Act I. The Sky War
SFX: Thunder rolling in the distance. A slow rotor hum.
A C-130 Hercules lifts off from Udon Royal Thai Air Force Base just after sunset. The crew has the cargo bay loaded with canisters. Not bombs, not supplies; canisters of silver iodide mixed with lead iodide and acetone. Command briefed the crew separately from every other unit on base. The flight plan logs say the crew's mission is “weather reconnaissance.”
Their actual mission: to make it rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Not to predict rain. Not to wait for rain. To make rain. To pull water from clouds that weren’t ready to give it up yet. We weren’t trying to win the weather. We were trying to weaponize it and choke off the supplies that kept the war alive in the South.
This is Operation Popeye. And for the next five years, it will remain the most classified weather experiment in American military history.
SFX: C-130 rotor hum.
Wyatt: “Hell, son, we weren’t tryin’ to predict the weather. We were tryin’ to break it.”
The problem started with a road. Except it wasn’t really a road. A network of trails, footpaths, rivers, tunnels, and jungle passages ran from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. The Americans called it the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The North Vietnamese called it the Truong Son Road. And no matter what the Air Force threw at it, the damn thing wouldn’t die.
We tried bombing it, thousands of sorties under Operation Steel Tiger. The jungle swallowed the craters.
We tried napalm. The canopy grew so thick that the fire barely reached the ground.
We tried defoliants, including Agent Orange by the truckload, and managed to strip some foliage, but the trail just shifted a hundred yards east or west, braiding through the forest like a living thing.
We even considered using nuclear weapons, but decided they wouldn’t end the war and would only invite the enemy to use them back.
The North Vietnamese moved at night. They built the trail in sections. Different units maintained each section. They camouflaged each one during the day with cut branches and woven bamboo mats. When American reconnaissance planes flew over, they saw nothing. When the bombs came, the crews scattered into prepared bunkers, waited out the strike, then came back out and filled in the holes.
By 1966, as many as 20,000 North Vietnamese troops moved down the trail every month, along with enough supplies to sustain the Viet Cong insurgency in the South. Trucks rolled south. Bicycles carried 500-pound loads. Porters balanced bamboo poles across their shoulders. The trail functioned as the circulatory system of the war. Cut it, and you would bleed the enemy dry. But nothing we tried would work.
Bombs couldn’t stop the trail. Fire couldn’t stop it. But water could.
During monsoon season, May through October, the trails turned to soup. Trucks bogged down axle-deep in mud. Bicycles were useless. Porters slogged through conditions that turned a day’s march into three days. The North Vietnamese themselves estimated that supply capacity dropped by sixty percent during heavy rains.
So someone at the Pentagon had an idea. What if we could extend the monsoon?
Aida: “Cloud seeding had existed since 1946. Vincent Schaefer at General Electric discovered that dry ice dropped into supercooled clouds could trigger ice crystal formation. Essentially, you could start the rain process manually. By the 1960s, people used it commercially. Ski resorts, farmers, even some cities experimented with it.”
But this was different. Farmers weren’t trying to coax an extra inch of rain onto their fields. The United States military wanted to manipulate weather patterns over a foreign country to gain a tactical advantage in a war.
The Pentagon classified the operation at the highest level from the start. So secret the program didn’t officially exist, and only a select few even knew about it. The Joint Chiefs approved it in 1966. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara signed off. President Johnson knew. But almost no one else did. Someone told the crews that the missions were “weather modification experiments” and that the details exceeded their clearance level. The planes, C-130s and F-4 Phantoms modified with cloud-seeding equipment, flew out of bases in Thailand.
Crews ignited the silver iodide canisters at altitude. The canisters released microscopic particles into the clouds. These particles acted like ice crystals. In the right conditions, with supercooled clouds that had plenty of moisture, the crystals would grow, become heavy, and fall as rain. The theory sounded solid. The question remained whether it would work at scale.
The first test runs happened over the Laotian panhandle in March 1967. Someone gave the operations pastoral codenames: “Motorpool,” “Intermediary,” “Compatriot.” Publicly, if anyone asked, these were agricultural flights. Crop dusting.
And it worked. Quietly, invisibly, and just enough to tempt us into thinking we could control the sky.
