Art Bell’s episode features storm chaser Warren Faidley debunking tornado myths, like the 1993 Kansas hailstorm that shattered his windshield with baseball-sized ice, and dismissing fringe theories—such as tornadoes intersecting Earth’s magnetic field—while acknowledging unanswered questions in meteorology. Meanwhile, callers report eerie phenomena: Stephanie’s daughter saw three green-eyed aliens in their New York home, leaving a slimy residue; bottomless potholes in Ohio and Seattle defy explanation; and dying birds in California hint at environmental anomalies. Faidley contrasts extreme weather’s beauty with its lethality, underscoring the need for vigilance amid shifting climate patterns and media risks, while Bell ties it all to broader mysteries—from seismic quirks to psychic warnings—suggesting reality may be stranger than even skeptics assume. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest WWE good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever the case might be, wherever you are in the world, and we cover most of it one way or the other.
This, of course, is Coast to Coast A.M., and I'm Mark Bell.
Now, the news round everywhere else is lousy.
The wildfire in Colorado today raced across 7,000 acres.
By evening, the fire was burned across an estimated 120,000 acres of wooded hills southwest of Denver fires.
Burning in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah have charred nearly 1.5 million acres of tinder-dry forest and brush.
Well, that's because the weather is changing.
You see.
Earlier, I got an email from a young lady, Stephanie.
I won't give her last name right now.
In New York.
That reads, I'm 36 years old.
I'm the mother of two children, ages 14 and 7.
Two nights ago.
My seven-year-old daughter awoke horrified.
She told me she had seen three aliens, small, like children, flying around the room.
They were green, had several eyes, and winged-like with big heads.
Our cat, Boo, was in the room going nuts.
He was jumping up and down from the bunk bed to the floor.
She said that he was scratching one of these aliens.
The cat was.
Then when he scratched it, they all disappeared.
There wasn't any blood stains on the bedroom walls.
There is, though, a brownish-like something or another that feels slimy.
And then I ran into my mother's bedroom, which was next door, and I woke her up screaming, and then I opened the light in her room, and then the writing transferred from my hand to her wall.
And I just felt there was like an evil spirit in the statue.
And then on a few other occasions, I was scared to death, so we just, we threw it out, not in front of our building, but we walked a few blocks down, you know.
You see, I'm already sitting here at this point listening to your story, you know, thinking this girl opened a door back when she was 15 and some sort of evil spirit came through.
unidentified
Yeah, I became a warning and Christian at 19.
So I got rid of that Ouija boy.
I mean, I would never play with something like that again.
You really need, I think you need to be in touch with somebody, somebody who can really help you out, somebody.
unidentified
Yeah, I'd be willing to even put a camera in here.
sometimes they have those things where you could, you know, the cameras see things that you can't see.
You'd be willing to have cameras, like in you know, to see if there's something in this house because there's a lot of stuff, and then I hear we hear singing sometimes, like little children by the attic.
I've got your phone number, your personal phone number.
So if any investigator out there feels like pursuing this with cameras or a team, they're going to need more details.
And I'll sort of screen them.
And if they, you know, I'll put you in touch.
unidentified
How's it going?
I appreciate it because I would like to, you know, I mean, if there's something here, there's someone who don't, you know, some evil spirit here, I definitely want to get out of this house.
Yeah, you know, after hearing all of that, and obviously there was more we didn't hear, that's a case I think of.
I can only consider two possibilities, but, you know, who the hell am I?
I can only consider that she has allowed something in that is still with her and may always be with her.
She's echoes of last night's program about the bell witch, huh?
Or it's coming from her, you know, young teenage girls, boy, again and again and again.
You hear about these stories, but here it is still with her.
Here's something that I would like to have you all follow up on for me.
It comes from a listener in Toledo, Ohio, Maggie.
Maggie.
All right, I heard a news story this morning at 8.30 or 9 o'clock on Clear Channel WSPD in Toledo, Ohio about a bottomless pothole in the middle of the street.
Firefighters put a 1,000-foot line down that hole and didn't hit bottom.
I only heard part of the story and think they said it was in a place called Washington or Washington Township anyway.
I think this may be another of the bottomless holes like Mel's.
Let's do a real quick break.
Well, I almost did it again.
I get so involved in what I'm doing that I blow right through breaks.
I do it all the time.
Things on my mind.
My back is, by the way, my back is really giving me fits right now.
And so I'm doing little back get better knocks on the wood.
