Bob Fitrakis is a Political Science Professor at Columbus State Community College. He has published the Free Press since 1992 and acted as editor since 1993. Dr. Fitrakis writes for the Columbus Alive, a local alternative weekly newspaper and has also written for other national and local publications. He has won numerous investigative reporting awards. From 1990-2001, Dr. Fitrakis co-hosted a regular public access news/public affairs program, offering analysis of political events and social issues, locally and nationally. Since June 1996 he has co-hosted a weekly public affairs call-in talk radio program on WSMZ 103.1FM. — excerpt from the Free Press, under the link COLUMNS

This summer, a Florida company plans to slow down a storm and rein in the weather

COMMENTARY
By Bob Fitrakis
June 20, 2002

Dyn-O-Mat spokesperson Louis Heidelmeier told Columbus Alive that “in a 10-day window in late July through early August” his company plans to lessen the winds of a hurricane from “135 miles an hour to 110 miles an hour.” Heidelmeier believes his company will succeed where the U.S. government’s 20-year project Storm Fury, launched between 1961 and 1980, failed.

On June 4, Dyn-O-Mat showcased an AeroGroup fleet of planes that will drop the company’s Dyn-O-Gel into a mid-summer hurricane. The man behind Dyn-O-Mat, Peter Cordani, claims each grain of Dyn-O-Gel powder “is capable of absorbing 2,000 times its weight in moisture, condensation and air.”

As Heidelmeier explains it, “The U.S. EPA has approved the two polymers we’ve combined in the powder. They don’t need to approve Dyn-O-Gel. We’ve come up with a Reese’s Cup—we’ve simply combined chocolate and peanut butter. Once the polymer absorbs the moisture, it turns into a gel and falls to earth.”

On July 16, 2001, Cordani and company loaded 20,000 pounds of Dyn-O-Gel into a C-130 jet at Palm Beach International Airport and, according to TechTV, “removed a building thunderstorm completely from the atmosphere, a first-ever feat documented by Doppler radar.”

As BBC science reporter Julian Siddle noted: “Dyn-O-Mat used a military aircraft to drop four tons of its powder onto a developing storm cloud. The cloud disappeared from radar screens.” The BBC says, “The U.S. government has already expressed interest in the new product.”

Heidelmeier says this summer’s tests will be conducted 15 miles off Florida’s shores in “international waters.” He told Alive, “We know the U.S. government is watching with interest and they haven’t done anything to stop us.”

The spokesperson dismisses environmental critics, admitting that he saw an attack on Dyn-O-Gel on the web linking the product to the unexplained “black water” mystery in the Gulf of Mexico. “It can’t be us,” Heidelmeier insists, “we were on the Atlantic side.”

Heidelmeier stresses that the unused powder either “burns up or dissolves when it hits salt water.” The powder is biodegradable and not hazardous to the environment, he claims.

Margareta-Erminia Cassani, writing on the environmental website Moonbow Media, reported, “On July 19, 2001, ABC news reported a similar story of a gelatinous ‘goo’ again washing up on beaches in West Palm Beach, Florida. This time it turns out the substance was identified as Dyn-O-Gel, a substance created for the purpose of modifying the weather… It has the ability to suck the moisture out of a hurricane and let it fall to the ground. It works on much the same principle as the ‘gel’ substance in babies’ diapers.”

Environmental reporter and watchdog Will Thomas understands why Dyn-O-Mat wants to “dial down” the catastrophic winds of hurricanes and typhoons by “sucking the moisture-fueled energy out of giant revolving storms.” Thomas points out that most of the Earth’s human population occupies coastlines within reach of ocean storms.

“This is a battle between the insurance companies that are bigger than the big oil companies driving global warming,” he said, “but such grandiose geo-engineering schemes make me nervous.”

A hurricane is the most powerful heat-venting force on the planet, according to Thomas, dissipating 25-degree Celsius surface waters. “Because no one really knows what will happen if this safety-valve is wired shut and ocean regions made even hotter, Dyn-O-Mat’s innovative storm-killing technology may prove to be dyn-o-mite in unexpected and unpleasant ways.”

“Physics teaches that energy is never destroyed—only displaced,” Thomas said. “The awesome heat-pumps disabled by Dyn-O-Mat have to go somewhere… What kind of storms will this produce? Do we really want to risk making the oceans hotter by dissipating their hurricane thermostats?”

A Dyn-O-Mat press release from Heidelmeier explains the motivation behind the company’s weather-control efforts: “Ten years ago this August, Hurricane Andrew struck Florida and Louisiana, costing over $40 billion while killing 26 and damaging or destroying over 125,000 homes (source: NOAA). Hurricane Mitch killed 15,000 in Honduras in ’98 and a typhoon in the early ’70s claimed 300,000 (!) in Bangladesh (source: National Geographic). Add the chemicals under your sink, the petroleum-based products in your garage and sewage/waste from each home and then multiply that by the number of homes destroyed by a major storm and you get an idea of the long-term environmental damage a major storm can create. NOAA has predicted nine to 13 tropical storms for 2002 with six to eight possibly becoming hurricanes and two to three could be major, (winds 111-plus mph). ...Hurricane season starts June 1.”

Heidelmeier concludes, “There is no downside.”

