Monday, June 18, 2007

MUST READ: THE BLUEPRINT

Out of the Blue: Space Drones, Black Programs, the Unveiling of U.S. Military Offensives in Weather as a Weapon, and the Coming Permanent State of Emergency.

keith harmon snow

keith harmon snow graduated B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. with a specialty in microwaves and antennas engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in 1986. From 1985 to 1989 he worked for General Electric Aerospace Electronics Laboratory on aerospace and defense technologies for classified communications, RADAR, EW and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) programs. Since 1990 he has worked as a journalist.

1. The Fog Watch (Propaganda): [2]

Throughout April, 2002, Amherst College (MA) radio (WAMH) ran a series of public service announcements (PSAs) sponsored by a Christian church organization declaring the existence of weather modification technologies, and advocating that listeners contact the U.S. government to demand that these technologies be deployed to moderate the extreme weather and drought we are seeing. According to these PSAs, the government use of these existing technologies to mitigate hostile weather “is a fundamental right” of every U.S. citizen. [3]

On February 17, 2002, ABC News ran a very brief “news” clip titled “Weather As A Weapon?” The inquisitive title infers that this is some not-yet-certain possibility, contributing to the democratic ideal that supposes weather warfare might be something we – the public – ought to at least be thinking about, and possibly debating. ABC would never have run the story without some greater purpose than simply “to keep the public informed.” That is the expected role of ABC, in the “democratic” and “free” press that ABC purports to be part of. [4]

If not to serve as a news vehicle for genuine public service and education, as suggested, what then is the true purpose of the ABC news brief? This introduction focuses on the ABC article first, precisely because the purpose of this article (and others like it) is to help pave the way for public acceptance of military objectives by shaping the public mind a priori.

The ABC article describes the potential advantages of weather modification: seeding clouds, creating rain or tornadoes over hostiles forces, burning through fog to expose enemy aircraft:

Consider what might happen on some battlefield of the future where the U.S. military could gain a tactical advantage by changing the weather. There are several ways they might try to do that. One way would be to create rain that turns battlefields into mud baths in order to immobilize enemy troops and enemies. Another is by triggering lightning storms over airfields to keep hostile aircraft on the ground. Yet another possibility would be to burn through a heavy fog by firing lasers to give U.S. fighter pilots a better view of enemy targets. An Air Force research paper called “Owning the Weather in 2025” predicts that weather modification could reshape battlefields. [5]

Weather warfare, of course, is set in some amorphous future battlespace. There is ABC’s first deception. ABC draws attention to the Air Force document Owning the Weather in 2025. This is an unclassified document, accessible to the public, and this USAFdocument suggests that ENMOD research and development is all mere theory and speculation, indeed, science fiction.

Owning the Weather in 2025 appears on its face to reveal significant details about the nature of U.S. national security and defense capabilities. However, in the age of international terrorism, with the U.S. military and its multinational corporations and their media minions whipping up a frenzy about terrorists of all stripes, about anthrax scares and world trade massacres -- and with rapid information access and electronic exchange making such reports Internet available to the hoards of uncivilized information-seeking barbarians feared by the Pentagon -- we can be sure that this document shows us only what we are intended to see.

Owning the Weather in 2025 serves the greater purpose of exposing only what is efficacious to the military, to the intelligence apparatus, to the companies they are in league with, and to the compromised policymakers seeking public support – by any means -- for the military programs they are paid to peddle. That is ABC’s second deception: steering the news-consuming public toward an inversion of reality, a public relations document, officially sanctioned, released and posted by the military. ABC does not question the origins of this document, or why it has suddenly come into vogue.

ABC confirms that weather warfare is, at the very least, under development: in its closing paragraph, the article noted that substantial ongoing investments in research and development of ENMOD technologies have continued.

In the U.S. and in many other countries, the private sector continues to work on weather modification technology — work that could also be used on the battlefield. And as this research continues on, for example, cloud seeding techniques that produce heavy rain to help farmers in time of drought or laser technology that could clear heavy fog for passenger jets, the military is watching. [6]

To say that the military is “watching” is to lie outright. There is ABC’s third deception: as I will imminently show, the military has funded and sponsored these weather warfare technologies for over fifty years. ABC’s fourth deception is the suggestion that the private sector and the government defense sector are independent, that one does not wash the hands, or wipe the ass, of the other. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fifth deception by ABC News is the suggestion that these life and earth destroying technologies – pursued with a scientific hubris that is psychotic and obscene -- will also serve peaceful uses. Indeed, given the industrial acceleration of climatic mayhem we can be sure that the public will be clamoring for these weather modification technologies -- to mitigate the domestic and regional cataclysms of climate instabilities. The further suggestion is that the transition of these technologies from commercial to military uses is an afterthought, rather than their raison d”etre. That is ABC’s sixth deception.

Naturally – or, rather, quite unnaturally -- weather modification tools will revive gardens of sunflowers and fields of wheat stricken by drought, and they will guide passenger jets full of innocent people (!) to safety. By implication, these weather modification technologies are essential to a functioning human society, they will never be used unjustly, and they are as [ostensibly] benign as atoms for peace [civilian nuclear weapons]. Such arguments about the ENMOD arena will increasingly proliferate, with great media fanfare, serving the intended purpose of manipulating the public mind, as information about ENMOD technologies is slowly and strategically transitioned out of the [classified] closet.

Indeed, the public has already paid billions of dollars to develop these technologies – a fact that ABC does not share -- so we might as well see them put to good use. Hiding the proliferation of public subsidies for weather warfare, or failing to question or investigate the DOD budget, at the very least, is ABC’s seventh deception.

The main purpose of the ABC article – and the WAMH public service announcement – is to introduce a new subject heretofore forbidden by the military and, its extension, the corporate media. These articles signal the beginnings of a propaganda campaign to habituate citizens to a happy, un-dissenting coexistence with weather warfare technology. That is ABC’s eighth deception.

The deeper purpose of the ABC “news” clip – the ninth deception -- is to garner support from U.S. citizens to withdraw from – to denounce, evade or trample on – an international treaty prohibiting ENMOD research and environmental warfare, signed by the U.S. in the 1970s. Thus does the bold and colorful subtitle, and the paragraph that follows, elucidate the central theme of the ABC article: “AGREEMENT BARS WEATHER MANIPULATION.”

But there is a problem turning theory into fact. Using weather as a weapon is a clear violation of international agreements. In 1977, the United Nations passed, and the U.S. signed, a resolution that prohibits changing the weather for hostile purposes on the grounds that too many civilians could be harmed. So the U.S. military, which once seeded clouds in Vietnam to produce heavy rains along the Ho Chi Minh trail, can now only concentrate on better weather forecasting. “We want to anticipate and exploit the weather, not modify it,” says U.S. Air Force Director of Weather Brig. Gen. Fred Lewis.

There may be a “problem turning theory into fact,” but there is certainly no problem turning fact into propaganda: some ENMOD technologies have been tested and, as reported elsewhere, used in battle already. It has been reported for example that weather warfare technologies cleared the skies to enable NATO carpet-bombing of Serbia – causing unprecedented, widespread, long-lasting droughts. [7] So there is ABC’s tenth deception.

In contradistinction to the suggestions by ABC News, we are not talking about merely seeding a few clouds. Here are the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth deceptions: ABC News hides the scale, magnitude and lethal capabilities of ENMOD weaponry – technologies that may already be operational, but are certainly under development.

The United States is party to an arms control treaty known as the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD Treaty), ratified in 1978. [8] We do not know why the U.S. signed this treaty in 1977, but we can be at least 95 % certain that the Nixon/Ford administrations did not do so out of concern that “too many civilians could be harmed,” as reported in this ABC article. There is ABC’s fourteenth deception: ABC dutifully peddles the myth that the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus is concerned about public health and welfare.

In the wake of the 1970s U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearings on covert actions (known as the Church Committee hearings), the broad spectrum of political assassinations, bloody coups, secret operations and technology developments deemed essential to the U.S. national security apparatus were driven underground in highly classified programs. [9]

Similarly, under a wave of devastating exposures about un-democratic US intelligence activities, and the Church Committee hearings, the U.S. DOD and the intelligence apparatus recognized that their secret programs and covert operations could only prevail given major but cosmetic changes promoting the “appearance” of termination, for one example, or promoting the independence of private sector laboratories and corporations, for another. Hence “front” companies were established, and, like numerous corporations already active in the various arenas, they were funded and tasked with maintaining the otherwise illegal, forbidden or secret programs and/or operations and/or activities. Just as the assassinations, coups and covert operations never stopped, the programs to develop weather warfare continued. This thesis is developed in details to follow.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. signed the 1977 ENMOD Treaty – in part -- for cosmetic purposes, and to further the disingenuous U.S. government posturing that pretends to care about truth, liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, at home and abroad. It is all smoke and mirrors. In fact, the United States resisted the ENMOD treaty to the bitter end, and refused to sign unless major provisions were deleted, or watered down, at the very least. (Such U.S. establishment behavior is commonplace today.) ABC’s fifteenth deception, then, comes in failing to investigate, or even mildly question, the disingenuous behavior of U.S. officials.

ABC quotes Air Force Director of Weather Brig. Gen. Fred Lewis. Choosing this person as the sole authority allowed to speak on the U.S. military’s weather warfare capabilities is ABC’s sixteenth deception. Brigadier Generals are credible enough, and this one utters some truth, and ABC does not question this truth. “We want to anticipate and exploit the weather, not modify it,” says U.S. Air Force Director of Weather Brig. Gen. Fred Lewis.

It is a curious statement, in the context it is in, because it is defensive at its core. It is a direct lie. Significant evidence suggests that somewhere in the national security apparatus – DOD (Department of Defense), DOE (Department of Energy), NSA (National Security Agency), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) or deeper – there are ongoing, intensive programs in ENMOD (read: weather warfare) technologies.

And then there are all the corporate programs “fronting” for the military.

Indeed, the highly invisible U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) – a phantom agency born in the 1950s, declassified in 1992 – enmeshed with the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency -- might be the culprit: the NRO plans, builds and operates America’s spy satellites, and they specialize in intelligence-gathering and information warfare. A DOD agency, the NRO is staffed by DOD and CIA personnel; it is funded through the National Reconnaissance Program, part of the National Foreign Intelligence Program. [10] According to CIA operative Victor Marchetti and state department official John Marks, “The NRO works in such intense secrecy that its very existence is classified. Its director for many years was a mysterious Air Force colonel (and later brigadier general) named Ralph Steakley, who retired in the early 1970’s to take a position with Westinghouse Corporation, a defense contractor which sells considerable equipment to the NRO.” The NRO budget in 1974 was more than $1.5 billion. [11]

As I will show, the entire subject of weather warfare revolves around “plausible deniability” and the capacity of elite decision makers to “plausibly deny” that such technologies exist (just as assassinations were not committed, coups were not fomented, massacres were not perpetrated, “disappeared” people were not disappeared). Because proof of secret operations is highly classified, hence invisible, the unverifiable accusations are answered with plausible denials and we are left to depend on the (ostensible) basic goodness and integrity of leaders.

The statement by Brig. General Fred Lewis is contradicted, in its most simple form, by the obvious fact that all branches of the U.S. military and security apparatus rely on sophisticated SIGINT (SIGnals INTelligence), COMINT (COMmunications INTelligence), EW (Electronic Warfare), C4ISR/T (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance / Tracking) technologies whose entire mission and purpose can be, and often has been, compromised, neutralized or entirely defeated by hostile (but natural) weather conditions in the battlespace environment. [12]

Question: Would the defense establishment ignore technologies with the potential to decisively defeat the “no-win” military compromises and losses due to an unpredictable and cranky old mother nature?

Answer: They would not.

The statement by Brig. General Fred Lewis is further contradicted by the obvious military thrusts to develop capabilities that maximize stealth and, simultaneously, minimize risk to U.S. troops, and the propensity, again, well documented, to use clandestine operations premised, again, on “plausible denial.” In light of these major policy and field objectives, the existence of an entire spectrum or portfolio of ENMOD technologies is both plausible and certain. Said differently, it is irrational and unlikely and naïve and unreasonable to suppose the absence of these technologies given the grossly offensive actions that have been consistently demonstrated by the U.S. military, scientific and intelligence establishment over the past five decades.

Owning the Weather in 2025, advertised by ABC News, confirms the offensive interests the U.S. Air Force has in “owning and controlling” weather -- as a weapon. Numerous citations and references from the report itself reveal that military analysts and scientists have been working on weather modification issues in some capacities. (Projected ENMOD capabilities from the report are delineated in Table One .)

Owning The Weather in 2025 is but one chapter of the much larger report Air Force 2025, but ABC News did not report on that, nor did they explore the obvious evidence of the military’s comprehensive embracement of ENMOD technologies. That is ABC’s seventeenth deception. Air Force 2025 is a significant document. It outlines diverse technologies and strategies that the Air Force feels it must adopt to prevent the Air Force from ushering in its own extinction by 2025. The following excerpts from the Air Force 2025 shed some light on the intentions of the Air Force, and call into question the credibility of the statement -- “We want to anticipate and exploit the weather, not modify it” – by Air Force Director of Weather Brig. Gen. Fred Lewis:

2025 is a study designed to comply with a directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force to examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future. [13]

In 2025, uninhabited aerospace vehicles (UAV) are routinely used for weather modification operations… Prior to the attack, which is coordinated with forecasted weather conditions, the UAVs begin cloud generation and seeding operations. UAVs disperse a cirrus shield to deny enemy visual and infrared surveillance.

It [weather modification] would also include specific intervention tools and technologies, some of which already exist and others which must be developed. Some of these proposed tools are described in the following chapter titled Concept of Operations. The total weather-modification process would be a real-time loop of continuous, appropriate, measured interventions, and feedback capable of producing desired weather behavior.