We increased rainfall in the targeted areas by around twenty-five to thirty percent. Roads that should have dried out stayed muddy. River crossings that should have become fordable stayed swollen. Entire sections of the trail turned into bogs.
Wyatt: “We’d fly the pattern they gave us, release what they told us to release. Sometimes a few hours later you’d see weather building that didn’t make sense for the conditions. Made you wonder what the hell was in those canisters.”
We expanded the operation. By 1968, Popeye missions flew regularly during the rainy season, focusing on the sections of the trail in Laos and the demilitarized zone. Command mixed the sorties in with regular bombing runs so they wouldn’t stand out. The pilots treated it like any other mission: brief, fly, return, debrief.
If cloud seeding could have put the entire Ho Chi Minh Trail underwater for months, cut those 20,000 troops down to zero, and stopped the supply flow completely, we would have seeded clouds until the whole jungle was mud. That was the job. That could have meant winning.
But it didn’t do that.
It worked, but not well enough. Twenty-five percent more rainfall meant muddier roads and slower convoys. It meant frustrating the enemy. It meant some marginal degradation of their logistics. But it didn’t cut the trail. It didn’t stop the war. It didn’t change the outcome.
What it did do was teach the wrong lesson. Not that the tool was weak, but that the temptation was strong.
If the United States could make it rain over Laos, even imperfectly, then the Soviet Union could make it rain over West Germany. China could trigger droughts in Taiwan. Weather could become an instrument of policy.
Did we want that? If we can turn weather into strategy, then weather becomes politics.
SFX: Thunder closer now. Rain beginning to fall.
Congress didn’t learn about Operation Popeye until 1971, when investigative journalist Jack Anderson broke the story. Anderson had a reputation as a muckraker, but the hearings that followed made people uncomfortable. Senators asked military officials to explain how the program had been approved and executed in secret for years.
The answer always took some version of the same form: “It was necessary. It was effective. It was war.”
Except it wasn’t effective enough. We’d spent five years secretly weaponizing the sky for results that barely moved the needle. We’d opened Pandora’s box on weather modification for marginal tactical gains.
By 1972, the Pentagon shut down Popeye. By 1977, the United Nations drafted and ratified the Environmental Modification Convention which prohibited military or hostile use of environmental modification techniques. Forty-eight nations signed it. The United States signed first. A done deal, right? No more cloud seeding.
But here’s where the story turns.
Let’s go back to 1915 and a man who claimed he could make it rain. And it worked!
Act II. The Rainmaker
San Diego. December 13th, 1915.
A man stands before the city council. He’s forty years old, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, dressed in a dark suit. His name is Charles Mallory Hatfield. He sells sewing machines for the New Home Sewing Machine Company. But that’s not why he’s here.
He’s here because San Diego is dying of thirst.
The Morena Reservoir is only one-third full. The city’s population had doubled in a decade. The Panama-California Exposition is entering its second year, and civic boosters worry the drought will scare off tourists. A group called the San Diego Wide Awake Improvement Club has been pressuring the council to do something. Anything.
And so Charles Hatfield makes them an offer.
He will fill the Morena Reservoir to overflowing. If he fails, they owe him nothing. If he succeeds, they pay him ten thousand dollars.
Councilman Walter Moore explains the logic: “If he fills Morena, he will have put 10 billion gallons into it, which would cost the city one tenth of a cent per thousand gallons; if he fails to fulfill his contract, the city isn’t out anything. It’s heads the city wins, tails Hatfield loses.”
The council votes four to one. Only Councilman Herbert Fay objects, calling it “rank foolishness.”
No one draws up a written contract. A handshake is enough.
SFX: Footsteps on gravel. Wind picking up.
Hatfield wasn’t a con man. Not exactly.
He was born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1875. His father moved the family to Southern California in 1886. Although a salesman by trade, Hatfield was no smooth-talking huckster. He had a polite, homespun manner.
As a young man, he was inspired by the way a boiling kettle attracted the water vapour rising from an adjacent, steaming pan on his mother’s stove. That got him thinking.
By 1902, he had created a mixture of 23 chemicals in tanks that he claimed attracted rain. One news editor remarked that the chemicals smelled so bad that the sky rained in self-defense.
