actually tiny dipoles whose ends are oppositely charged.) The dispersal of electronic chaff is today a major element in airborne missile evasion countermeasures, where the electronic tracking devices on an inbound missile are “fooled” by the chaff “decoy” materials launched by the pilot under attack. The U.S. Army Atmospheric Sciences Laboratory at Fort Monmouth, N.J., explored the potential of using chaff to pull the teeth of a thunderstorm. [32] Project Skyfire scientists launched rockets to “trigger” lightning discharges.
Project WhiteTop seeded clouds in Missouri throughout the 1960s.
Aimed at steering and/or modifying tropical hurricanes, the U.S. DOD’s Project Stormfury (1961-1983) undertook “massive seeding” operations, using state-of-the-art airborne radars, during hurricanes Ester (1961) and Beulah (1963). Refinement and coordination of RADAR and computing technologies brought increasing use of remote sensing to the ENMOD arena and from the early 1960s onward, the field, and the research and development successes, expanded exponentially. Stormfury deployed eight Navy jets, with multiple radars, and three weather Bureau planes. Stormfury scientists delivered seeding agents with rockets and with variations of the LW-83 high silver iodide pyrotechnic flare developed by the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, CA. [33]
In the summer of 1964, HydroQuebec used silver iodide generators to try to raise the levels of its reservoirs: it rained for three weeks, leading scientists to comment that, “the success of the operation exceeded the wildest dreams of the cloud-seeding force.” [34] In 1966, scientists from the USAF Cambridge Research Labs developed a “cloudbuster” – the same name assigned to an apparatus developed by Wilhelm Reich at Orgonon (ME) over 15 years earlier – which seeded clouds by plane with CO2. In 1966, Project Hailswath involved 14 research groups in hail suppression; meanwhile the U.S. DOD research on dissipation of cold fog had moved into operational use by the Army and Air Force. [35]
In 1966 the Federal Government spent about $7.3 million in ENMOD projects with eight agencies (NSF; FAA; NASA; Departments of Commerce, Defense, Interior, and Agriculture). The efforts encompassed: precipitation modification; hail suppression; fog and cloud dissipation; lighting modification; severe storm modification, and “other.” The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) has been a key player in both openly funded and more secretive ENMOD related research.
Major research efforts in tornado modification; hurricane steering and cyclone manipulation were sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. [36] In sections below we will see that ONR and NASA are two of the many agencies that today fund major ENMOD research efforts, ostensibly, again, for civilian purposes – meaning research into atmospheric modeling for weather prediction, not modification or control. It might, then, be propitious to ask at this point if we are to believe that some gap occurred, where decades of major ENMOD efforts of these and other agencies were abandoned or curtailed after the U.S. signed the ENMOD treaty in 1977.
Total expenditures for ENMOD operations reached some $9 million in the fiscal year 1967 budget – this for the quantifiable, publicly visible, non-black programs alone.
The secretive right-wing RAND Corporation think-tank secured numerous major initiatives in ENMOD development throughout the 1960s, all commissioned and supported by the U.S. government. The National Science Foundation in 1962 commissioned the RAND Corporation with a major study in weather modification; RAND won another major contract in 1964. [37]
RAND’s Project Air Force (PAF) has been an exclusive Air Force/RAND partnership for 57 years. Originally known as Project RAND (an acronym for research and development), PAF was established in 1946. RAND’s ‘special status facilitates stable USAF support over an extended period of years as well as in-the-family access by the research staff to relevant Air Force information and management personnel.” Indeed, RAND is very much the deep inside.
Recently declassified documents, for example, show that RAND helped guide the infant U.S. space satellite programs into their intelligence maturity. [38] A search of publicly available RAND publications from their own web site archive turns up only three documents on ENMOD, each from 1969 or 1970, on fog suppression, rainmaking in Israel, and weather modification. The abstract for the latter publication states:
A discussion emphasizing the importance of understanding the atmospheric environment in depth is a prime requisite for weather modification. Largely by the impetus of Langmuir’s research on the use of ice crystals in precipitation studies, the public has shown interest in “rainmaking” and cloud seeding activities during the past two decades. In the early 1960s two major research documents pointed the way to the use of computers for numerically modeling the atmosphere. With the space age, essentially simultaneous observation of atmospheric parameters has been possible on a global level. More important, perhaps, is that these studies point out the danger that exists in attempts to modify large-scale weather phenomena without sufficient understanding of the possible results. [39]
But while RAND generated wads of research on satellite technology interests and weather modification, much of this remains highly classified. Bibliographies from existing books on weather modification programs in the 1960s and 1970s list hundreds of reports, papers and books on ENMOD related research: one bibliography lists numerous RAND studies, which RAND’s own on-line library does not today call up. Is this an accident of electronic filing? Why did RAND both seemingly stop its involvement in ENMOD research and, apparently, relegate some of its own early studies to the oblivion of inaccessibility?