If precipitation enhancement techniques are successfully developed and the right natural conditions also exist, we must also be able to disperse carbon dust into the desired location… 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.

Recent army research lab experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of generating fog. [14]

It is important to note that many techniques to modify the upper atmosphere have been successfully demonstrated experimentally. Ground-based modification techniques employed [by the former Soviet Union] include vertical HF heating, oblique HF heating, microwave heating, and magnetospheric modification. Significant military applications of such operations include low frequency (LF) communication production, HF ducted communications, and creation of an artificial ionosphere. Moreover, developing countries also recognize the benefit of ionospheric modification: in the early 1980s, Brazil conducted an experiment to modify the ionosphere by chemical injection.

First note that this latter paragraph admits that both the U.S.S.R. and Brazil – the latter as recent as the 1980s – have performed ENMOD experiments on the earth’s ionosphere. This curious admission raises at least two questions to ponder prior to exploring the true U.S. involvement in the ENMOD arena: [1] Would the U.S. DOD stand idly by and twiddle their missiles while other nations develop potentially revolutionary lethal technologies that might be then used against the U.S.? And [2]: Were not the U.S.S.R. and Brazil’s ENMOD experiments in contravention of the International ENMOD treaty of 1977?

Air Force 2025, in theory, is a roadmap to the future. It closes with a passionate and glowingly patriotic section outlining the coming extinction of the Air Force, and, indeed, the entire United States itself, if critical technologies, environments, personnel and capabilities outlined in Air Force 2025 are not exploited absolutely. According to this summary, every freedom-loving American -- by default -- should enthusiastically and unquestioningly support the USAFagenda.

Of course, without any further qualification or investigation by ABC News, and fed by ABC only the simplest of ideas to ensure that they are digested by the public, the casual reader is unable to separate the truth from the lie. ABC’s eighteenth deception comes in allowing the lie to pass. Neither does ABC News balance the newly enshrined truth with any alternative views, or counter quotes, or dissenting opinions -- as if dissenters and their rationales did not exist at all. ABC has not reported on the proliferation of, or the dissenting scientific views on, or the risks of, these technologies – military or civilian. That is ABC News’ nineteenth deception.

Air Force 2025

Table One:

“Operational Capabilities Matrix”

DEGRADE ENEMY FORCES

ENHANCE FRIENDLY FORCES

Precipitation Enhancement

Precipitation Avoidance

- Flood Lines of Communication

- Maintain/Improve LOC

- Reduce PGM/Recce Effectiveness

- Maintain Visibility

- Decrease Comfort Level/Morale

- Maintain Comfort Level/Morale

Storm Enhancement

Storm Modification

- Deny Operations

- Choose Battlespace Environment

Precipitation Denial

Space Weather

- Deny Fresh Water

- Improve Communication Reliability

-- Induce Drought

- Intercept Enemy Transmissions

Space Weather

- Revitalize Space Assets

- Disrupt Communications/Radar

Fog and Cloud Generation

- Disable/Destroy Space Assets

- Increase Concealment

Fog and Cloud Removal

Fog and Cloud Removal

- Deny Concealment

- Maintain Airfield Operations

- Increase Vulnerability to PGM/Recce

- Enhance PGM Effectiveness

Detect Hostile Weather Activities

Defend against Enemy Capabilities

The ABC News “news” clip -- sympathetic to a military establishment ostensibly plagued by budget cuts and federal oversights and shackled by international legal treaties -- helps further the misinformation that the military, “which once seeded clouds in Vietnam to produce heavy rains along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, can now only concentrate on better weather forecasting.” There is ABC’s twentieth deception – the unfortunate U.S. military, its hands tied, “can now only concentrate on better weather forecasting.” Here we find a common media ploy: to help generate sympathy for a military and intelligence apparatus ostensibly shackled by its own government and people – in sharp contradistinction to egregious, brutal, comprehensive U.S. military force and violence wielded with secrecy and impunity, around the globe, with a budget that is obscene.

For their twenty-first deception, ABC News has casually introduced the idea that, well, by the way, weather warfare has been used before, in Vietnam. This occurred under a top secret national security pilot program called Project Popeye, and it was just one of many covert and overt ENMOD programs pursued in the 1960s and 1970s by the United States. [15]

However, the U.S. ENMOD operations in Vietnam are totally unappreciated, and unheard of, primarily because they have been little reported – if reported at all -- by the corporate U.S. media. The CIA, FBI and other “national security” institutions regularly utilize this same propaganda ruse to deflect attention from secret operations, torture and state-legitimized terrorism. The method is simple: begin circulating previously unreported facts to lay the groundwork for public acceptance, and then, if and when challenged, shrug the information off as “old news” that is “common public knowledge.” In any event -- we are always assured -- the institution in question (CIA) has long since reformed. [16]

To close this deconstruction of the ABC News article, and assess as accurately as possible the state of the art in weather weaponry, consider that in the interest of deploying weather warfare capabilities – under the same Nixon/Ford administration which signed the ENMOD treaty in 1977 -- unspecified substances were introduced into the troposphere over enemy territory during the Vietnam era, in order to render enemy radars inoperable. The results of those efforts were never made public. [17]

“What is the possibility of developing this capability [enhancing or suppressing precipitation] and applying it to tactical operations by 2025?” asks the Air Force 2025 document.

“Closer than you might think,” the document answers.

It is a very auspicious admission.

2.Who Will Stop the Rain?

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:

  1. instrumentation (radars, lidars, FOPAIRS, remote-sensing technologies);
  2. aerospace delivery platforms (UAVs, satellites, missiles);
  3. sensing platforms (UAVs, satellites, missiles, ground systems, submarines);
  4. compact computers and supercomputers;
  5. algorithms, data analyses, simulation and modeling tools;
  6. chaos theory.

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:

  • Modification of clouds and storm systems
  • Modification of large-scale weather and climate
  • Modification of local and regional climates
  • Inadvertent modification of the atmosphere

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.

3. How to Wreck the Environment… Devastation as Government Policy

In 1968, Professor Gordon J.F. McDonald, a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, elaborated in great detail on the state-of-the-knowledge weather modification technologies in a book chapter called “How To Wreck the Environment.”

“The key to geophysical warfare,” McDonald wrote, “is the identification of the environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy.” [54]

McDonald described large field programs on weather modification, and he elaborates on the scientific knowledge and the capacity for the military to hide ENMOD operations behind environmental chaos. This raises questions about whether the military has facilitated climatic mayhem – no matter the active or passive means -- to provide a permanent shield behind which to secretly operate. Blocking and stalling on climate treaties is one such means. Certainly, if the military-science-industrial juggernaut is operating on the premise that “we can control tomorrow the adverse weather we create today” it is reasonable, and perhaps even necessary, to believe that that is exactly what has happened.

McDonald bemoans the potential to mask offensive ENMOD operations under nature’s irregularities, where an “operation could be concealed by the statistical irregularity of the atmosphere… A nation possessing superior technology in environmental manipulation could damage an adversary without revealing its intent.” [55]

McDonald’s detailed discussions of manipulating Antarctica’s ice sheets raise questions about the possible military / scientific role in promoting the recent substantial Antarctic ice shelf fractures and the unprecedented shattering of icebergs, heretofore scientifically unknown. [56] While the mean annual rise in global temperatures might be the cause, one could imagine that Very Low Frequency (VLF) waves propagated by submarines or other high-energy transmitters might be responsible. The U.S. Navy is certainly capable of irresponsible high-energy submarine testing: the U.S. Navy recently confirmed, for example, that high-energy, low-frequency sonar experiments have killed humpback whales. [57]

Another possibility is that downscaled thermonuclear devices have been tested in remote ice core experiments in Antarctica: McDonald addresses this potential scenario. Curiously, the military, since the World Trade center attacks, has stepped up its public relations campaign focused on the supposed necessity of detonating small-scale thermonuclear devices. It is not unlikely that high-energy and directed-energy weapons -- nuclear or otherwise – are being sporadically tested beyond public or institutional oversight. Indeed, as we will see below, it appears that high-energy weapons have already been developed and tested under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP).

Polar missions remain shrouded under programs ostensibly dedicated to research in “atmospheric monitoring” and “global climate change.” However, we should certainly question the involvement of major military industrial corporations, such as Raytheon Polar Services Co. (RPSC), contracted by the National Science Foundation to run all U.S. Antarctic bases under the United States Antarctic Program, in alignment with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The McMurdo Research Station alone is home to over 750 researchers and support personnel.

World renowned scientist Dr. Rosalie Bertell today confirms that “US military scientists ... are working on weather systems as a potential weapon. The methods include the enhancing of storms and the diverting of vapor-rivers in the Earth’s atmosphere to produce targeted droughts or floods.” [58] As noted in Air Force 2025, “recent army research lab experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of generating fog.” [59] Similarly, research has been conducted in precipitation modification for decades. [60]

Former French military officer Marc Filterman outlines several types of contemporary “unconventional weapons” using radio frequencies. He refers to “weather war,” indicating that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had already “mastered the know-how needed to unleash sudden climate changes (hurricanes, drought) in the early 1980s.” These technologies make it “possible to trigger atmospheric disturbances by using Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radar [waves].” [61]

In Benign Weather Modification, published March 1997, Air Force Major Barry B. Coble superficially documents the existence of weather modification science – here is the curious phenomenon of unclassified revelations once again -- and he traces the developments that have occurred, notably, in the hands of the Pentagon and CIA’s staunchest ideological enemies:

“The first scientifically controlled and monitored effort generally recognized by the meteorological community as constituting weather modification occurred in 1948,” he writes, “when Dr. Irving Langmuir first experimented with artificially seeding clouds in order to produce rain. His experiments showed positive results, sparking tremendous interest in the field nearly overnight. [62]

Many countries throughout the world practice weather modification. The Russians have long been interested in using weather modification as a way to control hail. [63] The Chinese recognize the value of weather modification and believe, incorrectly, that the US military continues to use weather as a weapon. [64]

However, there is little available evidence showing active efforts by other countries to use weather modification for military use. The US military, especially the Air Force, is considered the preeminent world leader in technology and its applications in the battle space. Since the late 1970s, the Air Force has “backed away” from pursuing weather modification technology even though the scientific understanding and the technological capability have evolved, albeit slowly, over time. It is a well-known fact that weather affects the battle space, contributing to the “fog of war.” New developments in the field of weather modification may help eliminate some of this "fog" and turn weather into a force multiplier. [65]

Are we to believe that the U.S. national security apparatus ceased all weather modification research even as the ever hostile and encircling communist RED enemies pursued this research emphatically? Apparently so: Coble elaborates on the absence of any U.S. military role in weather modification developments.

DOD funding for weather modification research peaked at $2.8 million in 1977. Funding was eliminated in 1979. Since then there has been no active research effort into weather modification by DOD. The Air Force spends no money on research, and there is no effort to monitor civilian research, applications and advancements. The Army’s program, “Owning the Weather for the Battlefield,” deals only with incorporating weather information into the digitized battlefield of the future. Efforts to modify the weather for battle are not being pursued. [66]

After this rather auspicious paragraph denying any USAF or DOD interest or involvement in ENMOD technologies, Coble goes on and eventually identifies existing “benign weather modification” technologies under development. He specifically notes at one point that government research in benign weather modification, which in the beginning he adamantly denied, continues:

Each of these weather modification types has commercial applications, and several companies exist to practice these types of Benign Weather Modification. US government-sponsored BWM research, however, is on the decline. Annual government funding (both state and federal) peaked in FY77 at $19 million. In 1992 the funding level fell to $5 million. [67]

What are we to make of these contradictory statements? Plausible denial? The author earlier emphatically rejected all military development of ENMOD technologies whatsoever. This rejection came in the statements: ‘since [1979] there has been no active research effort into weather modification by DOD;” and “The Air Force spends no money on research, and there is no effort to monitor civilian research, applications and advancements.” The author has led us through a maze of contradictions. There is ongoing development, it is outlined to some extent in this unclassified report, and in 1992 the annual government funding level fell to $5 million! Naturally, as we are always reminded by the military, the funding is on the decline.

What kind of funding occurred from 1979 to 1992? What kind of funding occurred, and occurs now, under the darkest and most secretive “black” programs of the U.S. national security apparatus?

Now, perhaps this is the appropriate place to define exactly what is meant by “black” project. Black projects operate outside normal budgetary, directional and oversight channels. According to John Pike and Steven Aftergood of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, speaking on black aircraft programs:

Wasteful, dangerous, or highly speculative [black aircraft] programs will have a much better chance of being funded by congress if they are highly classified… [but this] inhibits the oversight process and it puts these programs outside the sphere of democratic activity. [68]

Pike and Aftergood calculated that up to $15 billion may have been spent on the secret – and some say non-existent – Aurora program (see below). Other estimates put the “black” aircraft budget (alone) at $14.3 billion annually. [69] The annual figure may actually be much higher.

E-Systems is one of the biggest intelligence contractors in the world -- doing work for the CIA, defense intelligence organizations and others -- and $1.8 billion of their annual sales are to these organizations, with $800 million for black projects -- projects so secret that even the United States Congress isn’t told how the money is being spent. [70] E-Systems, it turns out, is involved in the HAARP program (see below).

Another curious but oblique potential admission of the existence of these ENMOD weapons technologies can be found in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction. In this 1998 Air Force document delineating the chain-of-command policies on “Meteorological and Oceanographic Operations,” the Air Force states:

“The United States occasionally receives requests for assistance with weather modification operations in foreign nations, some of which are proposed initially to U.S. military commands or agencies located in those nations. In the event foreign nations or international organizations request assistance with weather modifications, they should be informed to forward their request through diplomatic channels to the Department of State. No encouragement or commitment should be indicated by the receiving military organization.” [71]

Are the governments or intelligence networks of other countries informed about U.S. ENMOD capabilities? (Given that the United States has installed many third world governments, with U.S. military trained personnel, it is highly likely.) What has brought these requests about? Is there anything suspect about a statement that declares: “No encouragement or commitment should be indicated…?” Is it merely anecdotal that the Department of Defense is providing guidance as recent as 1998 on what to do if countries request U.S. assistance on weather modification operations?

