1/12/2024 0 Comments Secret government weather machine![]() ![]() With traditional methods failing, the U.S. Johnson, the Vietnam War had been underway for over a decade (though still a decade away from its somber conclusion) and more than 8,000 Americans had already died. When preliminary tests for Operation Popeye began in October 1966 under President Lyndon B. (For comparison, the southwestern state of Arizona typically gets 8.04 inches of rain in a year.)īack in the 1960s, however, Vietnam’s rainfall patterns weren’t the concern of American tourists, so much as the American military. Heavy with water and churned by reversing monsoon winds, the northern metropolis of Hanoi typically receives 8.2 inches of rain in July alone, while Ho Chi Minh City in the south, where the monsoon hits a little later, racks up an average 11 inches each September. And, boy, is there rain.īetween roughly May and October, the mercury rises to 90 degrees and the humidity can hit 90 percent. Prices tend to jump during the so-called high season, but it’s the only surefire way to avoid the rain. Most travel agents would recommend planning your visit to Vietnam roughly between the months of November and April. A radarscope featured in the Compendium of Meteorology, 1951. Given the rise of geo-engineering projects, both from municipal governments and private companies, some experts believe Popeye is newly relevant. Eventually, the federal government would declassify its Popeye documents and international laws aimed at preventing similar projects would be on the books.īut the public would, more or less, forget it ever happened. The Nixon administration distracted, denied, and, it seems, outright lied to Congress, but enterprising reporters published damning stories about rain being used as a weapon, and the Pentagon papers dripped classified details like artificial rain. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. Its stated objective-to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War-was never realized, but the revelation that the U.S. Though it cycled through several names in its history, “Operation Popeye” stuck. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing.
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