But it seemed to work. Hatfield claimed at least 500 successes.
Was he a fraud? Maybe. Later commentators would say his success was mainly weather prediction, detailed study of rainfall statistics, and an innate sense of timing. He picked periods where there was a high probability of rain anyway.
Or maybe he knew something we still don’t understand.
Either way, on January 1st, 1916, Charles and his brother built a twenty-foot wooden tower beside Lake Morena, sixty miles east of San Diego, three thousand feet up in the mountains. They set iron pans on the platform at the top, poured in Hatfield’s secret mixture, and lit the fires.
The chemicals began to evaporate into the sky.
On January 5, 1916, it started to rain. The rain grew gradually heavier day by day.
At first, San Diego celebrated. The reservoirs were filling. The drought was breaking. The Rainmaker had delivered.
Then the rain kept coming.
By January 17, chaos ensued. Runoff filled empty gullies. The San Diego River overflowed, flooded Old Town and Mission Valley, and swept roads, railroads, and bridges away. At one point, four feet of water rushed down Broadway.
The Hatfield brothers, up on their mountain, couldn’t see what was happening below. No phone. Roads washed out. They just kept feeding chemicals into the sky.
The rain let up for a few days, and then it came back.
By January 27th, conditions were epic. In South Bay, the water in the Sweetwater reservoir overflowed the dam and tore out a fifty-foot chunk on one end. Then the Lower Otay Dam broke. A 40-foot wall of water surged into the valley below.
The flood destroyed the entire valley, towns gone, farms erased. No one knows for sure how many died. Some say twenty; others, sixty.
Many of the victims were Japanese farmers who lived in the valleys. These farmers were mostly isolated from the general population. The morning after the dam broke, the city treasurer went to the mouth of the Otay River. Out on the water, he saw many small boats; the Japanese colony, searching for their dead.
By the time the rain stopped in San Diego County, nearly 30 inches had fallen in a month. January 1916 is still the wettest period in San Diego’s recorded history.
SFX: Footsteps. Wind.
Up on the mountain, Charles Hatfield saw Morena Reservoir full of water and concluded he had fulfilled his contract. He and his brother walked the sixty miles back to San Diego to collect his ten thousand dollars.
The devastation must have surprised them. Angry, swollen rivers and streams. Houses swept away. People lost.
When Hatfield arrived, the city attorney asked: “If Hatfield were to get credit for the rain, would he accept liability for the damage?” City official Terence Cosgrove refused to pay Hatfield because that would make San Diego liable for the damages in the eyes of the courts.
Hatfield sued. The case dragged on. A judge ruled that the flood was “an act of God.” When it came time to assign responsibility, the courts said: this wasn’t human action.
The ruling absolved the city of liability and left Hatfield with no compensation. In the end, the city got to have it both ways. They hired a rainmaker, got rain, disclaimed responsibility, and called the outcome divine.
Hatfield never collected his ten thousand dollars. He went back to work as a sewing machine salesman. His wife, Mable, divorced him in 1931.
So…did Hatfield make it rain? Scientists say San Diego was likely hit by two atmospheric rivers that month. The same storms drowned the entire Pacific coast.
Maybe Hatfield was a fraud who got lucky. Maybe he was a skilled forecaster who knew how to time his arrival. Maybe he actually did something. We don’t know.
The ambiguity is the crux. Because now we have two stories, and neither gives us a clean answer.
In Vietnam, we had a tool we knew worked. Cloud seeding increased rainfall by twenty-five percent. Measurable. Real. But the results were mediocre. Roads got muddier. The war continued.
In San Diego, we had a tool that might have been a scam. But the results were decisive. Thirty inches in a month. Dams broke. People died.
Act III. The Bridge
This isn’t about rain or climate change.
This is about what we spend the people’s money on. What government is actually for.
America has six national goals. Right there, hiding in plain sight in the Constitution. Maintain Union. Establish Justice. Insure domestic Tranquility. Provide for the common Defence. Promote the general Welfare. Secure Liberty.
Everything government does should serve at least one of those. If it doesn’t, we shouldn’t be doing it.