In a paper entitled ‘systems Considerations of Weather Modification Experiments Using High Power Electromagnetic Radiation,” presented at EXPLOSPACE Workshop on Space Exploration and Resource Exploitation, in 1998, author and DOD deep insider Dr. Bernard Eastland directly confirms that military ENMOD pursuits occurred after 1977.

In the mid-1980s the author studied antennas producing up to 1012 watts using natural gas on the North Slope of Alaska for Atlantic Richfield Corp. [ARCO] and the Department of Defense for military applications in the ionosphere… Because of the similarity between the proposed antenna power and the energy turnover of some typical storm systems, applications for weather modification in the troposphere were proposed. [72]

As I will definitively show, the military directives addressed above appear to be designed to help maintain the highest levels of secrecy and security around ENMOD capabilities – a.k.a. devastating weather weaponry, which are very real (as the above cited research confirms) and, it would seem, available for select allied deployments or missions as determined at the highest levels of the U.S. State Department -- or the shadow warriors behind it. Having established that some discrepancy exists between public statements made by military officials, that weather as a weapon has been promoted in certain media venues, and that military programs have occurred at some levels, I will now provide further definitive evidence, examples and deep discussion of ongoing ENMOD realities.

4. We Take the Brain – Prelude to Stealth, Deception and Death

Modern aerospace programs and technologies had their genesis in the secret aerospace programs of the Nazi-American war machine. [73] Thus is it necessary to briefly revision the popular (limited) understanding of events that transpired at the end of World War II.

On April 12, 1945, having crushed the last bastion of Nazi military resistance, U.S. forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower secured Thuringia, the heart of the Nazi secret weapons research and development programs in Germany. Eisenhower led the charge to transfer superior and futuristic Nazi weapons technologies to the United States before the weapons facilities were turned over the allied invading Soviet army on July 4, 1945. The Soviets, of course, drew the iron curtain over Thuringia and Eastern Germany for the next 43 years (to 1989).

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the removal of futuristic aerospace “assets,” including the Fi 103 “flying bomb” (propaganda name “V1”), the A4 rocket (“V2”), and -- the world’s first deployable jet turbine aircraft -- the Messerschmidt Me 262 (which as a fighter could attain speeds of over 800 km/h). At least five Me 262 planes were assembled under the direction of U.S. forces in control of the Messerschmidt Me 262 production factory from April to July 1945.

The biggest and most secretive catch was an intact prototype of an all-wing, single engine, single-seater jet plane, type named the Go 229 V-3. This plane bore a striking similarity between the futuristic ‘stealth” bomber -- the flying wing -- unveiled in the United States circa 1989. “At least one complete Go 229 V3 plane and a large number of finished parts of the prototype fell into their [U.S.] hands.” [74]

It is notable that aircraft historian Curtiss Peebles, in his Dark Eagles: A History of Top Secret U.S. Aircraft Programs (Presidio, 1995), mentions both the Me 262 (page 16) and the Go 229 V3 (page 51) in passing, as if the reader will have some idea what they are or where they came from. He also mentions both aircraft in the context of being far superior to anything the U.S. had at the time. [75]

Given the relative obscurity of these aircraft, and the means by which they made their way in to the U.S. intelligence apparatus, Peebles’ incidental mention, and the complementary omission of further details, bespeaks the defense and intelligence apparatus tactic for bring classified information or projects out into the public: plant the information here and there; if and when anyone questions what it is about, explain that that has been common knowledge for some time.

Allied intelligence ascertained well in advance the locations of the supreme Nazi weapons facilities, including the exact factories and their production capabilities, but the Allied bombing campaign did not target the weapons complex. For example, while bombs fell in an ostensible attack on the V2 rocket production facilities near Nordhausen on April 3, 1945, the V2 centers were entirely spared: some 8,800 civilians instead died when the bombs hit the town itself. There was no military significance to these killings, merely eight days before the American troops arrived. [76] This is yet another example of war crimes orchestrated within the U.S. government.

General Eisenhower oversaw the exfiltration of over 2000 Nazi scientists – experts in biological warfare, rocketry, munitions, intelligence and psychological operations (torture and propaganda) – to U.S. bases of operation, mostly, but not exclusively, in the continental United States. (It is notable that Eisenhower, later, as U.S. President, was ardent in his support of early ENMOD research and development programs.) This mass and secretive recruitment and exfiltration occurred under highly classified programs of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) -- and continued under its later incarnation, the Central Intelligence Agency. These O.S.S./CIA programs were called Project “Paperclip” and Project “63.” Through the defense and intelligence establishment’s then “Operation Sunshine,” Nazi’s belonging to the elite “Gehlen Org” – named for Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen – were exfiltrated into the CIA. [77]

The U.S. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) was set up early in WW-II and tasked with collecting scientific data on the level of research attained by the Germans in select technical fields and weapons – primarily, at first, concerned with an atom bomb. Some 3000 researchers and engineers wearing U.S. Army and Air Force uniforms were attached to General Patton’s Third Army solely for this purpose, and they converged en masse on the Nazi secret underground weapons complexes of Thuringia after the Allied invasion. Their slogan was: “We take the brain.” [78]

The U.S. exfiltration of Nazi scientists paved the way for U.S. aerospace killing superiority and the imminent militarization of space. One veteran rocket scientist from the Nazi V2 rocket program, Dr. Kurt H. Debus, served at one point as director of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral (to1975); he later turned up as CEO of the secretive West German Orbital Transport and Missiles, Ltd. (OTRAG) corporation. Another Nazi rocket enthusiast was Lutz Thilo Kayser, OTRAG’s founder and manager, a former member of the U.S. ad hoc committee on the Apollo rocket transport systems. U.S. citizen Richard Gompetz, a specialist on the V2 engine and another Cape Canaveral veteran, served with OTRAG as well. [79]

OTRAG chose a very suspicious and remote location for their aerospace research and development projects: their operations in southeastern Zaire proceeded under a massive land-leasing arrangement with CIA operative and dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Seems OTRAG -- with complete U.S., German and French support -- was testing and developing aerospace weapons (cruise missiles, satellites) on territory leased from Mobutu in Zaire: it was a highly secretive and exclusive arrangement expropriating over 29,000 square miles. It was reported that the U.S. Boeing Company was also involved. The contract with Mobutu stipulated OTRAG’s rights up to the year 2000. [80] NASA has always been heavily involved in Zaire, apparently involved with earth environment “remote sensing” projects, though NASA interests and programs there remain mostly unexplained. [81]

USAID Project No. 660-0059, dated January 27, 1977, spelled out a cooperative agreement between the Mobutu government and NASA. Negotiated by Henry Kissinger, the project involved satellite reconnaissance station development by NASA, ostensibly for crop and water surveys. [82] The project seems to have revolved around advanced remote sensing missions, likely intended to serve the national security interests of the US-supported Mobutu dictatorship, the clandestine CIA war in Angola, and the mining interests (cobalt, copper, uranium, diamonds and gold) of multinational corporations in Shaba and Katanga.

Further refined secret aerospace interests appear to have spun out of the 1950s CIA development of a lightweight STOL (short-takeoff-and-landing) aircraft, the human-piloted Helio Courier. Developed by a contractor in Norwood, Massachusetts, the Helio Courier was first utilized by Christian missionaries and other CIA front groups furthering secretive and genocidal Rockefeller interests (Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil) in Latin America in 1959. (Recall that the Rockefeller’s United Fruit Company interests worked hand-in-hand with GE’s pioneering ENMOD scientist Dr. Irving Langmuir in Honduras after WW-II.) This remarkable CIA/NSA “asset” was kept secret for three decades. [83]

Other major CIA aerospace “assets” were developed in collaboration with the Lockheed Aerospace Skunk Works facility and the ultra-high secrecy aerospace “black” programs testbed at Groom Lake.

Groom Lake or “Area 51” is one of the now known “black” operations bases established by the DOD and cloaked in secrecy. This “non-existent” test facility was designated “Area 51” by the Atomic Energy Commission in June 1958, but was built around 1955. The adjacent AEC proving grounds became known as the Nevada Test Site. The base is now known worldwide as “Area 51” -- thanks to numerous mentions in Hollywood shows and movies – but this designation was officially dropped in the 1970s.

Groom Lake gave birth to numerous “black” aerospace “assets” with complete defense and intelligence cooperation and support at the highest levels. Two that we know about include the infamous U-2 (Article 347) spy plane, and the SR-71 (A-11), a technological legend in its own time. Under “Project Oxcart,” the CIA used front companies to fund subcontractors for aerospace developments. The A-11 and A-12 were declassified in 1981.

President Eisenhower was intimately aware of the development and deployment of the U-2. [84] CIA technicians worked frequently with Lockheed at Groom Lake on the U-2 and most major black aircraft to follow. Allen Dulles (CIA Director, 1947-1961), Richard Bissell (later CIA Director) and John McCone (later CIA Director) were intimately involved as well. In 1937, Steve Bechtel teamed up with John McCone and Bechtel-McCone Corporation won major military construction projects. It has been reported that the secretive CIA-insider Bechtel Corporation was one of the prime contractors involved in the construction of Groom Lake. Unsurprisingly, Bechtel Corporation has been heavily involved with the Nevada Test Site (see information on Bechtel below); Lockheed Martin is another Nevada Test Site contractor. The CIA had a special training program to provide CIA pilots for black aircraft testing and secret deployments – out of Groom Lake and other locations. [85]

It is important to recall that Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State) were lawyers with the Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell, teamed with the Nazi Schroder banks to directly finance Adolf Hitler. [86]

Notably, because it demonstrates both the propensity to obscure the real mission, and the early attention to weather related missions now undertaken routinely, proponents of the U-2 used research about the weather as a “cover” for the U-2’s real mission. The first public notice of the U-2, on May 7, 1956, by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), stated that the U-2 “helps to obtain the needed data… about gust-meteorological conditions to be found at high altitudes… including air-turbulence, convection clouds, wind sheer, jet stream, ozone and water-vapor.” [87]

Other secret aircraft of the 1950s included the Bell RX-1, RX-1A and RX-2 planes; the Bell X-16 was cancelled in 1955, but its existence was not declassified until 1976. [88] And then there was the WS-606 “flying disk” project of the 1950s – about which almost no information is available. [89]

5. Stealth, Deception and Death – Unmanned Aerospace/Aerial Vehicles

We can begin our assessment of the state of contemporary ENMOD technologies by narrowly addressing just one area related to ENMOD technology deployments: Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – UAVs – briefly mentioned above. UAV research, development and applications are a billions-of-dollars industry: the future has already arrived.

Early in 2002, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld added over $1 billion to the fiscal 2003 defense budget request to develop certain Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) programs. The DOD invested more than $3 billion in UAV development, procurement and operations between 1996 and 2001; it plans to invest $2.3 billion more by 2005 and is likely to spend $4.2 billion by 2010. According to the so-called UAV Roadmap, by 2010, the UAV inventory of all the military services is expected to grow to 290 vehicles. [90]

UAV development is slated to occur with complete transparency: the above designated budgetary appropriations do not account for expenditures on secret programs, or the decades of previous UAV research and developments, or for current and future ongoing UAV development under top-secret black programs.

Fleets, “packs” and “swarms” of UAVs or “drones” are already being systematically deployed around the U.S. T he U.S. Coast Guard – now part of the Office of Homeland Security – is deploying remote-controlled low-flying surveillance aircraft (UAVs) of the type used by the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan, along the Atlantic Coast. The acquisition of up to 76 drones nationwide is part of Deepwater , the Coast Guard’s $17 billion program “to replace aging equipment and respond to new security challenges.” [91]

Where and how did such prodigious stealth technology come about?

The birth of the UAV technologies seems to have spun out of a need for unmanned aircraft capable of highly secretive, dangerous missions like those undertaken by the U-2. Other missions revolved around remote sensing in severe weather, and dangerous overflights of “hostile” territory (China, Cuba, Russia), where the risk of human loss was high.

From 1959 to 1962, working for the CIA, the Ryan Aeronautical Company developed the Q-2C and Q-2D Firebee – a high-altitude reconnaissance drone, code-named “Red Wagon.” In 1962 the company won a $1.2 million follow-on contract for the Model 147A drones code-named Firefly. The Firefly reconnaissance drone reportedly photographed missile sites in Cuba, thereby providing the documentation that reportedly initiated the Cuban Missile Crisis. [92]

In the 1960s, numerous USAFpilotless unmanned aircraft – “drones” – were developed at Groom Lake. Unmanned high-speed drones tested and deployed in the 1960s included the Model 147 Lightning Bug – a spin-off of the 147A Firefly. The Lighting Bug drones saw 77 missions, over “Red” China and Vietnam, in 1965. Under Project “United Effort” (1965-1966), the U.S. flew some 105 electronic intelligence missions over North Vietnam and China, deploying the combat-ready Model 147 series UAV drones. The 147s complemented and eventually replaced the higher-risk manned U-2 missions in most cases, and the Model 147 Lightning Bug came in numerous specialized editions – the 147G, 147H, 147E, 147J, 147N, 147NX, 147NP, 147NRE and 147NQ – all adapted for specialized intelligence and warfighting missions, costing U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars (minimum).