All right, listen, we're going to take the regular network right now, and we'll be back shortly with a couple of more items.
Boy, there's an awful lot going on out there.
Can you believe an earthquake on the New Madrid Falls?
Gordon Michaels said, watch for it.
I'm Mark Bell, and this from the Left Coast is Coast.
But I guess the firefighters or the street people went to go try to fix just what they thought was a hole, and that's when they dropped the rope down, and then it just never ended or never stopped.
What is it about the state of Washington and these holes, anyway?
In the middle of the street.
Boy, I'll tell you, we live in a time of weird news, don't we?
Again, the story I have, talking about this fault line, the Evansville earthquake, actually the Midwest earthquake, you ought to call it really, it says Johnston from the U.S. Geological Survey said it was an arm of the New Madrid Fault Zone.
And then it goes on here to talk about the New Madrid Fault.
Besides the birds, my cat, she caught a bird this morning.
And so it's got to have been slow of stealth, you know, for her to catch it.
And my cat, that's the first bird that she's caught in a long time.
But I think because my cat's been throwing up, my dogs have been throwing up, I think there's something going on here that they're not telling or doing that they should be doing because the animals are getting sick here.
You know, you've got to follow your gut on this stuff.
As it is with a lot of life, you know, you've got to be true to yourself, honest with yourself, and if you're not, then you're going to make a hell of a lot of mistakes.
If you're not true to yourself, if you don't follow what you believe in and pursue that, then you're going to make mistakes.
And maybe there's a lot of people who don't listen to things and they make the ultimate mistake, you know, and they're immediately sent to the other side.
Of course, we never hear any complaints about those mistakes because they were the last mistakes made of that sort.
We had numbers, we had websites, and I'm telling you, man, just psh.
unidentified
Well, the reason that I ask is maybe you can have this professor on, this guy from Italy, who built this other time machine.
Because if this thing works, maybe the Air Force or Ares 51, which I hope you do more programs on, knows about this, and they're doing some work down there.
Yeah, the other issue is that I wanted to ask if you could ever get those four Army Intel guys that went AWOL from Germany, what was it, eight to ten years ago?
Yeah, I interviewed them.
Yeah, I just, I know that you had interviewed them years ago.
There are some things that you should not try at home that are dangerous.
But when one comes along that you can try and verify yourself, by all means.
Canada's number two privately owned national television network, according to Sammy from Ottawa, said in its 6.30 newscast, the weather is Canada's number One story today.
According to Canada's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the weather is only number six in the news, but this one, the privately owned one, is where it's listed.
He says, I can't blame him because in Ottawa we've already had, listen to this, folks, three times the normal level of rainfall.
Farmers near Montreal would have had more success growing rice in water paddies than the more traditional crops up here.
Now, water that might well be in Colorado right now is instead to the north where it ought not be, in Ottawa, three times the normal rainfall in Ottawa, up in Canada.
Now, isn't that exactly what we said would occur, that weather conditions would begin moving north?
That appears to be a process well underway right now.
My back knows when I'm about to want to do something important, whether it's work or vacation, it doesn't matter.
My back knows, and it goes, gotcha.
unidentified
Yeah.
It's sort of like when with your vehicles, my mom always told me, don't talk about when you have extra money in front of your vehicles or your partner.
gotta go when i think back on all the crap i learned in high school it's a wonder i can't think at all and my lack of education hasn't hurt enough You know, I recently had a conversation in my Firebird.
Well, that's a good question because you almost have to be there with weather.
Breaking news, you can go to a scene.
You either get there too early or too late or at the right time, and then you get the shot.
With weather, generally requires a little bit of pre-planning.
For example, you were talking about Amarillo.
In about two weeks, I take off and meet some of my chase volunteers in Amarillo, and we'll chase from that location through the rest of the spring into mid or late June.
Now, I heard an interesting stat on CNN the other day.
They said that this year thus far, we have had not anywhere near the number of tornadoes that we would normally have, which indicates some kind of change is going on, apparently.
Now, in your profession, do you have any guesses about, you know, People have noted, for example, this year that there doesn't seem to be a springtime.
People have gone from winter straight into summer, and they're missing the seasonal change.
But, you know, these weather patterns change over years.
If you look, for example, at tree ring research, where they take the very old trees and cut them in half, of course, and look at the actual rings, they can tell there are fluctuations every so many hundred years or even thousands of years if you look at some of the other fossilized data.