Bob Fitrakis is a Political Science Professor at Columbus State Community College. He has published the Free Press since 1992 and acted as editor since 1993. Dr. Fitrakis writes for the Columbus Alive, a local alternative weekly newspaper and has also written for other national and local publications. He has won numerous investigative reporting awards. From 1990-2001, Dr. Fitrakis co-hosted a regular public access news/public affairs program, offering analysis of political events and social issues, locally and nationally. Since June 1996 he has co-hosted a weekly public affairs call-in talk radio program on WSMZ 103.1FM. — excerpt from the Free Press, under the link COLUMNS

Controlling Mother Nature is a key part of the military’s “Full Spectrum Dominance” plan

COMMENTARY
By Bob Fitrakis
May 16, 2002

With a goal later described as “Full Spectrum Dominance” by the year 2025, the Air Force “backcasted” (as opposed to forecasted) what “determines the willingness and capability of the U.S. to take the lead in international affairs.” This scenario was called “Gulliver’s Travails.”

This chilling theme was echoed the next year by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, in his book The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski argued that the key to world power is in Central Asia, with its vast oil deposits. But short of a galvanizing attack by foreigners or terrorists on the scale of Pearl Harbor, Brzezinski postulated four years ago, Americans lacked the imperial will to seize world dominance.

In March 1997, Arnold A. Barnes Jr., of John Hopkins University and Phillips Laboratory, described a key element of Full Spectrum Dominance at the U.S. Army’s Tecom Test Technology Symposium. In his address, Barnes, a consultant on the Air Force study, calmly outlined the history of the U.S. military’s weather modification programs and what would be needed for future “integrated weather modification capabilities.”

The good doctor referred to the document “Spacecast 2020,” later updated in “Weather As A Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025,” which noted, “Atmospheric scientists have pursued terrestrial weather modification in earnest since the 1940s… Space presents us with a new arena, technology provides new opportunities.”

While “Spacecast 2020” analyzed “the difficulty, cost and risk of developing a weather control system for military applications” as “extremely high,” Barnes offered a different perspective. He saw “opportunities to capitalize on investment militarily [as] medium/high” while the “political implications/health hazards [were] medium/low.”

In Barnes’ scenario, there had already been a long history of U.S. military weather modification. In fact, the U.S. Air Force History Office boasts on its website that “for meteorologists, a major consequence of World War II was the development of a world weather network utilizing new equipment and techniques.”

The British Royal Air Force and Western scientists engaged in Operation Cumulus in 1952, which, according to an August 2001 BBC broadcast, was a rainmaking project that led to 35 flood-related deaths in Devon. Declassified documents show that in 1953 the British military and their allies experimented with increasing rain and snow by artificial means in hopes of “bogging down enemy movement.”

Perhaps more shocking, the documents contemplate the possibility of “explod[ing] an atomic weapon in a seeded storm system or cloud.” This would produce a far wider area of radioactive contamination than a normal atomic explosion.

Between 1955 and 1956, the U.S. Air Force participated in Project 119-L, which resulted in a worldwide meteorological survey. If you’re going to artificially modify the weather, you have to be able to predict it first. Barnes referred to the Air Force’s ability to create “cloud holes” using the chemical “Carbon Black” in the ’50s and ’60s and, later, using silver iodide.

Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance created a Defense Environmental Services study group in 1966 “to review the full spectrum of environmental services and R&D within the Department of Defense.”

By early 1967, Operation Popeye was underway. The 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron took off, in the words of one military official, to “make mud, not war.” The military seeded the clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to create floods and wash out North Vietnamese supply routes. Barnes noted, “Operation Popeye [was] run by people from our lab.”

Columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about the politically sensitive operation in 1971, paving the way for a Congressional investigation that documented these and other secret weather modification warfare programs.

As public anger grew, Senator Clayborn Pell of Rhode Island, who originally believed it was better to be rained on with water than bombs, wrote an editorial in the Providence Journal Bulletin in 1975 titled “United States and Other World Powers Should Outlaw Tampering With Weather for Use as War Weapon.”

That year, the U.S. and the Soviets began negotiations to ban weather modification as a military weapon. In October 1976, the U.N. produced the treaty “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification” (ENMOD). It went into effect two years later, a fact lamented by Barnes. “Since 1978, the official Air Force position has been that weather modification has little utility or military payoff as a weapon of war.”

Barnes argued at the Tecom symposium, “The official Air Force position needs to be reevaluated,” especially “in the light of 19 years of scientific advances.”

While the U.S. and Soviet military had officially turned away from weather modification as a weapon, their partners in the private sector filled the gap for the next two decades. ENMOD had a huge loophole that allowed for the peaceful commercial use of weather modification.

In his paper “Progress in planned weather modification research: 1991-1994,” Robert Czys of the Atmospheric Science Division of the Illinois State Water Survey reports, “A randomized hail experiment, Grossversuch IV, was conducted in central Switzerland during 1977-1981. Research groups from France, Italy and Switzerland participated in the experiment to test the Soviet hail suppression method.” Meanwhile, back at home between 1987 and 1993, the North Dakota Cloud Modification Program was underway.