The answer may lie in the greater questions: Did all ENMOD research and development come to dead stop in acquiescence to the U.S. having signed the 1977 ENMOD treaty – as military spokesman and the media would have us believe? Or has ENMOD research proceeded in secret, off the public record, and/or by corporations that front for the military-intelligence matrix?
As ENMOD operations proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, the government and its army of ENMOD researchers faced major emerging public policy issues. Increasing ENMOD operations led to more and more questions and concerns by the public, and, in some cases, interstate legal challenges to the U.S. or state governments.
As one report noted:
Experience has shown that although most attempts to modify the weather go unnoticed, the coincidence of an abnormal weather event, such as a flood or prolonged period of rainfall, with an attempt at weather modification tends to raise a public outcry against such activity. Lengthy scientific explanations of the lack of association between the two events prove to be of no avail. Much remains to be done to determine how people perceive the weather, what their attitudes are toward weather modification, and what role information appears to play in conditioning such attitudes. [40]
The report’s attention to “conditioning such attitudes” is an unveiled reference to the need for persuasive propaganda or, in more contemporary language, perception management. The hubris of the scientific community and policy establishment shines here, in admission of the basic institutional premise that “we know best what the public needs” and, therefore, we just need to figure out what conditioning is required, and then “we can tell them.”
At the same time, the policy establishment, in its own ranks, continued to formulate more stringent questions about ENMOD oversight and control: officials questioned whether decisions about modifying major storms should be undertaken by operating agencies, or whether they belonged in the hands of the Executive Branch, under the control of the President and his executive advisors. But the growing sociological, legal and oversight issues notwithstanding, the ENMOD establishment continued to openly press its aggressive scientific agenda. (The extent to which additional programs proceeded in secret is, obviously, unknown.)
In 1967 the U.S. Senate passed the “Magnusson Bill” (S373) authorizing the Secretary of Commerce to accelerate programs of applied research, development and experimentation in weather and climate modification. The bill allocated $12 million, $30 million and $40 million over the next three years. [41] They projected expenditures of some $149 million annually by 1970. By FY 1973 there were over 700 degreed scientists and engineers in the U.S. whose major occupation was weather modification. [42]
Project Stormfury in 1969 seeded hurricane Debbie five times on August 18th and 20th, and the results “were so encouraging that a greatly expanded research program was planned.” The project involved NOAA, USAF, USN, U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. Hurricane Ginger was seeded in 1971. [43] Other major tropical storms were also targeted, and programs waited for opportunities for ENMOD experiments on hurricanes, but, not ironically, mother nature did not immediately cooperate in providing candidate storms.
Radio controlled “drones” (remotely piloted vehicles) were already being tested for their potential to penetrate severe storms and other high turbulence areas. [44] Satellites were designed for weather modification experiments where “their operational use is of the utmost value in modification efforts when in stationary orbit.” Satellites were deployed to describe the “mesoscale in relation to global weather by observing cloud activity and motions.” Satellites sounded throughout the atmosphere’s depth using infrared and microwave remote sounding [sensing] techniques. [45]
Wrote one researcher, echoing the opportunities enabled by rapid advances in state-of-the-art instrumentation and understanding in the 1970s:
As the technologies develop and achieve the range and resolution required for our efforts in weather modification, remote sensing techniques should place our research on a whole new frontier. [46]
Indeed, four or five key areas or “turnkey” technologies were identified for the realization of military ENMOD capabilities, and major funding and research attention was subsequently focused on them. The development of pivotal “turnkey” technologies – which continue to dictate the state-of-the-art in ENMOD capacity – revolved around advances in:
The advent of solid-state electronic devices led to miniaturization of systems and components, and the exponential advances in computer technologies. While radars and remote sensing technologies themselves came of age, the platforms that enabled their manned and unmanned deployment – especially in remote environments like deep space, severe storms and deep ocean – matured rapidly and were both covertly and overtly transitioned into operational use.
Supercomputers like the Cray evolved generation after generation until their capacity provided for phenomenal rates of data collection and assessment, while advanced languages, algorithms and modeling programs were refined -- not specifically, but certainly available and adapted -- for ENMOD applications. Multiple and improved tests led to verification of computer models, while the advanced technologies and platforms predicted and confirmed ever more accurate conditions of state: severe storms models proliferated, and they were fine tuned and modified to better and more accurately predict and characterize weather events like tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones.
Because the earth’s atmosphere and climate (and, hence, severe weather events) revolves around wind and ocean currents, turbulence, condensation, energy budgets and heat transfer, the entire system, and its hemispheric and regional microclimates, are dictated by non-linear processes. That is where an understanding of chaos theory becomes critical. Computers have provided significant insight into chaos theory -- they are essential to modeling of non-linear processes -- and one of the fundamental requirements for understanding non-linear behavior revolves around a complete and accurate assessment of the initial conditions of the equations of state (pressure, temperature, moisture content, wind speed vector), and the boundary conditions within and between states. Radars were used to determine which parts of clouds should be seeded, and to assess the results of the seeding itself.