So we go through these swings, and we may be, at this time in our history, preparing to go through a major change.
Yeah, I would say it's probably underway right now, actually.
I have no idea.
They're upping the forecast for the number of hurricanes they think there's going to be.
I know in El Niño is building quickly again in the Pacific, and so I guess we're really in for it, which means that business for you is probably going to be pretty interesting.
Unfortunately, you know, when you have these lulls, when things slow down, I get a little bit nervous because that usually means that Mother Nature is going to find some kind of a way or method to make up for it.
So, you know, the quiet before the storm fits the situation.
Yeah, it's quite dangerous in that part of the country when you have those supercell thunderstorms.
But you have to remember the majority of people that chase, believe it or not, this may shock some people, there's probably about 200 or 300 hardcore people who chase just for the thrill of it, for the fun of it.
You've seen the classic footage, of course, of the people who were caught under the freeway bridge as a tornado passed directly above them or over them.
That's incredible.
What would have happened to the barometric pressure below these people?
Wouldn't they have lost eardrums, that sort of thing?
No, the pressure doesn't actually drop that much from what they know.
There's people who have been, and that's a great example, people who have been very close to tornadoes, and there's even instrumentation relatively close to some of the larger tornadoes.
The pressure wouldn't drop enough to hurt you.
But they found recently that underpasses are probably one of the least likely places you want to be during a tornado because they actually channel the winds.
So the old theory about going to an underpass has changed in recent years, and it's not the best place to be.
If you can find a small depression, you have to remember these winds, which can reach 318 miles per hour in an F5 tornado, are right above the surface.
So theoretically, if you can find a very small ditch, those winds will go right over you.
The problem you have is debris.
Debris flying within that zone of destruction can hit you.
And there have been cases recently where people did the right thing.
They did find a small ditch.
They laid in the ditch, and debris ended up hitting them and killing them.
So the best advice is to be as far away from a tornado as you can be if you see one guy.
Well, again, circling back to that famous shark movie I was talking about, I remember a scene in which a bunch of good old boys with beer and guns, they were overloading a boat and on their way out to kill that there shark, you know.
And I remember a scene in which one of the officials was standing on the shore just shaking his head, going, they're dead.
You know, they're dead.
And it's kind of like the hundreds of storm chasers that you're talking about take off out of Amarillo and other places during the really worst of it and chase these things.
You really think there ought to be some sort of legislation about this?
In other words, when you see a front developing or something that's obviously going to produce a tornado or very likely will of an F4 or F5 or ID, something really awful in the Midwest, do you get on a plane and move or what do you do?
April 26, 1991, I believe that was the year when there was a major outbreak of tornadoes.
You could tell days in advance.
You could see the system coming.
But most of the time with tornado chasing, you actually place yourself, as you know, as you used to do in Amarillo, in the best location.
And from about the last week in April through about the second or third week in June, somewhere within that region.
Now, it may be Midland Texas all the way up to almost the Canadian border, there will be somewhat of a regular season.
You may have to do quite a bit of traveling, but there will be tornadoes every few days.
So once you're there, it's a matter of forecasting.
It's a matter of going over the data.
The trucks we use for chasing all have weather computers and cell phones and laptops and all wonderful gadgets.
So we're forecasting continuously.
From the morning when the first reports come out, we're looking at data throughout the whole day on our laptops and refine our chase area to one location.
And then, of course, once the storms go up, it's more of a visual chase than it is so much of a data chase at that point.
This may be outside your immediate storm-chasing experience.
However, it may relate to what we're talking about tonight.
You know, we've got a situation in the world right now where, for example, the Larson B ice shelf just collapsed and is in a million pieces right now and can be seen from satellite down at the Antarctic.
At the North Pole, our Navy is talking about a new ocean because it's melting.
No more subs being able to hide under the ice up there because there won't be any ice.
In Alaska, the tundra is melting.
I mean, there are some fairly significant changes going on in the world right now, and that's bound to affect your work.
And over the course of the last 20 years, I've noticed changes.
The best example, if you ask anyone here in the southwest, in Tucson, about the summer monsoons, they'll tell you that in the last 10 to 15 years, the monsoons have changed.
As a matter of fact, most of what I would consider my best lightning shots were accomplished 10 Or 15 years ago when we had a large volume, a large number of summer thunderstorms, but in the last 10 or 15 years, that number has dropped off.