As Barnes noted, “operational and modeling information” from a 1976 scientific paper showed how “to achieve precipitation enhancement, create cirrus clouds and to dissipate fog and low clouds.” There were, however, “risks and limitations,” particularly the problem of the “creation of optimum submicron particles” which would pose a danger to health as they fell through the atmosphere.

But Barnes argued that the new “advanced weapons systems” were “more environmentally sensitive” and, once again, the military should be exploring weather modification weapons. After all, the uses were obvious. You could “deny fresh water” to the enemy, “induce drought,” “increase concealment” and “decrease [the enemy’s] comfort level/morale.”

Moreover, Barnes insisted that the weaponization of space is the key to warfare in the 21st century. The U.S. government would later produce a document named “Joint Vision for 2020” under the auspices of the U.S. Space Command outlining plan for “Full Spectrum Dominance.” In the years following Barnes’ presentation on fully integrating high-tech weather modification into the U.S. military, so-called “chemtrail” sightings have occurred throughout the United States and its Western allies.

Brzezinski predicted: “Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised… Technology of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”

Meanwhile, the commercial applications of the technology are apparently paying off. Weather Modification Inc. signed a contract with Thailand in 1996 to help “the southeast Asian country get a better grip on its weather” through “cloud modification.” In 1997, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government of Malaysia signed a contract with a Russian-owned company to create cyclones to blow pollution out to sea.

The BBC reported in 1998 that Canadian scientist Graeme Mather “believes he has found the Holy Grail of weather science in the skies over Mexico,” where he was trying to produce more water from available clouds. Also in 1998, an American Meteorological Society report conceded that over the past 20 years, “experiments had been carried out on lightning suppression.”

And this year, the Korean Times reported on January 27 that the South Korean “government is checking up on the possibility of using weather modification techniques” to prevent monsoon rains from interrupting the 2002 World Cup matches, which will be held there May 30-31. The paper reports, “Both the U.S. and Russia have commercialized rain and hailstorm prevention programs.” Meanwhile, North Korea continues to suffer the aftereffects of a decade-long drought.

Bob Fitrakis is a Political Science Professor at Columbus State Community College. He has published the Free Press since 1992 and acted as editor since 1993. Dr. Fitrakis writes for the Columbus Alive, a local alternative weekly newspaper and has also written for other national and local publications. He has won numerous investigative reporting awards. From 1990-2001, Dr. Fitrakis co-hosted a regular public access news/public affairs program, offering analysis of political events and social issues, locally and nationally. Since June 1996 he has co-hosted a weekly public affairs call-in talk radio program on WSMZ 103.1FM. — excerpt from the Free Press, under the link COLUMNS

How Kucinich’s “chemtrails” disappeared… from right under Congress’ nose!

COMMENTARY
By Bob Fitrakis
March 28, 2002

On March 16, in a front-page story titled “Conspiracy theorists look up,” the Akron Beacon Journal noted that Kucinich’s bill “had been rewritten…and the references to chemtrails and the other types of weapons were quietly eliminated.” The Beacon Journal article, linking chemtrails to conspiracies, resulted from massive local pressure. Michel Massullo of Akron provided Columbus Alive with rolls of photos of plane trails and a sworn affidavit attesting to extensive aerial activity over that city on February 18 and February 24.

Sources close to Kucinich’s new bill, HR 3616, which has been endorsed by some 254 community groups throughout the nation, say the term “chemtrail” was dropped because Kucinich, a Democrat from Lakewood, couldn’t get the Union of Concerned Scientists or the Federation of American Scientists to sign on.

Previously explaining the government’s position, Lieutenant Colonel Michael K. Gibson of the U.S. Air Force wrote U.S. Representative Mark Green in August 2000 and stated, “The term ‘chemtrail’ is a hoax that began circulating approximately three years ago which asserts the government is involved in a joint federal program of covert spraying of the public.”

It’s a classic non-denial denial: Gibson is denying that the Air Force is secretly spraying U.S. citizens. The reality is the U.S. Space Command and other government agencies are involved in ongoing experiments for military and environmental purposes that involve aerial spraying, and the microfibers and other sprayed chemicals inevitably fall to earth, putting the public at risk.

Before you believe Gibson’s and the government’s “denial,” do an Internet search for the following terms: Joint Vision for 2020; weather as a force [multiplier]; owning the weather by 2025; Eastlund; and Edward Teller. Two scientists working at Wright Patterson Air Force Base confirmed to Alive that they were involved in aerial spraying experiments. One involved aluminum oxide spraying related to global warming and the other involved barium stearate and had to do with high-tech military communications.

The U.S. government has a long history of denying inexcusable covert operations. These are the people who told you about the joys of nuclear radiation and Readi Kilowatt, that Agent Orange could defoliate a tropical jungle overnight but was harmless to humans. This is the same government that secretly experimented on its citizens with everything from syphilis to LSD.

The Pentagon would now have you believe that the mass sightings of chemtrails all over North America are collective hallucinations, even though the boys at the government’s Lawrence Livermore experimental lab admit that they’ve discussed all this aerial spraying and run computer simulations on the effects of weather modification for military and peacetime purposes.