The 147S Buffalo Hunter was developed in 1967. There were 340 global missions of the Model 147 in 1968; 437 missions in 1969; 406 missions in 1971. From 1970 to 1971 the DOD quietly transitioned the Model 147 drone program out of the black and into the blue. Some 570 missions were flown in 1972; 444 in 1973; 518 from 1974 to June of 1975. All told, the U.S. flew some 3,455 hostile UAV drone missions against China, North Vietnam and North Korea. CIA involvement with the Ryan Aeronautical Model 154 (P-4) Firefly was accidentally declassified in 1969; the drone was used until 1971. [93]

The CIA program to destabilize the governments of China, Vietnam and Korea is well documented, and secret aircraft missions, U-2 and drone overflights, and other combat “drops”, were pivotal. “There were many other CIA flights over China for purely espionage purposes, carried out by high-altitude U-2 planes, pilotless “drones”, and other aircraft. These overflights began around the late 1950s and were not discontinued until 1971, to coincide with Henry Kissinger’s first visit to Peking… China registered hundreds of “serious warnings” about violations of its airspace…” [94]

Flown out of Taiwan by CIA-trained pilots from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese Army, numerous U-2’s were shot down over China. The unmanned UAV drones were frequently shot down over the Chinese mainland as well: the Chinese claimed 19 downings of “U.S. imperialist, pilotless, high altitude planes.” [95] CIA aircraft also supported the Tibetan liberation movement, and the many Tibetan liberation fighters trained by the CIA in paramilitary warfare. Airborne biological agents were also released. [96]

To explain away secret aircraft and missiles platforms that were spotted now and then, or to answer the occasional unwanted publicity or press coverage of a crash, or a downing over “hostile” territory, the U.S. DOD used a variety of dismissive and deflective tactics, issuing statements of “no comment” and sometimes outright denials. Picking up on the sensitivity of these projects, major U.S. media outlets like the New York Times downplayed or dismissed reports, altogether hiding the existence of these secret assets from the American public. Notes aerospace historian Curtiss Peebles: “The concept of using an unmanned drone for high-risk overflights, and simply not commenting on any losses, had proved vital.” [97]

As mentioned previously, black projects proceeded outside normal oversight and budgetary channels. For example, in 1962 U.S. General Leo Geary arranged a $500,000 contingency fund for the initial studies that led to the Q-12 UAV (later known as D-21, code-named Tagboard); Lockheed Skunk Works was the contractor, and the D-21 became more secret than the U-2 or the A-12. While the aircraft was developed at Groom Lake, Tagboard funding and control was split between the CIA and the USAF, and the project was open only to the highest level officials: on January 18, 1967, for example, Lockheed chief designer Kelly Johnson met with U.S. deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance over Tagboard.

The Tagboard project was cancelled in 1971; it was declassified (1976-1977) by the tactic of putting the planes out in open spaces in towns where other aircraft were publicly visible. No photos showing the D-21 (piggybacked on top of the B-52H transport aircraft for launch) were released until circa 1982. Virtually all of details of the D-21 Tagboard, as with other major black aircraft made public, were not released until they appeared in 1993 in a highly patriotic and politically whitewashed book about Lockheed Skunk Works. [98]

USAFSystems Command took over the operation of Groom Lake by 1970. Soon thereafter, further extreme security measures were implemented as a series of new exotic aerospace projects evolved. Of course, under the imminent 1980s puppet Presidency of Ronald Reagan, black programs went even blacker. These included the Have Blue and Tacit Blue ( Shamu) stealth technology demonstrators (flights of these reportedly ended in 1985). The Tacit Blue plane was a Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) funded program, begun in 1978, revealed in April 30, 1996. [99]

In April, 1976, a $32.6 million contract was issued by DARPA to Lockheed Skunk Works for the black aircraft Hopeless Diamond – the Lockheed XST stealth fighter – also know (apparently) as Have Blue. Based on the implementation of low RCS (radar-cross section) stealth technologies developed under Project “Harvey” in the early 1970s (terminated 1975), Have Blue was officially confirmed in 1988, although photos were not released until 1991 (and these were released by accident). [100]

Aircraft 780 or Senior Trend was the F-117A fighter developed in the 1970s and lasting into the 1980s. As with other secret aerospace technologies, the F-117A was tested at the Tenopah Test Range (TTR), another secret base constructed northwest of Groom Lake; all flights occurred at night, in keeping with the increasing secrecy of black programs in the 1980s. The F-117A was declassified in 1988: given numerous crashes and leaks, it was no longer possible to be plausibly denied. Based on unclassified DOD info, the F-117A first saw combat in the euphemistically named Operation Just Cause, where thousands of innocent people were killed and thousands more wounded, during the illegal U.S. war against Panama (over CIA drugs profits), ordered by then President George Bush (I), then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, in October 1989. [101]

In 1983 a company called AeroVironment attracted government sponsorship from a “classified customer” to build a proof-of-concept solar-powered UAV. “Among the possible customers that have been suggested,” wrote aircraft historian Curtiss Peebles, “are the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the CIA and the Naval Research Laboratory.” (Please take note of these three organizations -- NRO, CIA and NRL -- to be discussed at length below for their direct financial and programmatic support of ENMOD development and enabling technologies.) This solar-powered UAV, developed at Groom Lake, was called HALSOL (high-altitude solar) -- and later HALSOL Pathfinder – and it remained classified until 1993. NASA later adapted HALSOL for classified “atmospheric research”. HALSOL was very similar to a “white” UAV called the Helios SRA, also designed for “atmospheric research”. [102]

In the early 1980s DARPA funded the development of the black Teal Rain UAV – later known as Amber -- with a $40 million development contract to Leading Systems Corporation (bought out in 1990 by General Atomics). The Amber program was partially declassified in 1987, although many of its characteristics remain “highly classified”. Amber I was developed for U.S. Army Intelligence tactical programs, and it was reportedly cancelled in 1990, and the designation of Amber I suggests there might be further Amber developments. [103]

AeroVironment also developed the Pointer, Pioneer and Exdrone UAV’s under black contracts. There were 533 sorties of the Pioneer UAV flown during the Gulf War – at least one Pioneer UAV was aloft at all times. U.S. Marines flew some 55-60 Exdrone UAV missions in the Gulf War. [104]

In the summer of 1993, Pentagon acquisitions chief John Deutch put out tenders for a UAV of certain specifications. This resulted in the GNAT-750, another Leading Systems development bought out by General Atomics. The CIA (under R. James Woolsey) controlled the black GNAT-750 program, and the unit deliverable price was $800,000 each. Reportedly, the GNAT-750 UAVs were first deployed during the U.S. war in Bosnia. [105]

To round out the discussion of UAV platforms, “drones” and other black aircraft, we need to interrupt our examination of UAV platforms and developments to briefly examine the veracity of the primary source of black aircraft information sited thus far, the 1995 Curtiss Peebles book, Dark Eagles: A History of Top Secret U.S. Aircraft Programs. Such an examination is important to the subject of secret ENMOD research and development pursuits, for it is precisely the lack of disclosure – and the cult of secrecy and denial behind it – that characterizes the entire military and intelligence apparatus, and the ENMOD arena that proliferates within it.

First consider that according to aircraft historian Curtiss Peebles, the GNAT-750 effort discussed above “marked the return to black aviation by the CIA after two decades” absence. To begin with, it seems unlikely that the CIA would cease and desist “for two decades” from black aviation projects -- and then just as suddenly resume. If we extrapolate backwards from the date (1993) the GNAT project was tendered by CIA director R. James Woolsey (based on information from Curtiss), the “two decades” of CIA inactivity (!) would be 1973 to 1993.

Please recall that this was a very auspicious era, replete with such milestone American events as Watergate, the Church Committee exposures on assassinations and coups, the U.S. supported invasion of East Timor, Iran-Contra, Reaganomics and the emergence of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – Star Wars – the predecessor to the now burgeoning Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) program.

Thus to situate the above Peebles’ comment, we need to examine the greater veracity of the Dark Eagles text. Much of the information offered in Dark Eagles is easily verified. Indeed, propaganda is generally true, and within the greater proliferation of selective and narrowly delineated truths one can neatly bury the occasional lie – which will then be believed. The beauty in propaganda, in disinformation, comes as well in the absence of any greater critical assessment, the selective use of certain facts and innuendos, or the complete dismissal of other, potentially damaging facts.

In the last chapter of Dark Eagles, Curtiss Peebles peddles the standard mythologies and fear about what the George Bush (II) gang has recently dubbed the “Axil of Evil.” Peebles demonizes North Korea, Iraq and Iran, rogue nations all.

All are totalitarian countries built around the cult of the leader and the ideology of violence, revenge and hatred. They define their status in terms of large military forces used to carry out their leaders’ will. All have secret police used to crush internal enemies, real or imagined. [106]

Indeed, had he not prefaced these comments with some attention to the so-called “rogue nations” of North Korea, Iraq and Iran, we might otherwise attribute them to the United States of America. They certainly fit. However, Mr. Peebles would never entertain such heresy, no matter that these statements are easily supported in examination of US foreign and domestic policy over the past five decades, as I have begun to show, and will continue to show.

From the above statement it is an easy extension to establish that Mr. Peebles is a willing apologist for black programs, permanent warfare, and the concomitant military terrorism of the United States of America. Indeed, in his closing chapter Peebles addresses the complaints made by critics of the US military-industrial complex. He suggests that black programs characterized by fraud, waste and abuse – in the language of the Federation of Atomic Scientists – were actually cost savers, and that some companies even returned funds to the US government, and that some programs came in “under budget”. His arguments mirror those of other rapacious multinational industries where some “savings” – ostensibly benefiting US taxpayers – has been instituted. Ditto for those environmentally hostile corporations who greenwash the public with examples of “good corporate citizenship” and ‘sustainable manufacturing” otherwise instituted merely in pursuit of greater efficiency -- and hence profits.

Multinational corporations seek to maximize profits, by any means necessary, and the scale of any “cost-savings” passed on to the public pale in comparison, for example, to the billions of dollars in tax breaks and special compensations secured -- by the US government -- for multinational corporations. It seems likely that one could prove that any funds returned by a corporation were not returned in the interest of equity and honesty, but in the interest of some damage control or other. Peebles also furthers the omnipotent myth that US military budgets are ever under attack and threat of reduction. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Peebles deals with issues of the lack of oversight with simplistic and dismissive examples selectively chosen to buttress his narrow argument. Hence, for example, “today the full defense and intelligence communities review” the GNAT-750 program. No matter that the GNAT-750 has already been transitioned out of the black and into the blue. In any case, he notes, black projects prevail under a climate of integrity, self-sacrifice and accomplishment, and there are reasonable checks and balances secured “by the responsibility of customers and designers to give and get ‘straight answers’.” No matter, as Peebles himself has repeatedly noted throughout his book, the propensity of DOD officials to lie through their teeth while looking you straight in the eye.

Curtiss Peebles is a patriotic American who believes in the unquestioning support of the U.S. military, its secret agencies and covert operations. Nowhere is this better illuminated than in statements made by Peebles in answer to critics’ complaints about costly boondoggles and lack of oversight. Curtiss Peebles’ rationales for U.S. military proliferation testify to his obvious bias in favor of the secrecy and denial of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus. Without black programs, unfettered by oversight and loosely funded outside normal governmental channels:

…in January, 1991, when it was needed, the F-117A would not have been in the dangerous skies over Baghdad.

Certainly not, and some thousands of innocent Iraqi people might be alive today because of it. And, in any case, we the people -- and our precious democracy -- would not have benefited from:

…technological breakthroughs that will gain for the U.S. an advantage over an enemy in any potential future conflict. The secrecy is necessary. It is not a joke or a game. They [black aircraft] must be hidden, they must be guarded by extraordinary means, as would any treasure.

This last statement is an open admission that Curtiss Peebles cannot be trusted to objectively investigate and disclose the extent of black aircraft operations, deployments, or the ongoing billions-of-dollars programs in black projects research and development. Given the extent of the information he has made available to us, we might plausibly assume that he has access to inside information precisely because he is a trusted and willing agent supporting the cult of plausible deniability -- through selective disinformation and intentional propaganda. He has openly expressed his unquestioning and patriotic support – indeed his duty – to defend the cult of secrecy and denial, by any means necessary. As we shall soon see, his role in spreading disinformation in support of the permanent warfare economy fits quite neatly into a larger propaganda and warfare framework.

Only two further black projects -- presumably test-flown from the secret Groom Lake and TTR bases -- have since been officially acknowledged: the stealth air-launched Lockheed Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM), reportedly cancelled in 1992, and the Northrop Tri-Service Stand-Off Attack Missile, reportedly cancelled in 1994.

Secretive UAV developments and related black programs technologies do not begin and end with Groom Lake -- or the newer Tenopah Test Range (TTR) nearby. The RAND Corporation has persisted in its insider DOD capacity as a significant and heavily funded resource in UAV studies and research. One RAND study, for example, examines the importance of mini-UAVs and micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) for urban conflict scenarios. The MAV is “designed to perch on buildings, with some chance for covertness.” [107]

Visible in the unclassified arena alone, there are small fleets of UAVs of varying capacities in service today. The U.S. military has over 200 UAVs of all types today. Others are under development. Consider that all branches of the military currently deploy UAVs with sophisticated SIGINT, COMINT, C4ISR, C4IST, EW and ADP (Air-Delivered Payloads) capabilities. [108] . The U.S. Army Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (TUAV) and the U.S. Air Force Global Hawk and RQ-1 Predator UAVs saw significant operational deployment in the war on Afghanistan, where they proved themselves indispensable, and they are part of a major array of weapons-bearing UAV-type systems slated to deploy various payloads sporting weather warfare enabling technologies. [109] RQ-1 Predator was also deployed over Kosovo. [110]

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI) literature clearly states: ‘state-of-the-art reconnaissance systems are in extensive use by the U.S. government including the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Department of Energy and the U.S. Navy as well as by overseas customers.” GA-ASI systems in use today include: RQ-1 Predator, and its advanced follow-on, Predator-B; GNAT, Prowler II and ALTUS UAV platforms.