You can talk to people that have been in one area long enough to notice changes, some of them very subtle, changes in wildlife, the number of animals or amphibians in a certain area, all these things, you know, collectively they do signal that something is changing.
I've been published in probably almost every news magazine, certainly here in the United States and even in foreign countries.
And it's amazing some of the things weather photos are used for.
I've seen them used for everything from puzzles to on cigarette lighters, billboards, you name it.
When you think about it, if you consciously think about it and pick up a magazine in your house right now, you'll probably find a stock-type weather photo.
I have watched a couple of specials on tornadoes, and I've seen some of the F5 tornadoes, and it's hard to imagine anything on Earth more frightening than something of that magnitude.
And as a matter of fact, the scientists were near the same tornado with portable Doppler instruments, and they actually recorded the highest wind speed ever recorded of a storm.
And that was, I believe, 318 miles per hour, which is the top-range top end of an F5.
Well, yeah, if you look at the physics, you know, and weather, one of the things that fascinates me is the physics involved.
You know, if you're talking about a softball-sized hellstone falling at 100 miles per hour, if you're talking about the wind speed, the damage from tornadoes, there's no doubt that there have been tornadoes with winds that have exceeded the 318 range.
Some of the damage is incredible.
There's one wonderful story the old-timers in Nebraska like to tell about a tornado back, I believe it was in the 40s or 50s that hit and carried away farm machinery that they've never found.
I start in the winter with blizzards and work the way through the spring with tornadoes and then lightning in the desert southwest during the summer, late summer, and then, of course, hurricanes along the Gulf, the Atlantic, and occasionally down in Baja during the late fall.
And then I usually get three or four months to relax and go through everything and do the marketing.
I've always wondered, you know, during a hurricane, the practice lately has been to take some poor correspondent who doesn't seem to have anything better to do that day, I guess, and say, listen, you're on an airplane, you're going down to where we think the eye of the hurricane is going to be, and here's this poor guy hanging onto a lamp pole, you know, with a camera pointed at him, and you wonder, man, he drew the shot strong.
Well, I tell you what, most journalists, and I believe there's even old footage of Dan Rather recovering those storms, and I could be wrong, and I've heard him say once that he enjoyed covering those kind of storms.
You know, there's just some attraction to weather.
It's not, as in news, and one of the reasons I got out of news was there was all this violence, man against man, you know, and now, of course, we have the terrorism.
I didn't want to cover that because to me, that was just something completely out of control.
And if you were killed by it, it would be, in my opinion, somewhat worthless in the scheme of things.
While on the other hand, nature, which is just so magnificent, no one has any control over.
You know, you can't have a peace accord to end all the supercells in Texas tomorrow.
No, actually, there's another side of this, and a lot of people won't understand it.
But I've not seen an F5, but I've seen plenty of tornadoes.
And the listeners aren't going to understand this because people have been killed, and a lot of houses have been destroyed, and towns have been destroyed.
But there's something incredibly beautiful about that demonstration of nature.
Beautiful is a dangerous word to use, but it's true, isn't it?
And, you know, it's interesting, if you've noticed, whenever there's wind damage, and I'm not talking about today, but I'm talking about usually associated with a regular storm where there's precipitation involved.
People will always insist, if there's any damage, that it was a tornado.
And I've noticed this over the years.
It's kind of fascinating.
If there's any kind of wind damage, it's almost like people want it to be a tornado.
They will insist, if you see them on the news or if you see them at the scene, they'll always say it was a tornado.
Even if the damage is all in one direction and it's obviously just straight line wind damage.
It's amazing how people are so fascinated.
They want to associate that damage with something like a tornado.
Well, that's because their brains are trying to assimilate what could have done this, and they just don't believe anything other than something as violent as a tornado could have done that much damage.
I figured that after all these years of chasing and surviving, I must have some kind of an angel.
That's the best reasoning I can give you for the name.
But yeah, it's a custom-designed chase truck.
It has just about everything you can imagine inside of it from a defibrillator in case we run across an accident or someone is struck by lightning, which is one of the biggest dangers when you're chasing.
To computers, safety equipment has a full five-point harness system like NASCAR in it and a roll cage.
But I think I would much rather have a truck out there that was attracting the lightning with me in it and being relatively safe inside a vehicle, which you are, as opposed to being standing out there and having me be the biggest target.
Yeah, as long as the windows are up and you're not touching anything that's grounded to metal, you're safe.
Now, there have been, believe it or not, this is rather bizarre, but there have been instances where people were driving and the tires actually blew out and they lost control of the vehicle.