A brief history of the chemtrail phenomenon can be traced to a Washington state man who told award-winning investigative reporter William Thomas that he’d become ill on New Year’s Day 1999 after watching several jets make strange lines in the sky. Within six months, Thomas, writing primarily for the Environmental News Service, had detailed over 700 eyewitness reports of chemtrails from 40 states.

Mainstream newspapers have gone out of their way to dismiss these eyewitness accounts. Thomas told the New Mexican newspaper in June 1999, “It’s easier to sell UFOs to major media than a phenomena as close in many cities as the nearest window.”

The New Mexican took a skeptical view of the local Skywatchers group and their account of “unmarked government planes puffing strange white smoke, making cryptic Xs and tic-tac-toe designs, covering the air above as the puzzled populace looks up in fear and confusion.” The photos from Akron that arrived last week show the same patterns in the sky.

A news database search showed that 24 local TV stations from around the country have reported on and dismissed the same phenomenon in the last few years. On January 14, Baltimore’s WJZ-TV report included a visual of “last Thursday morning’s chemtrails seen in the sky.” The story was almost identical to one broadcast by Orlando station WOFL in July 2000.

Last May, the West-Quebec Post spread chemtrails photographs across its front page (the Canadian press has been much more open to investigating the phenomenon). Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, reported that his readers had been photographing and comparing the aerial activity for some time.

While the U.S. government is busy with the latest in a long series of covert experiments, and contemptuously attempts to convince eyewitnesses that they’re crazy, non-governmental organizations are quietly circulating a proposed UN treaty titled Permanent Ban on Basing of Weapons in Space; listed under the heading “Exotic weapons” is the term “chemtrails.” This treaty is a direct outgrowth of UN General Assembly Resolution 55/32, passed 138-0 with three nations abstaining (the United States, Israel and Micronesia).

Sooner or later the government will declassify documents, as it inevitably does, showing that it engaged in aerial spraying for military and environmental purposes. Until then, the government will continue to tell us we don’t see what we obviously see.

Bob Fitrakis is a Political Science Professor at Columbus State Community College. He has published the Free Press since 1992 and acted as editor since 1993. Dr. Fitrakis writes for the Columbus Alive, a local alternative weekly newspaper and has also written for other national and local publications. He has won numerous investigative reporting awards. From 1990-2001, Dr. Fitrakis co-hosted a regular public access news/public affairs program, offering analysis of political events and social issues, locally and nationally. Since June 1996 he has co-hosted a weekly public affairs call-in talk radio program on WSMZ 103.1FM. — excerpt from the Free Press, under the link COLUMNS

The government says they don’t exist, but Kucinich wants Congress to take action

COMMENTARY
By Bob Fitrakis
January 24, 2002

The bill, HR 2977, specifically outlaws a variety of weapons detailed in the December 6, 2001, Columbus Alive article “Stormy Weather,” which exposed allegations of secret government aerial spraying activities. Kucinich’s bill explicitly outlaws “chemtrails.”

Alive asked Kucinich why he would introduce a bill banning so-called chemtrails when the U.S. government routinely denies such things exist and the U.S. Air Force has routinely called chemtrail sightings “a hoax.”

“The truth is there’s an entire program in the Department of Defense, ‘Vision for 2020,’ that’s developing these weapons,” Kucinich responded. Kucinich says he plans to reintroduce a broader version of the bill later this month. “Plasma, electromagnetics, sonic or ultrasonic weapons [and] laser weapons systems” were among those banned by HR 2977.

Two scientists working at Wright Patterson Air Force Base informed Alive of the ongoing secret experiments, one involving weather modification and the other involving the creation of an aerial antenna using a barium stearate chemical trail. The scientists referred to the work of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. Before Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”), there was Tesla’s vision of high-tech space-based warfare and weather modification.

According to Tesla biographer Margaret Cheney, federal agents seized Tesla’s papers after his death in 1943. “[At] least one set of Tesla’s papers had reached Wright Field [now Wright Patterson Air Force Base],” Cheney wrote. The Aeronautic Systems Division at Wright Patterson admitted it had the Tesla papers but claim they were “destroyed.”

However, Tesla’s dream is embodied in a glossy brochure titled “Vision for 2020” released by the U.S. Space Command in 1998. The brochure states, “The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance.”

The Space Command spells out its purpose pretty plainly: “Dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment.”

There’s nothing new here, for those who have been paying attention. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, bluntly stated in his book Between Two Ages, “Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need to be appraised… [T]echniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”

On January 4 this year, Canadian Professor Michel Chossudovsky, of the Center for Research on Globalization at the University of Ottawa, issued a report noting that weapons have the ability to trigger climate changes. “Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the world’s climate. In the U.S., the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),” Chossudovsky wrote. “Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction.”

Doubters of the military’s secret plans should refer to George and Meredith Friedman’s The Future of War, Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the 21st Century. The Friedmans, government-touted “arms experts” and favorites of the military-industrial complex, assert that “The American experience of power will rest on the domination of space.”

The U.S. Air Force giddily embraced the Friedmans’ thesis in the 1996 report “New World Vistas: Air And Space Power For The 21st Century.” The Air Force report notes, “In the next two decades, new technologies will allow the fielding of space-based weapons of devastating effectiveness to be used to deliver energy and mass as force projection in tactical and strategic conflict.”