Critical as well, was the capacity to analyze and compare modified versus unmodified weather systems. (Enter the University of Massachusetts MIRSL labs, and the military’s attention to the ostensibly “benign” but otherwise critical determinants of data collection, state-of-the-art radars, and remote sensing technologies – all to be discussed in detail below.) “Models have provided virtually priceless criteria for launching and evaluating seeding missions.” [47]
By the late 1970s it became obvious to some researchers that ENMOD operations might one day determine the atmospheric conditions over entire hemispheres and that these, in turn, through feedback mechanisms and “teleconnections” of the global climate system – would influence and dictate weather patterns elsewhere. Attention shifted to understanding the global energy budgets, and a major focus fell on the “triggers” of instability found in specific cloud systems. Satellites were focused on understanding simultaneous “hot towers” around the globe – a task that could now be systematically accomplished through remote sensing from space-based microwave and millimeter-wave radar platforms.
These “hot-towers” were the cumulus clouds, the “cylinders of the global heat engine,” and a “crucial part of the global heat pump:”
Other teleconnections between local triggers and hemispheric circulation adjustments are becoming subjects of serious investigation.
Results of full-scale experimentation [hurricane research] to date warrant some optimism that a storm-sized system may be markedly changed by means of cumulus modification.
Another promising but untried area lies in the “explosive” deepening of middle latitude oceanic cyclones. An important factor in the deepening process appears to be sea-air heat-flux, coupled with increasingly tall cumulus connection.
[Cumulus clouds] raise and covert energy at a rate nearly one million times that of all human power consumption in the world… their rapid deepening can trigger a major readjustment in wind pattern around a whole hemisphere.
Extended time and space effects of cloud modification need not be confined to rainfall, but could affect radiation budgets, energy budgets, momentum transports, boundary layer processes, severe weather manifestations, wind circulation patterns, and etc.
If the seedability in some potential deepening situations were to prove adequate, the explosive development of the storm could possibly be induced artificially. But why would anyone wish to consider such an experiment? The reason is that the explosive deepening of marine cyclones, particularly in the Gulf of Alaska, has been found to trigger major changes in the entire wind circulation pattern over the whole northern hemisphere.
Massive modification of equatorial cumuli might one day change the weather over middle America. [48]
About the same time that attention was drawn to developing the enabling technologies noted above, the National Academy of Sciences identified four problem areas for sustained ENMOD research and investments:
By this time however (circa 1971) the U.S. government viewed ENMOD research as having transitioned from the “basic research” stage to the “operational” stage. Experiments were occurring – or had occurred -- in 22 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Iran, Israel, Kenya, Italy, France, South Africa, Congo and the U.S.S.R. Airborne seeding programs were undertaken to combat drought in the Philippine Islands, Okinawa, Africa and Texas. [49] Fog clearing was a standard operation at airports; hailstorm abatement was successful in several parts of the world; forest fire control was being carried out operationally in Alaska; watershed seeding was widely practiced; lake storm snow redistribution was under extensive investigation. [50]
From 1971-1976 the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada ran the National Hail Research Experiment.
Project Stormfury continued. In 1974 the U.S. DOD dictated that Stormfury researchers conduct “more field experiments on tropical cyclones at every opportunity.” [51] In 1976, U.S. government officials outlined 50 experimental projects and 20 actual pilot programs costing upwards of $100 million over the next eight years. [52]
It was an explosive subject, up the 1970s but, after 1977, ENMOD interest seemed to disappear almost overnight. In other words, after decades of intense research and development, after billions of dollars of investment, after major institutions and governmental bodies were created and charged with oversight of ENMOD and its many peripheral issues, and after the entire reorganization of the U.S. Government to channel and guide and map out the future of this new and promising military and civilian “technology” – said to be more important than the atom bomb -- everything stopped.
Or did it?
It was as if a huge curtain fell over the subject as all research, all institutional interests, huge salaries and thousands of jobs – vanished. And the mass media stopped reporting anything and everything as if struck by plague. That – sudden and total silence -- is perhaps the most telling and suspicious indication of the secrecy and denial that the ENMOD arena was shackled with. Today, 2003, it is almost as if it never happened.
If man can modify the weather, he will obviously modify it for military purposes. It is no coincidence that the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Signal Corps have been deeply involved in weather modification research and development. Weather is a weapon, and the general who has control over the weather is in control of an opponent less well armed… The idea of clobbering an enemy with a blizzard, or starving him with an artificial drought still sounds like science fiction. But so did talk of atom bombs before 1945. [53]
So wrote author Daniel S. Halacy Jr., in his book, The Weather Changers, published in 1968.