In other words, that's actually the lightning then finding its way to ground through the metal of your car and then ultimately through the rubber of the tire and just blowing it up.
You can feel it when the conditions are right, but you know, it's very difficult on a big day to predict what will happen.
And I remember a couple times last year when we had what's labeled as a moderate risk or a high risk, and that's a level that the Storm Prediction Center uses to grade, in layman's terms, the risk potential on a given day.
And you can feel the energy.
And you know, after chasing this many years, I can tell by the way the sky looks in the morning.
I can tell by the way the wind.
Sometimes you can tell by the smells, the moisture in the air.
You can occasionally smell the golf as it works its way up into Texas.
Here in the desert, we have these things called dust devils.
And they look for all the world like miniature tornadoes.
Now, what is the difference in the physics, if there is a difference, between a dust devil and a tornado that's formed as a result of, or comes from, is mothered from a thunderstorm?
The difference is a tornado is associated with a thunderstorm.
A dust devil is more of a thermal feature, which results from the thermals rising from the desert floor, usually associated with high temperatures and sometimes a little wind.
I had a group of three, four kids, and we would sit out in the corner of this giant vacant dirt lot, vacant dirt lot, out in the 110, 115 degree temperature, waiting for the right dust devil, and off we'd go, riding into the center.
And there was a couple occasions I actually got into the middle of them, and I remember the interior, the first thing was it was as hot as a blast, so you could barely breathe.
I don't know exactly what physics are involved in there, but the inside temperature was even hotter than the outside.
It can be the way the air is condensed inside of it.
Who knows?
But I remember looking inside, and you could actually see the wall, the dust going around me, and it was kind of a weird, eerie, dusty yellow look, and you could actually see the tube going up into the sky.
You know, and I've thought about in recent history nowadays to go back and do it with some professional equipment and see if I can actually photograph it or videotape it.
Of course, I'm sure if I was out there doing it, it probably wouldn't be too long until the guys in the little white uniforms show up.
Yes, as a matter of fact, most of the time the local authorities want some kind of weather update.
And I have a pretty good working relationship with most of them, as I do with the weather service offices throughout the plains.
But yeah, you know, law enforcement and the spotters really don't get a lot of the credit they deserve.
I mean, in any community right now, matter of fact, as we're talking as late as it is, I'm sure somewhere in the United States right now there are storm spotters out looking at a storm, reporting it back to the weather service.
Storm spotters are really overlooked.
We hear all this about chasing, but storm spotters and the people that work at the weather service are often overlooked in all this.
He gets to take a little bit of a break right now at the top of the hour.
We're talking about storms, and we had a real whiz-banger in the desert here today.
The desert picked up and moved.
I'm telling you, it was awesome.
From the high deserts in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have been on that care of what I am It's all clear to me now My heart is on fire What's
I suppose you could adjust a Doppler-type radar to pick something like that up, but generally they're not.
Now, there are special radars that are used around airport to detect these things.
And I should note, too, that generally when you're talking about microbursts, you're talking about a very small concentrated area, usually somewhere less than, say, three miles in area.
So it's a very, very small area.
And they don't last that long.
They usually last less than five minutes.
But again, if you're in a plane or if you're on the ground near one, they can do quite a bit of damage.
Well, as I always tell people, the safest bet is to have planned ahead for that.
But if you get in a situation like you just described, the best thing you could do is to find some place underground, no matter what it is.
You're always going to be safer underground, in a basement, in a depression.
You know, if you were an experienced storm chaser, there's a chance you could get in a car and drive away if you knew what you were doing.
But most people, when they see a tornado coming towards them, they panic.
I mean, they lose their mind.
Tornadoes are really odd because they're somewhat mesmerizing.
And even after the number I've seen, there's still something about them that I've equated to like you can get transfixed staring at a fire in a fireplace.
I heard, Warren, that occasionally tornadoes have actually become so strong, so fast, that they've broken away from the thunderstorm that was feeding them and moved ahead of it.
Well, during the dissipation stage of a tornado, you can still have a very weak circulation.
It may not be associated with the main rotation of the storm, but that would be very short-lived and probably wouldn't do any damage.
Now, you can have things the leading edge.
You can have these avoidance at the leading edge of a thunderstorm known as gustnadoes, but they're not generally associated with any kind of large-scale rotation as you have with the storm.