State University of New York Professor of Journalism Karl Grossman, writing in 1999, revealed how the mainstream corporate press virtually ignores the government’s pronouncements while trade journals like Space News, Defense News, Aviation Week, Space Technology and Electronic Engineering Times routinely report on the military-industrial complex’s high-tech breakthroughs.

As for chemtrail skeptics, they might want to consult Rutgers University Political Science Professor Leonard Cole’s book Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Test Over Populated Areas. Chemtrail deniers are apparently happy with the thought that their beloved paternalistic government would engage in aerial spraying over densely populated areas.

U.S. Representative Marty Sabo, a Democrat from Minnesota, denounced “the secret Army program to spray Minneapolis and other cities with chemicals in the 1950s and ’60s,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in September 1994. “The idea that the government would use its own citizens as guinea pigs is appalling, and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms,” Sabo told a House subcommittee investigating the secret spraying, which used fluorescent tracers to mark wind patterns.

As for the Army, it argues that the secret Cold War-era spraying was not “human experimentation” since it didn’t target any specific individuals and the zinc cadmium sulfide used was harmless. But the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists all cadmium compounds as known cancer-causing agents.

Former students of Clinton Elementary in south Minneapolis told an investigating panel from the National Research Council that the Army’s secret chemical spraying adversely affected their health, according to the Star Tribune.

Skeptics who continue to insist the government would never be involved in secret aerial spraying, particularly in Ohio, may want to address their questions to the C-130 aircrews from the 910th Airlift Wing stationed at Youngstown’s Air Reserve Station. In July 2000, an Air Force press release bragged, “Fifteen service members from military installations in Germany and England were at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, 8-12 May, learning how to use chemicals to destroy the enemy… The seven airmen and eight soldiers learned how to plan, execute and oversee the entire process of applying pesticides by air.” The press release said the Youngstown air unit will only be used against “insects with their deadly diseases.”

Apparently insects take many forms. During the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in November 1999, CNN reported that a military air unit with pathogen capacity to induce sickness in humans was deployed against the demonstrators.

Bob Fitrakis is a Political Science Professor at Columbus State Community College. He has published the Free Press since 1992 and acted as editor since 1993. Dr. Fitrakis writes for the Columbus Alive, a local alternative weekly newspaper and has also written for other national and local publications. He has won numerous investigative reporting awards. From 1990-2001, Dr. Fitrakis co-hosted a regular public access news/public affairs program, offering analysis of political events and social issues, locally and nationally. Since June 1996 he has co-hosted a weekly public affairs call-in talk radio program on WSMZ 103.1FM. — excerpt from the Free Press, under the link COLUMNS

The government’s top-secret efforts to control Mother Nature

COMMENTARY
By Bob Fitrakis and Fritz Chess
December 6, 2001

During a flight to Phoenix in early October, a Columbus Alive reporter noted that air traffic was like a nest of hornets over southwest Ohio and Indiana, with jets spraying everywhere. One plane appeared to be a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, a refueling plane.

What’s the difference between a “chemtrail” and a normal contrail (or vapor trail), the wisps of condensation you expect to see in a jet’s wake? Typically contrails can only form at temperatures below negative-76 degrees Fahrenheit and at humidity levels of 70 percent or more at high altitudes, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist Thomas Schlattes. Even in most ideal conditions, a jet contrail lasts no more than 30 minutes.

So what are the big, bilious trails that seem to hang indefinitely and slowly feather out and appear to turn into cirrus clouds? Or the contrails seemingly purposely splayed over cities in geometrically precise grid patterns? These are “chemtrails,” and the mystery of their source and purpose has been fueling increasing speculation among government skeptics and on watchdog websites like chemtrailcentral.com, chemtrail.com and carnicom.com.

For the past decade, the official government response to inquiries about the jet contrails appearing across the continent is to attribute the phenomenon to increased commercial air traffic. In 1997, the Christian Science Monitor reported the government’s claim that the jet contrails were actually causing clouds to form.

Yet, in the month after the attack on the World Trade Center, there was very little commercial airline traffic and virtually no private civilian air flights. Still, white jets billowing lingering plumes frequently appeared in the skies over Columbus. An Alive reporter, using high-quality binoculars, could see that some of the white planes had orange markings. In addition to Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, another refueling plane, appeared to be used for spraying.

There’s nothing new about these sightings. It may seem to be the stuff of X-Files-style paranoia or grist for conspiracy theorists (and skeptics like Jay Reynolds, writing at goodsky.homestead.com, have made thorough attempts to debunk the theories). But as chemtrail sightings become more common, mainstream scientists (and the mainstream press) are taking note. One scientist familiar with chemtrail experiments even agreed to speak with Columbus Alive (though he refused to allow his name to be used), saying that public disclosure of the experiments is inevitable and maybe imminent.

The Canadian Ottawa Citizen reported a “fervor over chemtrails” on May 16: “What one sees here reflects sightings across North America.” The Citizen noted, “West Quebec Post publisher Fred Ryan reports that his readers have been photographing and comparing them [pictures of chemtrails], and such manifestations are listed on the web.”