Figure One:

General Atomics RQ-1 Predator UAV

Current military plans for Global Hawk (Northrup Grumman) and RQ-1 Predator (General Atomics) include the multibillion dollar ongoing research and development effort to implement a wireless “Internet in the sky,” allowing thousands of UAV robots to communicate quickly while zooming around a battle zone at speeds of up to 300 miles an hour. An association of some 300 scientists and engineers coordinated by the Office of Naval Research is about a year-and-a-half into a five-year, $11 million effort. The project is called Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents, or Minuteman. The network communications structure, developed by UCLA Prof. Mario Gerla, will deploy the highest-flying UAV, Global Hawk , as a “cell [phone] tower in the sky.” [111]

On August 23, 2002, General Atomics ASI announced that the combat-proven RQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) successfully launched a mini-UAV while in flight. Known as a Flight Inserted Detector Expendable for Reconnaissance ( FINDER), this 57 lb mini-UAV was carried on a pylon under Predator’s wing and released at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)-produced FINDER mini-UAV program is designed to evaluate Predator’s capability to carry and launch independently controlled and self-propelled mini-UAVs into hazardous conditions. [112]

According to General Atomics:

“Once launched, atmospheric sampling and assessments can be made prior to any combat strikes and that information can then be relayed to users in real-time. To extend the capability of the FINDER mini-UAV, the next phase of the program will include the integration of PIRANHA, an Aerospace SMC-manufactured Predator Infrared Narrowband Hyperspectral combat Assessor (PIRANHA) that can detect and identify the presence of various atmospheric compounds.”

Said differently, these UAV, mini-UAV and micro-UAV platforms and sensors will relay information essential to successful military campaigns -- including ENMOD operations. Other sensors and systems, and mission parameters, remain undefined due to the highly classified nature of their missions. Included in these are ENMOD objectives, since UAV payloads will certainly include major sophisticated weather sensor technologies that have already been transitioned into the DOD’s operational arenas.

By February 21, 2002, the U.S. DOD had already purchased 79 RQ-1 Predators from General Atomics, for a per unit price of about $7 million, or some $553 million dollars. [113]

Other major aerospace weapons platforms developed under secret black operations (and associated with ongoing black programs) include:

1956 Suntan

CL-400 (supposedly cancelled in 1957)

TR3A Black Manta or Baby B-2 UAV

Aurora

Little is known about the Aurora program, and it has been heavily denied. [114] Armed Forces Journal has described it as “a very black program within a black program.” Believed to have been developed during the 1980s and 1990s, speculation has placed Aurora under the purview of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Supposing it does exist, it is believed that the Aurora craft can exceed speeds of Mach 6. Counted amongst the newest secret aerospace developments is the Bird of Prey – named after the Klingon “Bird of Prey” seen in Star Trek. A product of the Boeing Aerospace Phantom Works facility, the Bird of Prey UAV was unveiled on October 18, 2002.

It is important to recognize the scale of the black programs. In 2002, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the U.S. military’s black budget was slated to rise to levels not seen since the 1980s, from $16.2 billion last year to $20.3 billion.

6. May The Force Be With You!

Where, and so suddenly, did all these sophisticated and seemingly futuristic UAV technologies come from? Will ENMOD technologies be similarly transitioned into the public sphere? Talk and deployment of UAV “drones” has become increasingly prevalent, and these hitherto unknown killing technologies have splashed onto the overt policy, “news” and war-making arena seemingly overnight. Indeed, they are appearing everywhere, all at once.

With out the least trace of irony, we can say for certain that we know where the language and public introduction of these new technologies came from – language like “drones,” names like Predator and StrikeStar and DarkStar for example – and perhaps we can now reflect on the relevance and importance of the timing of the releases of the Star Wars films and their many lesser spin-offs. These films habituated U.S. citizens to an increasingly militarized environment, the physical and social environments of every day life now characterized by rapid technological changes, and changes that are occurring at a rate far more accelerated than the rate of human adaptability, and beyond the capacity for any organized social protest. Indeed, the rate of change is overwhelming.

These major Hollywood productions were clearly intended to facilitate the military objectives of “turning science fiction into fact” and it is in the context of the popularity of these films, and the hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to their production and proliferation, that we can situate the realities of the “death-and-destruction” technologies that were developed behind them. Indeed, the technologies did not appear overnight: the Hollywood Star Wars type films were the chronicles of death foretold.

Take two recent print magazine features for example. The campaign to manage public perceptions of U.S. militarism has penetrated all quarters of American daily life and major articles selling the patriotic imperatives of UAV weapons and communications platforms, for the example at hand, have appeared in popular print magazine venues.

In a highly sexualized account, Mark Bowden in “The Kabul-ki Dance” (The Atlantic Monthly, November, 2002), canonizes the “astonishing precision of modern American weapons” used in Afghanistan and the “extraordinarily brave stealth operators” who deliver them. This includes ‘sleek and cool” weapons of death-and-destruction, and the “coming of age of UAVs” armed with cameras and missiles – “drones like the Predator (RQ-1), which made a name for itself for the first time in this conflict” – which, in Bowden’s reading of war, eliminated the propensity for “death-and-destruction” which characterized the anachronistic wars of bygone eras. Indeed, he eulogized, “War was never like this before -- you aren’t supposed to enjoy yourself while killing people.” [115]

Bruce Sterling, writing in the popular Gen-X / Gen-Y magazine WIRED takes the U.S. military agenda even further in “ASTROCOP: The Race to Dominate Space is Over: We Won! Now What?” Curiously, Sterling postulates several of the very same “futuristic” scenarios of battle as were articulated as concerns in the Air Force 2025 document. Is this a coincidence? Does it signify a lack of editorial imagination? Or does it signify the intimate relationship Sterling enjoys with the defense intelligence and information warfare apparatus? Indeed, “intimacy” is a poor choice in the lexicon of prostitution: WIRED has certainly been expropriated – most likely a willing volunteer – for the U.S. war effort. In any case, WIRED is published by The Conde Nast Publications, a mammoth publishing enterprise sporting such major bastions of pop-culture as Vanity Fair, Vogue, New Yorker, House and Garden, Self, Allure, Glamour, Brides and GQ.

Bruce Sterling’s “ASTROCOP” feature outlines in detail many of the heretofore unappreciated but enabling satellite technologies designed to complement operational capabilities of weather warfare. These include the many advanced but operational billions-of-dollars constellations of satellites already in place, major components of the satellite space warfare and environmental warfare theater, which includes: MILSTAR (Military Strategic-Tactical and Relay), LANDSAT, DMSP (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program), GPS (Global Positioning System), DSP (Defense Support Program), SBR (Space-Based Radar), SBL (Space-Based Laser), Advanced EHF and UHF Follow-On satellite constellations. [116] Of course, we are told nothing of the billions-of-dollars research, development and deployment programs, veiled by the C4ISR/C4IST apparatuses, that have also launched satellites and other aggressive payloads into space.

These two propaganda features provide egregious examples of popular print venues – often perceived as editorially progressive – serving as unquestioning vehicles for the Pentagon’s disinformation war against the American public. Both authors have prostituted themselves to the moral bankruptcy of the military-industrial complex – and they were most likely coached in generating the propaganda they did, and/or groomed for the positions – as writers -- they have ascended to.

Examples of the technologies seen first in Hollywood films include small, remotely deployed, information sensors scattered over the landscape (see the BAE Systems development of MIUGS devices below) reporting on the comings and goings of Luke Skywalker and his droids. Our first introductions to the conceptual, albeit futuristic, realities of the info-warfare “drone” technologies – the UAVs, UCAVs and TUAVs – came through such films as Dune, Star Wars and Star Trek. The decades old Star Trek series, of course, set the stage.

It is important to truly appreciate the subservient role that the mass media and entertainment industries play in further institutionalizing the American addiction to war and space. Consider that the Pentagon has sponsored hi-tech “brainstorming” sessions with some of Hollywood’s most celebrated science fiction writers and producers. With a five-year, $45 million dollar contract with the U.S. Army, the Institute for Creative Technology in Marina del Rey (CA) has been tapping the creative genius of John Milius (co-writer: Apocalypse Now), David Ayer (writer: Training Day), Ron Cobb (creature designer for Star Wars films). Hollywood consultants are paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day to dream up new high-tech military gizmos. [117]

Other highly leveraged corporate ties proliferate. For one example, consider that one of the directors of aerospace and defense giant GE Company, Barbara Scott Preiskel, is also a director of the Washington Post, and she is Senior Vice-President of the Motion Picture Associations of America, New York, NY. For a second example, consider that Lucille S. Salhany sits on the Hewlett Packard board of directors with Philip M. Condit, Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company, and that Lucille S. Salhany was President of United Paramount Network (1994-1997); Chairman and Director of Fox Broadcasting (1993-1994); and Chairman of 20th Century Fox Television (1991-1993). [118]

The Chairman of the board of a massive tier-one defense corporation called Allied Defense Group (ADG), discussed below, is General (Ret.) J.H. Binford Peay, III , previously Commander-in-Chief, and Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army. It is notable that General Peay’s is a private consultant to Walt Disney Imagineering, a major subsidiary business of Walt Disney Company.

Of course, Walt Disney Company owns ABC Broadcasting, purveyor of ABC News, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Nightline, Prime Time Thursday, 20/20 and other major broadcasts. The ABC television station group includes 10 local stations, which reach 24 percent of the country’s TV households.

The ABC Entertainment Television Group includes both the ABC Entertainment division and the Touchstone Television studio, which brings major programming to CBS and NBC networks as well.

As owner of 53 local radio stations, ABC Radio Group reaches 15 million listeners on a weekly basis, while ABC Radio Networks provide programming to more than 4,600 affiliated stations reaching 126 million people weekly. ABC Radio also includes Radio Disney, which is available in 48 markets, representing 54 percent of the country. About 2.5 million children ages 6-14 and 1.4 million moms tuned to Radio Disney on a weekly basis in 2001.

Walt Disney Television International (WDTV-I) distributes almost 5,000 hours of programming, including war propaganda films such as Pearl Harbor, to 120 countries around the world. Walt Disney publishing company Hyperion publishes bestsellers that hide and deny the significance of U.S. military terrorism, as with George Carlin’s Napalm and Silly Putty, which by virtue of its title alone suggests that napalm is some benign children’s toy, and not the deadly chemical agent that burned uncountable bodies of innocent men, women and children under defoliation bombings in Vietnam. Notably, the effectiveness of napalm was studied under the Pentagon’s “Project Heatwave” in 1966, overseen by the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, a premier defense contractor for military aircraft, and chemical and biological weapons. The Cornell labs -- and the napalm work – were intimately connected to Rockefeller interests. [119]

A nother poignant example of the relationship between the peddlers of the permanent warfare economy and the major entertainment venues in America, note that defense and intelligence deep-insider General Alexander Haig – a major Reagonite and Star Wars proponent -- is today director for major media giant America Online, and director for the mammoth Hollywood films corporation Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) -- the producer of major propaganda pictures, like Black Hawk Down.

It is through the proliferation of such popular cultural artifacts as sci-fi films (Star Wars) and techno-mags (WIRED) that the military will continue to acculturate the public to its agenda, and thereby facilitate the easy transitions of state-of-the-art technologies -- such as weather warfare capabilities -- into the unclassified (public) arena. Mass media and pop culture technology and warfare purveyors like novelist Tom Clancy have done their part to acculturate the public to the DOD and intelligence warfighting agendas, and to further institutionalize the permanent warfare economy of the United States.

The transition from military classification to public purview occurs through well-defined “public acclimation programs” designed to slowly leak and strategically place information, and through extensive perception management (propaganda) campaigns which thereby acclimate the public to DOD pursuits, objectives, technologies or programs that might otherwise spark massive resistance or public protest.

Attesting to the awareness of elite DOD planners about the potential public resistance to ENMOD pursuits are the following statements made by a consultant to the HAARP ionosphere modification project in Alaska. (See: Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, Section 10, herein.):

As soon as information on any of the projects becomes known to residents… it will trigger a strong reaction of concerns.

However justified or unjustified these concerns might be, they will be voiced passionately, perhaps even stridently.

Classification of the entire project by DOD at an early stage would help prevent surprises at a later stage (but it should be clear that concealment or credible cover-up would be essentially impossible). [Note: impossible in the case of the huge HAARP antenna array.]

“I expect increasing activism… if and when the concepts… become widely known, a very strong international reaction could be expected. [120]

“The above comments have proven to be prophetic,” wrote Dr. Bernard Eastlund. ‘since the large HAARP phased array [antenna system for ionospheric modification] was constructed in Alaska, there have been intense protests by local Alaska environmentalists as to the safety and intent of the project.” [121]

While his ties to the military industrial complex run to the deepest levels, as we will later show, Dr. Bernard Eastlund’s pursuit of ENMOD research and technologies ostensibly in the private sector can be gleamed from the web site of Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation. The corporate product line includes such state-of-the-art ENMOD capabilities as:

  • Ionospheric modifications

  • Weather Modification

  • Tornado modification

  • HAARP Applications

Not coincidentally, Dr. Bernard J. Eastlund – whose ENMOD research and development has proceeded under the guise of private and supposed non-military pursuits -- was Vice President for Energy Technology with BDM Corporation from 1979 to 1984. For years BDM has operated as a major front company for the intelligence apparatus (see below). As a consultant to Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO) from 1984 to 1987, Eastlund developed “new civilian and military uses of North Slope natural gas.” From 1966 to 1974, Dr. Bernard J. Eastlund managed research programs for Controlled Thermonuclear Research for the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. [122]

Eastlund’s connections sink deep into the classified military-industrial arena, and it is just such cases like Dr. Bernard Eastlund that provide stark examples of one of the means whereby the military realizes its objectives – even those prohibited by international treaties. And that is through the ostensible independence of private sector actors, those who are otherwise deeply in tune with both overt and covert military goals, allowing the DOD and its peripheral and supporting agencies to hide behind intelligence and defense “front companies” and thereby exercise their highly efficacious -- and deceitful -- constructs of plausible deniability.