If we fund geoengineering, cloud seeding, spraying the stratosphere, whatever comes next…what goal does it serve?
Here’s a story about people who asked that question. And got laughed at for it.
Tennessee. March 2024.
A state legislature debates Senate Bill 2691. The bill would ban, and this is the key line, ‘the intentional injection, release, or dispersion… into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.’
The national press picks it up. Headlines frame it as a “chemtrail ban.” The jokes write themselves. And the laughter! Those white lines behind jets are condensation, not mind control. Don’t they know the difference between science and conspiracy theory?
The bill passes anyway. Governor Bill Lee signs it into law.
The headlines mocked Tennessee as backward, another story of people who don’t understand science.
Except…
The actual bill doesn’t mention chemtrails. It doesn’t mention mind control or poison or any of the things some assume these people believe. It bans the intentional release of substances into the atmosphere to modify temperature or weather.
That’s not crazy. That’s literally what geoengineering is.
The scientists, the policy papers, the UN reports all describe doing exactly what Tennessee just banned. Spraying aerosols into the stratosphere. Seeding clouds to reflect sunlight. Releasing particles to cool the planet.
Tennessee didn’t ban a conspiracy theory. They banned a technology that doesn’t quite exist yet, but almost certainly will.
And they did it before anyone asked their permission to use it.
Some of the people who support this bill might believe some crazy things. They might think the government is already spraying chemicals. They probably got the science wrong in a dozen ways.
But they got something right that the experts missed entirely.
They asked: Who decides?
Who decides whether we spray the stratosphere? Who decides whether we seed the clouds over Tennessee, or Wyoming, or anywhere? Who votes on that? What legislature authorizes it? What constitutional provision permits it?
The answer, right now, is: nobody. No vote. No debate. Just experts who think it might be necessary, and politicians who don’t want to say no, and everyone assumes someone else will figure out the governance later.
That’s how Operation Popeye happened. Secret flights, classified programs, five years of weather modification before Congress even knew.
That’s how Hatfield happened. A handshake deal, no written contract, and when the dam broke, the courts called it God.
The chemtrail people may be wrong about the facts. But they’re not wrong about the instinct.
Someone is going to touch their sky. Someone is going to spray, seed, or modify something, and nobody is going to ask them first. The decision will be made in a conference room somewhere, by people with credentials and good intentions, who genuinely believe they’re saving the world.
And by the time Tennessee notices, it’ll be too late to stop.
So they passed a law. A silly law that the experts laugh at.
But it’s also a law that says: you need our permission to modify our weather.
Let’s go back to the six goals.
Maintain Union. Establish Justice. Insure domestic Tranquility. Provide for the common Defence. Promote the general Welfare. Secure Liberty—for ourselves and our posterity.
If geoengineering serves one of those, then let’s have the debate. Let’s argue about which one. Let’s pass broadly supported bipartisan legislation that says “addressing climate change is part of the general Welfare” or “preserving a livable planet is necessary for the common Defence.” Let’s do what the Founders did: state our purpose, argue about it, vote on it, and write it down.
But we haven’t done that.
We’ve got research, pilot projects, scientists, activists, and endless policy papers.
What we don’t have is a democratic Republic’s decision. A vote. A statement of purpose that says: this is what we’re doing, and this is why, and this is who authorized it.
The conspiracy theory chemtrail people, wrong about everything, are the only ones who noticed that was missing. It’s an answer to a question:
Is preserving a livable climate a national goal?
Not “should we do something about climate change?” That’s too vague. Let’s be specific. Should we as a nation say that climate change is one of the purposes of American government, alongside justice and liberty and defense and welfare?
Maybe. Maybe not. We haven’t asked.
If the answer is yes, that preserving a livable climate is a national goal, then we can finally have a real debate about means. About what tools serve that goal. About whether geoengineering is a bridge to somewhere or a bridge to nowhere.
If the answer is no, that we cannot agree this is a government purpose, then we have learned something important too. We have learned we do not have consensus. We have learned that any geoengineering program is illegitimate, because “We, the People” never agreed to it.
Either way, the question has to be asked out loud, in public, by a self-governing people:
Who gave you permission to touch our sky?
May God bless the United States of America.