“Ground fallout [from the chemtrails] analyzed in the United States contained carcinogens and bacteria. Coincidentally in the past decade, most jet fuel was re-engineered to reduce fire hazards by adding a long-banned pesticide, which was reportedly also found in gel samples from chemtrails. Also found were toxic micro-fibers, much finer than asbestos,” the Citizen wrote.

Chemtrail sightings have been reported in 14 NATO nations. Investigative reporter William Thomas notes that “Croatian chemtrails began the day after that country joined NATO.”

Which begs one simple question: Why?

Explanations range from chemtrails’ use in military communications applications to scientific experiments designed to control the weather, thwarting global warming or relieving droughts.

A scientist working at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, who insisted on anonymity, told Columbus Alive that two different secret projects have been conducted. One involved cloud creation experiments to lessen the effect of global warming. The other involved radiation reflection off clouds in conjunction with the military’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska.

The scientist claims that the two most common substances being sprayed into chemtrails are aluminum oxide and barium stearate. When you see planes flying back and forth marking parallel lines, X-patterns and grids in a clear sky, that’s aluminum oxide, according to the scientist. The goal is to create an artificial sunscreen to reflect solar radiation back into space to alleviate global warming.

In some cases, barium may be sprayed in a similar manner for the purpose of “high-tech 3-D radar imaging. The barium can be used for a ‘wire’ to shoot an electromagnetic beam through to take 3-D images of the ground far over the horizon,” according to the scientist.

Thomas, writing in the November-December 2001 issue of NEXUS New Times magazine, essentially confirmed this assessment of the activities at the Dayton air base. “The barium spread in exercises conducted out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base acts as an electrolyte, enhancing conductivity of radar and radio waves,” Thomas reported. “Wright-Pat has also long been deeply engaged in HAARP’s electromagnetic warfare program.”

Ken Caldeira, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore Labs and one of the country’s leading experts on weather modification, conducted the original computer modeling for the use of aluminum oxide to fight global warming. He told Columbus Alive, “We originally did this study to show that this program [using massive spraying for weather modification] shouldn’t be done,” due to negative health effects. Caldeira said there are persistent rumors that the Bush administration will announce geo-engineering weather modification projects this spring. Caldeira sees this as “political suicide.”
 

Patenting Mother Nature

The amount of information available on weather modification and defense applications surrounding the HAARP project proves that chemtrails aren’t so secret after all. Public documents have trickled out of government offices and committees for the last 50 years. And the most valuable cache of data about weather-control efforts is freely available from a very reliable source: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Throughout the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union actively investigated the military use of weather modification. In 1958, Captain Howard T. Orville served as the White House’s chief advisor on weather modification. He publicly admitted that the military was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather through electronic beams to ionize and de-ionize the atmosphere.”

Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald, serving on the President’s Science Advisory Committee in 1966, frequently published papers on the military use of weather modification. In the book Unless Peace Comes, MacDonald titled a chapter “How To Wreck The Environment.” He described the military applications of weather modification including climate change, melting the polar ice caps, techniques for depleting the ozone layer over the enemy, engineering earthquakes, manipulating ocean waves and using the earth’s energy fields for brain wave manipulation.

“The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy,” MacDonald commented.

In the early 1970s, the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment held investigative hearings on the military’s research into weather and climate modification. The committee’s findings were shocking at the time, including detailed plans for creating tidal waves through the coordinated use of nuclear weapons.

A 1977 United Nations treaty, The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of the Environmental Modification Techniques, prohibited “the use of techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and cause such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves and changes in climate and weather patterns.”

The revival of the Cold War during the Reagan years produced a slew of new inventions in the area of weather modification. Presumably to cool off the earth, an August 1982 patent, number 4347284, outlined plans to produce a “White covered sheet material capable of reflecting ultraviolet rays” from the sun.

Numerous other patents attempted to perfect “aerial spraying of liquids,” like patent number 4412654, registered in November 1983: “A laminar microjet atomizer and method of aerial spraying involved the use of a streamlined body having a slot in the trailing edge thereof to afford a quiescent zone within the [airplane] wing and into which liquid for spraying is introduced.”

Not to be outdone, a patent was filed in July 1986 detailing a “Liquid propane generator for cloud-seeding apparatus.” The abstract reads: “Apparatus is provided for release of liquid propane from the holding chamber of a cloud-seeding rocket.” A new and improved “liquid atomizing apparatus for aerial spraying” was patented in August 1990. “The generator is driven from a power take-off from the engine of the spraying aircraft, a drive assembly includes a device for controlling the speed of the generator relative to speed of the engine,” reads patent number 4948050.

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s ushered in brave new opportunities in weather modification. The New York Times reported on September 24, 1992, that a Russian company was openly selling electronic equipment to manipulate the weather in a specific area. The Times noted that certain Russian farmers used the weather-control technology to alter the climate for better crop yields.

A little over a month later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Russian company Elate Intelligence Technologies Inc. was selling weather-control equipment using the slogan “Weather made to order.” The Journal quoted Igor Pirogoff as saying that Hurricane Andrew, which did an estimated $17 billion in damage, could have been turned “into a wimpy little squall” by his company.

South Africa’s Water Resource Commission admitted to being involved in the actual testing of “hygroscopic seeding particles from a seeding flare” in an October 1994 patent: “In a confidential technical trial which was conducted on a small isolated cloud formation above the Nelspriut area in the Transvaal province of the Republic of South Africa, two flares were ignited electrically from inside the aircraft…to produce rain.”