Recognizing early on that it would be “essentially impossible,” to “conceal” or “cover-up” the sheer physicality of the huge HAARP antenna systems, DOD classification was strategically dismissed. In contradistinction are the numerous highly classified ENMOD programs whose “concealment” and “cover-up” was both feasible and deniable, in an effort to prevent “unavoidable surprises” by an educated, intelligent but dissenting public -- a public unwilling to tolerate the egregious arrogance of elite planners, and their plans for the hostile manipulation of the earth’s environment. Having pursued their ENMOD agendas under the veil of secrecy, without public approval or discussion -- and with plenty of overt research and development pursued by proxy agents in the so-called “private sector” -- these people are now preparing to transition large-scale weather-as-a-weapon developments into the public realm. The objective, again, is to use them openly and without question. The public hysteria whipped up as an integral part of the United States’ “war on terror” offers an apt vehicle for the introduction and deployment of such technological madness.

7. Remote Sensing – Not So Remote.

Not coincidentally, UAVs are amongst the platforms consistently used to deploy and test some of the ongoing weather sensors and weapons pursued in unclassified technology research and development programs geared toward the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Virtually all of these programs, on their face, are described as weather analysis, data collection and research, and, to be fair, those applications certainly exist. However, it is disingenuous to dismiss the military applications, given the funding sources and the many aerospace and defense programs already using these technologies in one way or another. Indeed, this area revolves around highly lethal and offensive military capabilities.

UAV’s will operate as sensors, scientific data and image collectors transmitting climate and weather data to ground stations, satellites and airborne platforms. They might also be deployed as the vehicles to deliver seeding agents, to facilitate or distribute other ENNOD inputs at the precise place and time. One thing is certain: UAV’s are expected to be integral components for the facilitation of remote sensing, weather collection, climate and atmospheric data collection and analyses, and rapid information transfer – all crucial to offensive military ENMOD capabilities.

The Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory (MIRSL) at the University of Massachusetts has for seventeen years pioneered the research and development of sophisticated sensors, radars, receivers, transmitters, antennas and systems for the most egregiously hostile military weapons systems and weapons platforms applications, for weather characterization and investigation, and ultimately -- whether MIRSL researchers admit this or not -- to enable weather modification and control.

Virtually all of the technologies were developed under funding by the military industrial complex, and it is quite possible that intelligence operatives work within the U-Mass “community;” they are certainly monitoring the academic “community” in any case. [123] Until the late 1980s, at least, significant classified research occurred at U-Mass. MIRSL personnel regularly staff flights and tests deploying weather monitoring (clouds, ocean waves, hurricanes, atmospheric) and measuring equipment.

The MIRSL expertise focuses on microwave and millimeter wave technologies for RADAR, communications and EW applications. These MIRSL enabled technologies are also deployed for SIGINT, COMMINT, C4ISR and C4IST capabilities. These technologies have seen direct applications, in repeated tests and experiments, and they are the technologies of current choice in use in the armed forces, and of future choice for an array of offensive capabilities identified in the unclassified Air Force 2025 document.

The U-Mass MIRSL research is aligned with the U.S. Department of Defense ARM-UAV (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement -- Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle) Program – another program euphemistically dedicated to “atmospheric measuring and monitoring” for benign purposes.

One of the companies involved in the ARM program is Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. (AER), in Lexington Massachusetts. AER offers satellite-borne sensors “providing a unique, multispectral perspective for monitoring environmental processes over the Earth.” Providing remote sensing technologies and data “for diverse scientific, military and commercial applications” AER’s clients include Boeing Satellite Systems; Lockheed Martin; ITT Industries (Aerospace Division); Ball Aerospace; JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory); NSF; NASA; NOAH; DOE and DOD. AER is also teamed on some ENMOD related projects with the Desert Research Institute. As previously noted, the Desert Research Institute was involved in major ENMOD projects, including the National Hail Research Experiment (1971-1976). [124]

Another key ARM program participant is SeaSpace Corporation, a major vendor of satellite “weather and climate” ground stations for defense customers: the SeaSpace connection leads us on a wild goose chase of powerful interlocking defense and intelligence corporations and interests.

SeaSpace Corporation was recently acquired by major defense and intelligence corporation Allied Defense Group, Inc, (formerly Allied Research Corporation). ADG sits at the pinnacle of defense and intelligence power, peddling weapons, intelligence and security all over the world. According to company literature, ADG is “a diversified defense and security firm, developing and producing conventional weaponry, sophisticated security systems, innovative training and simulation products, and mission-critical safety and environmental products, for markets in Europe, Asia, Africa, Antarctica, North America and South America.”

The ADG Chairman of the board is General (Ret.) J.H. Binford Peay, III, former Allied Research Corporation Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO, previously Commander-in-Chief, and Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army. Current directors include: Dr. Jay R. Sculley, former Assistant Secretary for Research and Development, U.S. Army; ADG director Gilbert F. Decker was the former Assistant Secretary for Research, Development and Acquisition, U.S. Army. General Peay is a private consultant to Boeing Corporation, and, as mentioned previously, he is a private consultant to Walt Disney Imagineering, a major subsidiary business of Walt Disney Company.

ADG director Ronald H. Griffith is a former General (Ret.), and Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, and he remains the Executive Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of an elite, and somewhat exceptional, private military company called Military Professional resources Inc. (MPRI). MPRI is a private mercenary firm based in Alexandra, VA, responsible for egregious private military terrorism all over the world. [125] MPRI’s terrorist activities take place with full diplomatic cover of the US, and they are rarely if ever mentioned in the media.

MPRI principals include: General (Ret.) Carl E. Vuono, former Army Chief of Staff who oversaw the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War; General (Ret.) Ronald H. Griffith; Colonel (Ret.) Stephen E. Inman; General (Ret.) Crosbie Saint; and Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jared L. Bates; Admiral Wesley McDonald, the former Supreme Allied Commander of Atlantic Forces; General (Ret.) Frederick Kroesen, the former Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe; and retired U.S. Army General Harry Ed Soyster, former director of the DIA. [126] Soyster arranged the MPRI mercenary program in Croatia with the help of CIA director John Deutch. [127] Two more MPRI executive warmakers are Mr. Hardisty, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, headed the U.S. Pacific Command, and serves on the CIA’s military advisory panel; and Mr. Trefry, executive vice-president, who served as a military assistant to the White House under President Bush (I). It has also been reported that MPRI counts General Alexander Haig as a principal executive, (this remains unverified).

Returning to the ARM-UAV program, this aerospace and defense initiative was made visible in the mid-1990s with millions of dollars in funding from the DOD Strategic Environment Research and Development Program (SERDP). SERDP continues to fund UAV and satellite platform technology developments for the ARM-UAV program of the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. DOE in turn has funded the University of Massachusetts MIRSL program. [128] Further ENMOD related research and development at MIRSL has been sponsored through NASA (ERAST) programs. [129] The NASA Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology (ERAST) program awarded major contracts to General Atomics Corporation to develop/adapt the GAC Predator-B UAV platform “to operate in a variety of weather conditions to support a broad range of potential science missions...” [130]

Taking place on a remote ice floe in the Arctic Ocean is another major ARM scientific spin-off effort, the SHEBA program. The Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean Project (SHEBA) continues under the omnipresent and all-encompassing U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) sponsored by the DOD, DOE, NOAA, NASA, NSF and ONR, and initiated in 1997.

SHEBA scientists are applying their extensive field data to improve computer models of the earth’s climate, and thus enhance the capability of researchers to predict global change… DOD participates in USGCRP through sponsored research that concurrently satisfies national security requirements and stated goals of USGCRP. [131]

Now let’s ask a few questions about the above statements. How much climate change research is needed? Is it reasonable to believe that the billions of dollars that have been devoted to “global climate change research” in the recent past have been dedicated to that? Given the extent to which the defense scientific and intelligence community has gone to destroy the environment, and the policies, programs and regulations put in place to maintain entrenched nuclear and petroleum industries, and to destroy emerging solar technologies in the 1980s, should we not assume without question that some major proportion of this funding has been allocated to ENMOD weaponry?

What are the “national security requirements” of the U.S. Global Climate Research Program? Why is the DOD involved, if not to secure their broad and ubiquitous warmaking interests?

While it is certainly true that “more research needed” has become the mantra behind which action to mitigate global climate change is stalled or suspended, it is also true that data collection, remote sensing, computer modeling, and platforms (for deployment) research and development for ENMOD purposes has been taking place.

Funding for U-Mass MIRSL research has come from virtually all the major advanced weapons systems and programs research and development agencies: NASA; ARO; USA; ONR; DOE; NOAA; USDA; DARPA; NSF; AFOSR; and AFRL. From FY 1990 to FY 1994, less than four MIRSL principal investigators received approximately $ 8,155,117 from these agencies for remote sensing research or experimentation on:

  • Air-sea interface

  • Earth (terrestrial)

  • Cloud profiling

  • Measurements of cloud water and ice

  • Measurements of hurricanes

  • Measurements of natural surfaces

  • Ocean Surface Wind Speed

  • Sea characterization

  • Sea ice and glacial ice characterization

  • Snow covered terrain

  • Soil moisture

  • Turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer

  • Tornadoes.

Working with the U-Mass MIRSL scientists on their various programs are also: General Electric, Ball Brothers, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Hughes, Lockheed-Martin, Sun Microsystems and United Technologies. Massachusetts’s contractors involved at various levels include Raytheon, Kollmorgen, Quadrant Engineering, Danaher Corp., Millitech and Yankee Environmental Systems. [132] Danaher Corporation -- the parent company of Kollmorgen -- is a major contractor, with over 30 subsidiaries, involved in key aerospace, defense and SDI programs. (Danaher director Alan G. Spoon is President of the Washington Post.) [133]

Yankee Environmental Systems (YES), Turners Falls, MA, is an R&D firm with decades of involvement in ENMOD military thrusts. In the 1960s, while at Cambridge Systems Inc., YES founders designed the TMQ/22 Tactical Measuring set for the U.S. Army; TMQ systems have been used for years; YES collaborates with the White Sands Missile Range on this project today. In October 2001, two retired U.S. DOD insiders -- Lieutenant Colonels Dave Sautter and Bill Bauman -- both former USAF officers, joined YES after 20-year careers as “meteorologists” with Air Force Weather.

Major YES customers, partners and programs relating to ENMOD technologies include:

  • U.S. Dept. of Energy: ARM-UAV Program

  • U.S. Dept of Agriculture

  • U.S. Department of Defense

  • Space and Warfare Systems Command

  • Army Research Labs

  • Air Force Research Labs

  • Office of Naval Research

  • U.S. Department of Commerce

  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  • National Science Foundation

  • Argonne National Laboratory

  • Brookhaven National Laboratory

  • Jet Propulsion Laboratory

  • Los Alamos National Laboratory

  • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  • Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

  • Boeing Corporation

Note that almost all the U.S. National Laboratories are involved as customers, and these are the same National Labs responsible for some of the most secretive military programs in the history of the United States. They are also responsible for major nuclear (plutonium) contamination to the environment, for radiation testing on humans, and numerous other billion-dollar boondoggles. [134]

U-Mass MIRSL Labs work in partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the University of Colorado. It should not come as a surprise that the most extensive hydroscopic [cloud-seeding] test to date, run in Mexico by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for the past few years (1999-200?), has conducted some 99 seeding missions, showing rainfall increases of as much as 40 percent. [135]

SPAWAR “provides line management staffing of the National Reconnaissance Office; coordinates naval space research, development and acquisition activities between NRO and other space programs; provides naval space and warfare experience to develop superior and affordable space systems in support of national missions and joint, combined and naval operations.” [136]

The Air Force Research Laboratory is entrenched in UAV and UAV payload, sensors and weapons research. A subdivision of the Air Force Material Command (AFMC), AFRL’s UAV efforts were outlined in a recent (2002) AFMC publication. A feature titled “Turning Science Fiction Into Science Fact” reported, for example, that the next-generation X-45A Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) was successfully test flown at NASA’s Dreyden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base (CA) on May 22, 2002. The X-45A is a DARPA, AFRL collaboration with Boeing’s highly classified Phantom Works research and development facility.

Another insider space and ENMOD warfare operator is Mission Research Corporation, involved in weather and climate simulation; environmental modeling; image and information processing; sensors and sensor systems; ionospheric manipulation; and advanced high energy beam technologies. Major Mission Research Corporation clients and partners include all the standard ENMOD participants funding the U-Mass MIRSL labs: NASA; all national labs; Naval Research Laboratory; DARPA; U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory; and other corporations.