Located at the leading edge of a thunderstorm or just in front of it, as we were talking earlier, some of the winds, the microburst-type winds fanning out from the storm will kick up these little, very similar to dust devils in front of the storm, and they're often mistaken.
I've seen them.
Depending on which way you're looking at the storm, and if you don't have your bearings straight, it will look like a real tornado.
And many of the false reports you get around thunderstorms are gustnadoes.
I was looking at some of the forecasts for today now.
I guess it was tomorrow, just a little bit ago, but for Tuesday.
And, you know, there is a risk up there of severe weather.
And you figure with these winds heading up in that direction and the dew points are a little bit higher and those higher temperatures, something's going to give.
So if you live up in that part of the country, you might want to keep an eye on the weather tomorrow.
No, it would have to be something extraordinary, something that had enough positive elements and then a fewer negative elements to go.
There are a few situations where I would actually do that.
But you have to remember with severe weather, you can forecast a day in advance.
You can forecast hours in advance.
But a lot of times it comes down to, believe it or not, one or two degrees difference in the upper atmosphere, which we call capping, which holds back the development of storms.
And sometimes that can be just a few degrees that will prevent major tornadic outbreaks.
The people in the planes probably have no idea how many times that chasers have been sitting out there, and the atmosphere has come within just a few degrees of letting loose absolutely horrific weather.
A jet stream is one of the most critical elements for the formation of a tornado.
You need to have that upper level flow.
You need to have veering winds from the surface up through the atmosphere.
Very important to get the rotation going in a storm.
The jet stream also creates lift in the atmosphere.
When you have any body of fast-moving currents over an air, you're going to have some upswelling, which will give you some lift.
The jet stream also vents storms.
Most of us see storms out here in the desert.
They go up and they look tremendous.
But what happens is they collapse on themselves, all that weight, and they just fall and collapse.
Well, with the supercell storms you have out in the plains that create the majority of the large tornadoes, you do have jet stream winds which are venting the top of those storms, allowing the updrafts to survive for longer periods.
Well, the jet stream generally, when you hear someone referring to the jet stream, they're talking about somewhere in the range of anywhere from probably 10,000 feet on up to 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 feet.
All right, the reason I ask that is because when you start talking about the supercells you and I have been talking about, the kind that form out the panhandle and up into Oklahoma, those supercells, I believe, can get as high as 50 or 60,000 feet, can't they?
That helps move the storms along, and again, it creates a lot of lift and moves them along.
When you talk about the jet stream, you have to remember there are different types of jet streams.
There's low-level jets, what we call that sometimes set up in the planes coming from the south.
So you have jet streams up through all levels of the atmosphere, and of course, depending on where you are on Earth, there are different levels and different intensities.
Well, you know, weather forecasting is kind of interesting because of all the sciences, it's probably one of the ones that has not really advanced as fast as a lot of other science.
But I'm not a scientist, although I do admire the science of it immensely.
It just doesn't attract meteorology, it doesn't attract, I think, the most brilliant, the large pools of brilliant people, although it certainly has a few people, many people who are gifted.
But it doesn't attract the kind of people, I think, who are looking for money.
Well, you know, weather forecasting has come along very slow.
We have things now called atmospheric profilers, which are Doppler radars that point vertically.
So you can actually tell the wind speeds if you have the right configuration.
You can actually tell which way the winds are blowing without sending up the standard.
You know, everyone's probably, most people have seen the weather balloons that they release to gather data as they go up to the atmosphere.
Well, the problem is here in the U.S., most of the time they only launch those twice a day.
They launch them in the a.m. and they launch them at the p.m.
So when most severe weather occurs, which is towards, you know, after mid-afternoon to early evening, they don't really know what's going on in the atmosphere as far as temperatures go.
For example, we were talking earlier about the cap and the temperatures, how important that is for severe weather.
Occasionally, if it looks like it's going to be a big day, they'll send up an extra balloon, but that's one of the weaknesses.
It's just an example of one of the weaknesses in forecasting is there's that large void of data between certain hours that prevent forecasters from making a really, really positive forecast.
And there's other little things like that.
So I think at some point, somebody has to be willing to put the money and the technology into it to make more accurate forecasts.
Although, of course, nowadays I think you can say the forecasting is a lot more accurate than it was, say, 10 or 20 years ago.
And it's not because of negligence with the tools that the forecasters have.
And I think the technology, they do the best they can with what they have.
But, you know, weather is sickle.
It's really bizarre.