Russia’s open selling of former Soviet military weather modification devices often made for interesting news stories. “Malaysia to battle smog with cyclones” is a headline in the November 13, 1997, Wall Street Journal. “The plan calls for the use of new Russian technology to create cyclones—the giant storms also known as typhoons and hurricanes—to cause torrential rains washing the smoke out of the air,” the Journal reported.

By 1997, the great global reinsurance firms—the companies that insure the insurers, like the Swiss Reinsurance Company and Lloyd’s of London—were complaining publicly of global warming and the added risk of climate-related insurance losses. Beating the drum in the U.S. for weather-modification technology to combat global warming was none other than the father of the H-bomb, Edward Teller. His public interest in the issue coincided with the December 1997 Kyoto Conference on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions.

In April this year, the New York Times described Teller as director emeritus of the Livermore Weapons Laboratory and “an ardent advocate of the Reagan administration’s Star Wars anti-missile plan and, more recently, has promoted the idea of manipulating the earth’s atmosphere to counteract global warming.”

The U.S. Air Force admitted to CNN in July that it had broken up a storm over the Atlantic using products made by a company called Dyn-O-Mat. The company’s website, dynomat.com, lists “environmental absorbent products” such as Dyn-O-Drought and Dyn-O-Storm.

As recently as November 13, another patent was filed outlining a “method of modifying weather.” The abstract reads: “The polymer is dispersed into the cloud and the wind of the storm agitates the mixture causing the polymer to absorb the rain. This reaction forms a gelatinous substance which precipitate to the surface below. Thus, diminishing the cloud’s ability to rain.”

Sunbury resident Dan King remembers a stormy day in July when he was driving on a newly resurfaced section of I-71 and “the rainwater looked like dish soap water on the highway. I thought it was just from the resurfacing,” he said, “but when I got out in the country I saw the same thing. Piles of suds at the side of the road.”

The scientist who works at Wright-Patterson told Alive that barium stearate is basically a soap bonded to a metal and could have produced the soapy rain.

It’s impossible to know which chemicals are being sprayed or for what reason since, according to the government, chemtrails don’t exist. But, increasingly, government skeptics and other watchdogs are demanding to know if chemtrail spraying poses any health risks.

In his NEXUS New Times article, William Thomas wrote, “Chemtrails can cause drought by soaking up all available moisture, and drooping chemical curtains fall through vast colonies of UV-mutated bacteria, viruses and fungi living in the upper atmosphere. Could these malevolent micro-organisms be piggy-backing on the plumes?”

Thomas suggests that the spraying following September 11 has nothing to do with a deliberate biological attack or the inoculation of the American public. Rather, it’s simply an ongoing attempt by humans to fool with Mother Nature.

Just what exactly are those mysterious airplane vapor trails seen filling America's skies?  A group of independent investigators may have the answer.

EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPOTLIGHT
By Mike Blair
June 21, 2001

For two years, The SPOTLIGHT [now The American Free Press] has been in contact with experts in fields ranging from medicine to nuclear energy who have been investigating the mysterious trails left by airplanes in skies all over America and in many foreign countries.

These “tracks” in the skies, believed to be left by a combination of military and civilian aircraft drawn into the massive, multi-billion dollar program, are unlike regular high-flying aircraft’s vapor trails.  Instead of dissipating rapidly, these so-called “chemtrails” mesh together for hours and are often mistaken for natural clouds.

The principal chemical being deposited in the air consists of various mixtures of barium salts, which were revealed in studies undertaken by a Pennsylvania-based high-tech weapons scientist.

Chemicals, he said, were being utilized as part of the development of a new radar system at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

The base will be the site of a massive demonstration on Saturday, June 23, starting at 1 p.m. under the sponsorship of Ohio Citizens Against Chemtrails, headed by Kim Weber, one of the citizens working on the chemtrail investigation.

The rally will be attended by hundreds of people from across the nation who are concerned about these poisons being dumped out of the sky onto millions of people on the ground.

Considerable effort has been put into chemtrail research by a physicist who has been associated with Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y.  The scientist, with his fellow researchers, has determined that the chemtrails are being created by efforts of the military in at least four major, but separate, projects.

The first project is an effort to block the rays of the sun from hitting the Earth, including ultra-violet radiation that will come through without an adequate layer of ozone in the upper regions above the Earth.

In the event of global warming, this, it is hoped, could lower temperatures on the surface of the Earth and block ultra-violet radiation from causing skin cancer in humans.

The aerosol being sprayed in this case is probably aluminum oxide or a compound that would have similar properties, and is the only one of the government programs that does not use the barium mixtures.
 

BLACK PROJECTS?

The second and most secret project is the Navy’s Radio Frequency Mission Planner (RFMP) program, which is a system encompassing a group of computer programs.

One of its supporting subprograms is known as Variable Terrain Radio Parabolic Equation or VTRPE.  This is a computer radio frequency propagation program that deals with radio waves and enables the RFMP system to visually see the terrain of a battlefield in three dimensions on a television-type screen.