Note that AFRL funding and programs direction comes from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). Both AFRL and AFOSR were identified above as funding sources for U-Mass MIRSL labs research and development, and both are sponsors of the private MIRSL spin-off companies Prosensing and Quadrant Engineering, and Yankee Environmental Systems (YES). The AFOSR director of some $60 million in annual physics and electronics programs is Dr. Forrest J. Agee, also a former manager of strategic [black] C3 programs at BDM Corporation (1979-1982). [137]

Another BDM corporate insider from 1978 to 1992 is former USAF Colonel William P. Schneider, a Soviet area studies expert who went on to found the private Technical Research Corporation (located on Langley Drive, VA), which specializes in stealth, missile and electromagnetic energy and laser technologies for aerospace applications. [138]

BDM Corporation is another of those shadowy national security apparatus insider corporations that has been involved in questionable [read: highly illegal] activities, including mercenary operations abroad. One BDM International acquisition was Vinnell, an old mercenary firm that had been around since the Vietnam War days. [139]

The Carlyle Group recently acquired 26 percent of BDM stock. Carlyle counts amongst its principals former Secretary of State (1989-1992) James Baker, and former Defense Secretary (1987-1989) and CIA Africa hand Frank Carlucci. A defense and intelligence deep insider, Carlucci formerly served as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs under President Reagan; Deputy Secretary of Defense (1980-1982); and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (1978-80). James Baker was White House Chief of Staff for President Bush (1992-1993) and President Reagan (1981-1985); he was also Secretary of Treasury under Reagan (1985-1988); and he was President Ford’s Under Secretary of Commerce.

Carlyle’s international advisors include former British Prime Minister John Major (Chairman of Carlyle Europe) and former German Central Bank President, Karl Otto Pohl. Current Carlyle Chairman Louis V. Gerstner recently served on the board of directors of the New York Times Corporation, and remains a director of Bristol Myers Squibb, a pharmaceutical giant which retains deep ties to the New York Times Corporation.

Unsurprisingly, Karl Otto Pohl has also served on the advisory board of Barrick Gold -- with former CIA Director and U.S. President George Bush (I), former prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney, and former U.S. Senator Howard Baker. With the likes of Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, Mulroney sits on the Advisory Council for Chase Manhattan Corporation. It is no accident that Barrick Gold’s devastating mining operations, with military support at the highest levels, remain off the media agenda. [140]

Another Barrick director is Edward N. Neys, also a director of the highly secretive public relations and perception management firm Burston-Marstellar. In true perception management form, Brian Mulroney is a trustee for the right-wing Freedom Forum media think-tank (publisher of the influential academic Media Studies Journal). [141]

As noted by intelligence investigator Wayne Madsen, “Interestingly, Philip Odeen, the president of BDM, was in charge of a Defense Department task force on restructuring the military to face 21rst century threats.” [142] In 1998, BDM – entrenched in ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems -- was acquired by TRW, a major DOD intelligence, satellite and space warfare insider corporation, charged with violations about BMD monopoly by the Federal Trade Commission. [143] (Note that TRW was itself absorbed by Northrup Grumman amidst major Securities and Exchange Commission violations charges in December of 2002.)

BDM was just one of the corporations under contract in 1998 to the DIA and CIA “to procure various weapons from dubious international sources under the covert “foreign material acquisition” program.” [144] Under this program, authorized in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 1991, the U.S. congress permitted the DIA to establish private “businesses” as cover for military intelligence-gathering operations. [145] Licensed for export by the U.S. government, BDM shipped over $80,000 worth of computers and computer-assisted design equipment to Iraq for utilization in Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs between 1985 and 1990. [146] One of the most notable points about BDM, is that the AFOSR director of some $60 million in annual physics and electronics programs is Dr. Forrest J. Agee, was a former manager of strategic [black] C3 programs at BDM Corporation (1979-1982).

With the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and U.S. Navy, Boeing Phantom Works is developing the UCAV-N (Naval Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle). Notably, Boeing Phantom Works plans deployment of their “Advanced System-of-Systems” Future Combat System by 2012. With a “network-centric set of satellites and unmanned and manned air and ground systems to provide a highly deployable, effective and survivable advanced force structure,” the Future Combat System capabilities include “precision all-weather surveillance and targeting systems.” Such systems almost certainly revolve around weather warfare capabilities cloaked by euphemisms like “precision all-weather” surveillance and targeting for C4IST/R.

Figure Two:

Two UAV and/or UCAV Technologies Under Development through AFRL.

Unmanned Air Vehicles

Says Major Gen Paul Nielsen, AFRL Commander: “Eventually UCAVs will fly in packs [swarms] seeking enemy anti-aircraft missile launchers, and work together to destroy them, with a human operator who could be anywhere in the world. The next-stage of this next-gen deployment is the X-45B, a larger and more robust and capable UCAV.” AFRL is developing UAV (and manned vehicle) hypersonic propulsion technologies allowing speeds over Mach 6 (4500 mph). [147]

Another partner working with the U.S. Navy, DARPA and Boeing Phantom Works on UAV technologies and their related C4ISR/T is BAE Systems, a U.S./U.K. multinational corporation flagged in 2002 by the United Nations’ Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). BAE Systems violated international sanctions by illegally shipping spare parts to the Zimbabwe Air Force for ZIM Mark 60 Hawk Fighters. Intermediaries in the deal included John Bredenkamp and Liberian President Charles Taylor, both widely known for international criminal operations in arms and diamonds smuggling amidst massive loss of human life in Liberia, Sierra Leone and DRC. [148]

BAE Systems recently demonstrated their “Micro-Internetted Unattended Ground Sensors” (MIUGS). These hand-deployed MIUGS provided coverage of more than two square kilometers of the China Lake Superior Valley test range, and sent back target reports to a command and control center 30 miles away. The sensor nodes successfully detected “high-value targets” (such as mobile missile launchers) and cued a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to verify the target. BAE’s Information & Electronic Warfare Systems (IEWS) business received a $10 million development contract in July 2001 to develop rapidly deployable, networked sensors, to fight the “war on terror.” Note that BAE Systems executive Curtis Gray has a long history of employment with Boeing (Phantom Works) and Rockwell International. [149] BAE Systems is reportedly involved with the blackest of black programs: the development of anti-gravity technologies, including an advanced anti-gravity fighter-interceptor. [150]

The USAF COROLIS weather satellite (delayed from launch in December 2002) provides another recent example of sophisticated ongoing ENMOD research where stated objectives of “data collection and analyses for meteorology and weather forecasting” most likely cloaks the hidden ENMOD agenda. As noted in the promotional materials of Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc.(AER): “sensors aboard civilian and military satellite platforms measure down-looking microwave and infrared data which are used to determine properties of the atmosphere and earths surface for defense applications, weather prediction, and global change studies.” [151]

The COROLIS satellite will carry a U.S. Navy WINDSAT polarimetric microwave radiometer to measure the ocean surface wind vector on a global scale. “This technology demonstration is an important pathfinder for the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).” [152] The NPOESS Program is described as “the country’s combined military and civilian weather satellite programs that enable more precise monitoring of weather patterns around the Earth.” [153]

Other satellites recently launched for classified -- or ill-defined, at the very least -- ENMOD pursuits are the two NASA “research” satellites launched by a Boeing Delta 2 rocket on January 12, 2003 at Vandenburg Air Force Base. This $298 million dollar NASA mission launched their ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite) and CHIPSat (Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer) spacecraft duo. According to NASA, “ICESat is a NASA Earth Science Enterprise spacecraft whose key purpose is contributing to understanding the impacts of global climate change” by measuring the thickness of polar ice sheets. Assembled by Ball Aerospace, ICESat will be controlled through the University of Colorado in Boulder. Both Ball and U-Colorado are clients of, or partners with, U-Mass MIRSL labs. The Ball ICESat is specifically designed for remote sensing missions and onboard technology was previously used for QuikSCAT and QuickBird missions. But like the NPOESS mission above, the true objectives of these satellite programs and missions remain shrouded in the scientific euphemisms of global climate change research and climatological assessment.

The importance of satellite platforms to environmental warfare cannot be understated. Guidelines on “weather control by space means” have already been developed, though they purport to accent the concern of scientists about the adoption of “weather mitigation technologies” for military purposes. “There is fear that such [ENMOD] technologies will be developed for military purposes notes,” Dr. Eastlund notes. “Fear may be justified, however, such fear should not stop responsible scientists from pursuing areas of research that could save lives and property.” [154]

How do we delineate the responsible scientists from the irresponsible scientists? Which category does Dr. Eastlund himself fall into? One is reminded of the statement by the environmentalist David Brower, about the preponderance of those around him to be ‘stark raving mad.” Fear of military expropriation is no reason to stop, in any case, according to Eastlund, no matter that that is the near certain outcome, and – I suggest – that Dr. Bernard J. Eastlund knows perfectly well what hidden agenda – military expropriation -- he is furthering.

The DMSP satellite constellation employs microwave imagers for weather sensoring, and like the Tropical rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), it carries ‘some of the most advanced space based precipitation radar and microwave imaging systems.” [155] These are the kinds of futuristic-here-and-now systems enabled by U-Mass MIRSL military-funded research and development programs.

It is interesting to note that solar powered satellites were operational by 1979 – even as emerging solar technologies for public and environmental benefit were being expropriated by big oil, gas and nuclear interests. [156] These satellites have the capacity to generate extremely high power energy beams. By placing these satellites in geosynchronous or lower orbits, “we could extend the range of applicability of weather modification ideas” offering great “potential for severe weather modification,” wrote Dr. Bernard J. Eastlund. [157]

Eastlund’s Thunderstorm Solar Powered Satellite (TSPS) would use WRS-88D Doppler radar imaging systems to remotely sense and modify severe storms (with special interest in tornadoes) by zapping them with high-power beams of electromagnetic radiation. “Even though these beams would be carefully controlled,” Eastlund notes in passing, “a miss could still be dangerous biologically.” Missing the storm center, dangerous, “high-level electromagnetic radiation could strike a populated area.” [158]

Eastlund notes that the “U.N. Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Use of Environmental Modification” went into effect on October 5, 1978. To get around this minor obstacle, attention is focused on the civilian benefits of localized storm mitigation. Nonetheless, “it is our recommendation,” he wrote, “that the TSPS concept be reviewed by the U.N. and other appropriate international organizations from its inception.” [159]

It is precisely through such ostensible gate-keeper institutions (U.N., World Bank, IMF, ITTO) that the Euro-American military industrial complex has circumvented international treaties in the past. The suggestion is disingenuous, cosmetic, and irrelevant, in any case, as military ENMOD pursuits for hostile applications have proceeded unchecked since the late 1940s -- with complete impunity -- and in total violation of the 1977 ENMOD Treaty. The continuing ENMOD research of Dr. Bernard J. Eastlund offers indisputable testimony to that.

8. Academia -- Science, Self-Deception and Denial.

Through MIRSL, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and their alumni, the University of Massachusetts retains significant, meaningful and contemporary ties with defense and intelligence institutions, and through these ties the faculty gains critical feedback to enable them to further hone and focus their research activities in accordance with major military objectives and trends. This is standard operating procedure.

As university researchers learn what technologies corporations, agencies and institutions need, they develop programs aimed at providing the basic support research, and at developing the necessary intellectual and human capital. This is how such research programs – and the academics involved -- insure their proliferation and success. Thus are university grants written with a thorough understanding of the military and intelligence needs. Funds are subsequently provided; intellectual and human resources are developed and then transferred to the funding institutions; the cycle is then complete.

The researchers and scientists involved in the development enabling ENMOD pursuits – and other major war-fighting technologies in any case – deflect critical attention from their agendas using a variety of dismissive means and narrow justifications. If their statements are to be believed, then they are accomplished agents of self-delusion. In contradistinction, it may be – and seems most likely that – such researchers have become so completely entrenched in their areas of expertise that they are no longer able to see the sky for the clouds: secluded in their sterile laboratories and surrounded by like-minded scientists and ever validated by the military-industrial complex and its media minions, they are unaccustomed to being challenged and have grown resoundingly unconscious and preposterously arrogant. Such are the defensive manifestations of interest. It is quite reasonable, as well, to expect that such people are prone to lying outright, and getting away with it. Says MIRSL professor David McLaughlin, for example, on the question of ethics and military applications of MIRSL research and technology developments:

“We actually envision UAVs being sent out for weather purposes. UAVs under the Department of Energy are looking at clouds, understanding cloud structures, and the energy balance… But I haven”t had anything in particular that will cause me concerns. The Navy is funding us to chase hurricanes. And I can’t think of anything harmful that could come out of that. I think we are so far away from any storm modification. All I know is what I read in the journals.” [160]

Dr. David McLaughlin has received over $2 million in grants from above noted military agencies and defense contractors during his tenure at U-Mass. He is currently spearheading a major technology initiative to develop and implement an advanced national security and weather “prediction” sensor grid system that will utilize and locate MIRSL sensors and surveillance technologies on the available “real estate” being leased on the over 200,000 existing telecommunications towers across the United States. MIRSL’s lightweight millimeter-wave radars were specifically designed for military UAV applications.

MIRSL technologies have been directly adapted for other major warfare platforms, with significant applications by the U.S. Navy, particularly for anti-submarine warfare applications. MIRSL is working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and California Institute of Technology to provide more futuristic millimeter-wave radars for satellite applications; MIRSL has worked extensively with the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). MIRSL remote sensing technologies have been part of Antarctic research missions.

MIRSL’s Focused Phased Array Imaging Radar (FOPAIR) has been applied to the problems of measurements of the air-sea interface – another of those boundary zone chaos modelling programs of importance to, and funded by, the Office of Naval Research; the FOPAIR is mounted on the deep sea “FLIP” platform of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Notes the MIRSL brochure: “Our familiarity with advanced electronic technology is largely the result of the close associations we have developed with industry.” [161]

In a series of articles delineating the critical military importance of strategic and tactical oceanography, the U.S. Navy states very clearly that:

“Remote sensing of the ocean from satellites gives us remarkable new abilities to determine the state of the ocean over large regions in close-to-real time. Coupling this data with the tremendous power of state-of-the-art computers allows new models of the ocean to provide nowcasts (the state of the ocean now) and forecasts (the state of the ocean in the next few weeks) to Naval planners and operators, much as weather forecasts are provided by the Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center (FLENUMOCEANCEN). Satellite communications provide these forecasts to widely spread forces.” [162]

“The Navy has a long-standing commitment to coordinate and work with the national oceanographic community, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in naval oceanography’s continuous ties to academia. For example, Navy owns six large oceanographic research ships that are operated by academic institutions for use in ocean science. .. The academic institutions directly support Navy interests and, in turn, contribute to research accomplishments of the national and international communities.” [163]

“Naval oceanography’s ability to collect, analyze, and process massive amounts of environmental data, coupled with its extensive oceanographic data bases, places the Navy in a particularly important position to respond to the urgent, growing national and international need to deal with such matters as global climate change and environmental protection.” [164]

Nothing could be further from the true interests of the U.S. Navy, but it is very telling that they draw attention to the ostensible concern – and certain need – to mitigate global climate change. This is how such agencies co-opt and exploit very feel and justified public fears and concerns about global climate mayhem; meanwhile pursuing agendas that ever hostile, and arguably, disastrous to the ecological integrity of the earth.