You just never know from one day to the next what's going to happen.
And you do the best you can, but there's no foolproof method yet.
Within really a few hours to forecast, of course, with Doppler radar, which is one of the greatest, in my opinion, tools that the Weather Service has nowadays, you can dissect a storm and tell if it has tornadic potential sometimes an hour in advance when the storm first.
But the tornado's passing right next to a farmhouse and probably missed it.
It looks like probably about a quarter of a mile from nailing that.
As a matter of fact, when I was sitting there videotaping that, there was a group of people, local people there, talking about the people that lived there.
Well, you have to remember that the majority of tornadoes are made up of individual vortices within that circulation.
So when you see on television a tornado, it's not just usually one large circulation.
It's a series of sub-vortices within that circulation, which if you think of it, the damage that does, instead of having one area of circulation, you may have numerous areas near spinning, you know, 200 or 300 miles per hour.
You can imagine the efficiency of damage and also why you have sometimes unusual damage.
You know, one building will be destroyed and the one next to it is not because of the way the physics of the structure of that vortice.
This one, you can see there's the main one on the ground and that circulation around that area is actually some of the other vortices that are spinning off of it.
And sometimes you'll see them they'll come out horizontally.
Really, there was a matter of fact from that same day in Oklahoma City, there's a classic shot of a large tornado on the ground with a horizontal tube coming out the side of it, a smaller one.
You know, there's some researchers in Oklahoma that are doing that right now.
A couple years ago, they had Operation Vortex, which went out a massive research project.
They were using planes and research vehicles.
And the data from that is just fantastic to read because they've learned so much now, especially with the portable Dopplers, which they're taking out into the field, able to dissect storms up close and personal, to get all kinds of different readings at different levels to see why these things form, why they dissipate, why sometimes the perfect storm does not create a tornado, which can be just as important as the ones that do.
I mean, for example, they found out that a lot of the tornadoes are the result of boundaries left over from other storms.
Matter of fact, if I remember right, on this day, I believe there were some existing, on the Oklahoma day in 1999, there were some boundaries from previous precipitation earlier in the day.
Just as a matter of interest, since you do this as a full-time profession, when things are totally calm and it's a beautiful day and the birds are singing and there's no bad weather anywhere, do you sit around and pout or what?
You know, the elements that help create the large storm systems, like the perfect storm, for example, it's really a timing of elements coming together at the right time.
Whether you're talking about the wind you had today or the perfect storm, you know, it's like a machine.
Everything has to work at the right time and come together at the right place to create.
The wrong way, correct.
And as a matter of fact, I just noticed here, this is kind of interesting.
They just issued a high risk for tomorrow.
Or actually it would be today, it would be Tuesday for portions of across Minnesota, western Wisconsin, northwestern Iowa.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people probably don't know what high risk means, but I'll tell you that that's a very, very rare rating that the Storm Prediction Center gives.
You see only a handful of these, maybe one or two a year issues.
The moisture up there and the heat, and those of the winds are going to come together tomorrow.
And if you live up in that portion of the country, you'll want to really watch the weather tomorrow, the forecasting.
Again, that's very rare they issue these.
And I saw the red come up on the screen.
Matter of fact, if you go to my, we were talking about the stormchaser.com on the left-hand side, there's actually a little graphic there from the SPC, and you can click on there, and it'll give you all the.
If you look on the right-hand, or actually, excuse me, the left-hand side, you come down there about halfway, it says today's severe weather outlook from the SPC, and I put that there so people can go there.
But when we were talking at the break, I looked on there and saw that red, and I'm like, oh, boy.
I think the upper atmosphere, I looked over this real quick.
I didn't have time to go over the whole statement.
But I think the winds, as we were talking earlier about the jet stream, and this all ties together, the winds are unidirectional.
They're coming from one direction.
Instead of having that turning in the atmosphere, which will create more rotation in the storm, I think they're looking here at more of a straight-line damaging wind event and maybe large hell.
Now, that could change.
Again, this is preliminary.
And in the morning, I'll tell you, I don't know how many times I've woke up and looked at one of these at night and got all excited when I'm out chasing.
And it's taken down to a slight risk, which is one of the lowest ratings.
So, you know, severe weather like this changes hourly.
A lot of it seems awfully technical here for people like yourself, but it says parameters appear to be coming together for a significant severe wind event across portions of the upper Mississippi Valley on Tuesday.
Oh, wow.
So all of that energy is about to be converted.