The RFMP system also depends on satellites to supplement the images of a battlefield picture obtained from the ground, thus producing the 3-dimensional images.

In providing an interactive picture portraying in the radar screen, the RFMP system allows the computer operator to develop familiarity with the “environment” before a war mission occurs by playing a variety of “what if?” virtual warfare scenarios on his computer screen.  Since all major modes of radio frequency propagation are modeled in his computer (the RFMP system), special, sometimes counter-intuitive, cases can be examined in detail and exploited during a battle.

Initially, the VTRPE computer program only worked accurately over water and along coastal areas but not over land masses because the system’s radar waves required an atmospheric condition known as “ducting,” over land, to operate accurately.

This “ducting” problem was solved by releasing an aerosol, a mixture of barium salts into the atmosphere over the United States.  Thus, they can make an atmospheric radio frequency “duct” with a base of barium aerosol released from aircraft.

One of the researchers, the physicist from Brookhaven, explained how the process works:  The chemical and electrical characteristics of the mixture cause moisture to stay in the clouds.  The aerosol sets up an electrical and chemical environment that supports RF ducting for the RFMP/VTRPE warfare system.

“The mixture of barium salt from the aerosol when sprayed in a straight line will also provide a ducting path from point A to point B and will enable high frequency communications along that path, even over the curvature of the Earth, in both directions,” he said.  “Enemy high frequency communications can be monitored easier with the straight line A to B ducting medium.”

The third project also utilizes the mixture of barium salts in the atmosphere and involves weather control.  It is a project of the Air Force and utilizes concepts of radio frequency radiation, developed originally by legendary scientist Nikola Tesla, against the ionosphere above the Earth.

Known as the so-called HAARP project, it is manipulating life-support systems in the environment, testing and altering them for military advantage.

Air Force documents, obtained by the independent researchers, indicate that “the risks are high but the rewards are worth it.”

The mixture of barium salts, supporting moisture, is administered along the weather fronts and manipulated in a controlled fashion.

It is believed that microwave energy is also utilized in the weather control program.  Weather data is also a required input to the VTRPE program of the RFMP system.

Perfect weather control technology will enable the military to withhold rain, cause floods, cause drought, cause storms, withhold sunshine, damage food crops, and bring any country to its knees without firing a shot.

The fourth atmospheric project is being run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a means to detect and decontaminate enemy biological attacks.

The program also utilizes a mixture of barium salts as the base vehicle in aerosol, along with special polymer fibers.  The combination allows detection of biological agents.

Some biological agents have actually been released into the atmosphere in trials, testing the detection and decontamination systems.

It is believed that barium salt, polymer fibers and other chemicals in the atmosphere are the physical irritants that may be directly or indirectly responsible for unexplained nose bleeds, asthma, allergies, pneumonia, upper respiratory ailments and arthritis-like symptoms.

Chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere are producing air and ground conditions that may be harmful to humans and animals, while stimulating the growth of molds and bacteria.

Barium salts, an Earth metal, are toxins that absorb readily into the gastrointestinal tract which are deposited into muscles and other tissue.  No case data is available on the long-term effects of barium in humans.

“The programs remain secret because the Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental agencies need to ‘not know’ about the by-products of the metabolites of these biological, illegal and harmful agents,” said one of the researchers.  “It’s for that reason the combined projects have been kept secret from the citizens.”

The U.S. military is testing high-tech, experimental equipment in the eastern United States.

EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPOTLIGHT
By Mike Blair
June 11, 2001

The latest, which the Pentagon is calling “Joint Patriot 01,” is under way at Fort Drum, a military base outside of Watertown, N.Y.  Exercises will run through June 30.

Centered at Fort Drum, the home of the Army’s elite 10th Mountain Division, the military is also utilizing facilities at Combat Readiness Training Centers at Volk Field, Wisc., Alpena, Mich., and Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds.

“Concurrently, the exercise permits testing of advanced command and control technology developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, N.Y., research site,” a Pentagon spokesman said.  “Numerous technologies will be field tested, including command and control systems, dynamic planning and targeting systems, sensor systems, and specialized next-generation communications systems.”

The Air Force Research Laboratory at Rome, located in Central New York about 75 miles from Fort Drum, used to be part of Griffiss Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command B-52 bomber base.

In 1982, the air base was closed down and the top secret laboratory was the only Air Force facility retained.  The lab was enhanced and its mission scope increased.  Little is known about what goes on there, but it is known that the scientists there are developing military technology involving lasers.

In the mid-1990s, a local sensation was created in the vicinity of Rome when numerous residents reported seeing bizarre “balls of light” traveling at treetop level.  Many believed the phenomena were created at the Air Force laboratory.

The Pentagon claims that the maneuvers at Fort Drum are “a war-fighting capability training exercise for more than 6,000 Air and Army National Guard members and elements from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, and allied reserve forces from Britain and the Netherlands.”

In a similar drill, not reported in the media, 26,000 military personnel on March 20 took part in a massive exercise, which involved a Navy battle group headed by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise 200 miles off the coast of North Carolina.  In the drill, Eastern North Carolina was “enemy territory” and the VTRPE system was used to keep surveillance on it.

Exercises at Fort Drum and North Carolina may have been assisted by Air Force-induced weather changes.