The articles goes on to describe the importance of remote sensing and numerical computing for understanding ocean currents, energy budgets and the fundamental dynamics of ocean systems -- and the subsequent importance of these to tactical naval and anti-submarine warfare. Finally, the articles note at length the essential role of the military-academic interface. [165]

We should not fail to note that the authors of the above referenced Oceanus articles show a remarkable propensity to have swung through the revolving doors from the U.S. Navy (e.g.: ONR and/or Oceanographers of the Navy) to the Scripps or Wood Hole oceanographic institutions, or vice versa. Rear Admiral R. F. Pittenger, for example, was recently (circa 1991) appointed Arctic Coordinator for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Craig E. Dorman was (circa 1991) Director, Woods Hole, and Rear Admiral U.S. Navy (Ret.). The journal Oceanus – “The International Magazine of Marine Science and Policy” -- is published by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

It might also be possible that MIRSL researchers are able to maintain the façade of plausible denial and their supposed independence from active ENMOD research by collaborating in a passive “don’t ask, don’t tell” or “need-to-know” arrangement with the military. In this very real and plausible scenario, MIRSL research teams – like hurricane chasers – are not privy to the military plans and objectives, whereby cloud seeding or other environmental modification is actually taking place – for example – through the use of auxiliary aircraft unbeknownst to MIRSL teams. Hence MIRSL researchers might very sincerely believe that they are not part of ENMOD operations, no matter that they are merely uninformed about -- or close their eyes to -- the greater “mission” realities taking place around them. While this possibility is highly speculative, it is also both reasonable and likely.

We should take a moment to note the insidiousness of research institutions otherwise believed to be furthering purely scientific or academic knowledge – or protecting the earth’s environment and people. These include such monumental propaganda deceptions as:

National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH)

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Wood Holes Institute of Oceanography

University of Massachusetts (MIRSL)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

World Wildlife Fund

United Nations

It does not take a lot of research to establish and definitively verify the intimacy between these organizations, major corporations that revolve around a permanent warfare economy, the U.S. DOD, and the military and intelligence apparatus. NASA has become the preeminent vanguard of the militarization of space, while NOAH and the oceanography institutes serve the complementary functions – an economy of war -- in inner space and the marine environments.

One of the most important points of this study is that the lines between military and civilian, academic and industry, government and corporations, no longer exist. The only differentiating parameter is the degree of classification involved on the military side, which uses the resources, research, development, data and human inputs from the civilian side.

It should be clear enough by now that University of Massachusetts researchers are using the cover of civilian atmospheric research and geophysical monitoring to support the U.S. Department of Defense objectives from the most basic and fundamental levels to the highest echelons of classified research and development. And, by the way, we might note that the agenda of the military branch of the U.S. government might more aptly be summarized under the title Department of Offense.

9. ‘strikeStar” – Drones in Packs and Swarms:

The obvious extension of benign weather modification UAV developments is to expand UAV use to include lethal missions. Indeed, by 2025 – were we inclined to suppose that it has not already been achieved in its full or partial operational capability today -- the Air Force intends to deploy the StrikeStar UAVs. The StrikeStar is “a stealthy UAV that will be able to loiter over an area of operations for 24 hours at a range of 3,700 miles from launch base while carrying a payload of all-weather, precision weapons capable of various effects.” [166]

However, as described below, StrikeStar’s predecessors are numerous and sophisticated, and they are also engineered for lethal missions. These are very real, existing UAV “drones” and their coming dominance was secured through Star Wars entertainment films that massaged and prepared the public mind to accept and tolerate such lethal and unnecessary futuristic weaponry.

A higher performance vehicle is the Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical Conventional High Altitude Endurance (CHAE) UAV. Referred to as the Tier II+, or Global Hawk, it is designed to fulfill a post-Desert Storm requirement. Tier II+ [was] scheduled to fly in late 1997 and meet a price requirement of $10 million per unit.

StrikeStar will give the war fighter a weapon with the capability to linger for 24 hours over a battlespace 3,700 miles away, and, in a precise manner, destroy or cause other desired effects over that space at will. Bomb damage assessment will occur nearly instantaneously and restrike will occur as quickly as the decision to strike can be made. StrikeStar will allow continuous coverage of the desired battlespace with a variety of precision weapons of various effects that can result in "air occupation"-the ability of aerospacepower to continuously control the environment of the area into which it is projected.

Not only could a StrikeStar hold the enemy at risk, it could produce unparalleled psychological effects through shock and surprise. In the words of Gen Ronald Fogleman, Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, ‘so, from the sky in the aerospace medium, we will be able to converge on a multitude of targets. The impact will be the classic way you win battles-with shock and surprise."

A final task, well suited to a StrikeStar , would be covert action against trans-national threats located in politically denied territory or in situations were plausible deniability is imperative. Because of a StrikeStar’s endurance, altitude, and stealth characteristics, it could wait, undetected, over a specific area and eliminate targets upon receiving intelligence cues. If required for plausible deniability, specialized weapons could be used to erase any US fingerprint. Uniquely suited to a StrikeStar would be delivery of high-kinetic-energy penetrating weapons. [167]

Recalling that we have greatly narrowed the scope of our assessment into the military interests of ENMOD developments to focus on UAV capabilities as ENMOD platforms, we now have stated confirmation that these technologies will be used for covert action missions where specialized weapons could be used to erase any US fingerprint to insure plausible deniability.

Air Force 2025 has an entire chapter dedicated to secretive Special Operations Forces and covert operations. (Recall that these operations are accountable to no one; they perpetuate terror as a means of social control; they are amongst America’s most egregious examples of instruments of state power hostile to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) [168] While impossible to verify, most likely UAVs carrying ENMOD technologies in various states of development have already been deployed on covert operations.

These drones have multiple secret, lethal and “benign” operational capabilities. UAV purchase costs alone, ignoring the monstrously high but incalculable research and development costs paid by U.S. taxpayers, range from $1 million to $20 million per unit. [169]

Many of these UAVs will carry radars, passive and active antennas, electro-optical (EO) devices and systems, phased array systems, and sophisticated weather data banks, all fundamentally enabled through the intellectual resources, and the computational, theoretical and applied research programs of the University of Massachusetts MIRSL laboratories. [170] Numerous other major aerospaceborne weapons and intelligence platforms also utilize technologies enabled by MIRSL students and scientists.

Most of these UAV configurations will deploy some level of active and lethal ENMOD capabilities. As revealed above, payloads will also include “directed energy weapons,” and when the military delineates the coming “revolutions in weapons technology that include…directed energy weapons” they do not delineate the other technologies included in the “revolutionary weapons” category. Further, note that UAV Strikestar capabilities -- beyond “target” destruction -- include causing “other desired effects over that [battle] space at will.” Similarly undefined, these “other desired effects” certainly include ENMOD capabilities already under development.

As we will see below, these are numerous means by which environmental warfare can and will be waged.

It is important here to pause and recall that military strategists and leadership, in their reports and their direct quotes – as previously delineated above – have emphatically denied the existence and military interest in even the most “benign weather modification” (BWM) technologies. That is the point of departure from which to assess the monumental scale and complexity of the weather warfare deceptions.

To reiterate, the UAV section above offers one fraction of insight into the nature of the secret ENMOD developments under pursuit by the national security apparatus. What follows is further evidence from the most widely publicized case on record.


10. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP [171]

Between August and September 1958, the US Navy exploded three fission type nuclear bombs 480 km above the South Atlantic Ocean, in the part of the lower Van Allen Belt, closest to the earth’s surface. In addition, two hydrogen bombs were detonated 160 km over Johnston Island in the Pacific. The military called this “the biggest scientific experiment ever undertaken.”

Designed by the US Department of Defense and the US Atomic Energy Commission, and code named “Project Argus,” this gigantic experiment created new (inner) magnetic radiation belts encompassing almost the whole earth, and injected sufficient electrons and other energetic particles into the ionosphere to cause worldwide effects. The electrons traveled back and forth along magnetic force lines, causing an artificial “aurora” when striking the atmosphere near the North Pole. [172]

These pioneering experiments were the first of many – some of which are ongoing today – some of which I have already mentioned, but many which I have not, that were involved with ENMOD research, development, test and deployment. These programs included:

  • Project Cirrus (1947)

  • Central Arizona Project

  • Project Dallas

  • Project Climax

  • Project Cloud Physics

  • Project Flatlands

  • Project Argus (1958)

  • Project Skyfire (1960s)

  • Project Starfish (1962)

  • Project Skywater (1966)

  • Project SCUD

  • Project Thunderstorm

  • Project Rapid (1966-1968)

  • Project Stormfury (1961 to 1983)

  • Project Cloudcatcher (1969-1970)

  • SPS: Solar Power Satellite Project (1968)

  • Project Popeye (1960s and 1970s)

  • Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP)

  • Saturn V Rocket (1975)

  • SPS Military Implications (1978)

  • Orbit Maneuvering System (1981)

  • Innovative Shuttle Experiments (1985 to present)

  • Mighty Oaks (1986)

  • Desert Storm (1991)

  • Poker Flat Rocket Launch (1968 to present)

  • High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP (1993 to present)

The details of many of these are readily available. Note that the Air Forces’ Project Stormfury continued in ENMOD pursuits for five years subsequent to the U.S. ratification of the 1977 International ENMOD treaty.

Perhaps the most comprehensively documented of the above programs – at least in the unclassified literature -- is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program – HAARP – investigated in detail and documented in the book Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. This huge experiment being conducted in Alaska uses very large arrays of transmitters and receivers to generate energy beamed into the upper atmosphere. (The research will be briefly summarized here.) According to authors Nick Begich and Jeane Manning:

In 1994 the Air Force revealed its Spacecast 2020 master plan, which includes weather control. Scientists have experimented with weather control since the 1940s, but Spacecast 2020 notes: “using environmental modification techniques to destroy, damage or injure another state are prohibited.” Having said that, the Air Force claimed that advances in technology “compels a reexamination of this sensitive and potentially risky topic.” [173]

According to Dr. Rosalie Bertell, the U.S. Military’s first target under the HAARP program is the electrojet: a river of electricity that flows thousands of miles through the sky and down into the polar icecap. The electrojet will become a vibrating artificial antenna for sending electromagnetic radiation raining down on the earth. The U.S. military can then “X-ray” the earth and talk to submarines. [174]

No surprise, by the way, aerospace systems are some of the most disruptive agents leading to global climatic mayhem. Says Bertell:

“During the 1980s, rocket launches globally numbered about 500 to 600 a year, peaking at 1500 in 1989. There were many more during the Gulf War. The Shuttle is the largest of the solid fuel rockets, with twin 45-meter boosters. All solid fuel rockets release large amounts of hydrochloric acid in their exhaust, each Shuttle flight injecting about 75 tons of ozone destroying chlorine into the stratosphere. Those launched since 1992 inject even more ozone-destroying chlorine, about 187 tons, into the stratosphere (which contains the ozone layer). [175]

In researching Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, the authors discovered numerous patents associated with the HAARP program for nuclear weapons, atmospheric disturbances and, of course, weather (ENMOD) weaponry. Many of these were originally controlled by ARCO Power Technologies Incorporated (APTI), a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Company, one of the biggest oil companies in the world. APTI was the contractor that built the HAARP facility. ARCO sold this subsidiary, the patents and the second phase construction contract to E-Systems in June 1994. [176]

Bernard J. Eastlund’s U.S. Patent # 4,686,605, "Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and/or Magnetosphere" was sealed for a year under a government Secrecy Order. The Eastlund ionospheric heater was different: the radio frequency (RF) radiation was concentrated and focused to a point in the ionosphere. This difference throws an unprecedented amount of energy into the ionosphere. This huge difference could lift and change the ionosphere in the ways necessary to create futuristic effects described in the patent.

[177]

“Weather modification is possible by, for example, altering upper atmosphere wind patterns by constructing one or more plumes of atmospheric particles which will act as a lens or focusing device. ... molecular modifications of the atmosphere can take place so that positive environmental effects can be achieved. Besides actually changing the molecular composition of an atmospheric region, a particular molecule or molecules can be chosen for increased presence.

[178]

In light of the conclusive evidence of weather warfare capabilities outlined above it is instructive to revisit the recent statements by USAF Major Barry B. Coble and USAF Director of Weather Brig. General Fred Lewis – both previously cited herein:

DOD funding for weather modification research peaked at $2.8 million in 1977. Funding was eliminated in 1979. Since then there has been no active research effort into weather modification by DOD. The Air Force spends no money on research, and there is no effort to monitor civilian research, applications and advancements. The Army’s program, “Owning the Weather for the Battlefield,” deals only with incorporating weather information into the digitized battlefield of the future. Efforts to modify the weather for battle are not being pursued . (Coble)

And, of course, were we similarly inclined to trust what we have been told, Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone gunman, assassinated John F. Kennedy.

THE SECOND HALF CAN BE ACCESSED HERE


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