Does that mean that it's going to suddenly, after all this happens, get cool?
I don't remember there being a real strong cold front associated as you normally have this time of year with this system.
This is more the dynamic system as opposed to, say, what you associate with a cold front coming down and sweeping across the country.
This is a very intense low-pressure system.
The one you had, again, is working its way up there, and when it hits that moisture...
It's heading their way.
The strong winds, when you mix that with, you know, when you mix any kind of a strong wind with surface heating dew points, you're looking for trouble.
All right, here's a question that everybody asks, and I've had people call me up and say, you know, there's got to be a way to stop a tornado.
People have envisioned blowing, literally blowing them up, putting some sort of a very high explosive or maybe fuel air explosive or, you know, something or another in a forming tornado that would cause it to disperse instead of to continue to form.
In your opinion, is there any possibility that could work?
Warren, that leads us into even a touchier couple of areas here.
One is there are a lot of people who believe that there are ongoing attempts at weather control, that our government would not talk to us about it for the very reasons that you just spoke about, that they'd probably get blame, but that they are secretly experimenting with modifying our weather.
I've talked to old-timers who have told me back even in World War II, there were secret projects to try to create cloud cover, for example, or to create fog or to modify the weather.
I believe both here, or I should say the United States, Europe, the Allies, and also in Germany at the time, I believe there were attempts to modify the weather.
But again, the amount of energy it would take, I think, to change any kind of weather system is not available now.
And then even more controversial, I've got to at least run this by you.
There are, I'll warrant, thousands of people across the country right now that believe they are seeing something they have not seen before.
Now, we all know what contrails are.
You know, they're condensation, little wispy condensation things that appear behind airplanes, sometimes linger for a little while, but most times just sort of fade away.
In recent years, on my program and many others, people have begun to talk of what they are calling chemtrails.
And they believe that something is, I guess that means that you're not too familiar with this or it's just too controversial.
No, these are, and I've seen them myself, so I can describe it to you.
On an otherwise not cloudy day, you will see many jets laying out patterns, frequently an X-type pattern.
And instead of the normal dispersal of the contrails that you would see, just a slow wisping away, these grow sort of a dirtier color, they expand, and they actually become kind of a dirty, cloudy day.
And there are many people who believe that there are ongoing experiments, for what reason we're not sure, weather modification or something else, that's being performed by some jet aircraft.
Pretty wild stuff, I know, but believe me, many people have seen and believe this to be true.
Well, you know, I personally haven't heard that, and I personally haven't seen anything.
I've seen contrails that will fan out, depending on what the atmosphere is doing.
Sometimes they'll dissipate rather quickly, and sometimes they will fan out and look more like cirrus.
Sometimes you'll have a system moving in ahead of that, and the cirrus will blend in with the contrails.
You can have, in some cases, it's kind of rare, but you can have contrail shadows where the sun actually hits the contrail and hits a cloud below it, say a cirrus cloud, and you actually see a gray shadow below it.
But I've never heard a theory of anything like that.
So then, is it fair to say, do you think, that if attempts at weather modification are going on either in the private sector or in the government sector, they probably wouldn't do a lot of talking about it.
And another thing is if you're new to an area, if you're new to an area, if you've moved from, say, Las Vegas to Amarillo, Texas, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, you might want to start learning about severe weather.
You know, don't just take it for granted that someone's going to warn you.
There was a tornado warning three or four nights ago in Amarillo, I believe, at 2 or 3 in the morning.
So never take anything for granted.
Learn about severe weather.
And most importantly, have a plan if severe weather strikes.
If you live in hurricane-prone areas, you want to have specific safety measures for hurricanes.
If you live in Tornado Alley, you want to have knowledge of what to do, where to go.
That's always a big question.
I know you brought that up earlier when you asked what should you do if you were in the farmhouse.
It shouldn't get to the point where you don't know what to do.
Yes, and one of the saddest things I've seen as a journalist, and it always breaks my heart to this day, it still does, is when you see children killed when a tornado strikes.
There's absolutely no excuse for that.
Children have a whole different way of looking at things, at storms and things.
They expect adults to take them to safety if there's a storm.
They rely on it.
So it's always important to have a plan.
If the kids are at home alone, make sure they have a plan.
Make sure they know where to go.
Make sure they know where the shelters are.
That's the best advice is just stay informed and have a plan.
WarrenFadley.com, which, of course, you can't do under intellectual property law.
Right, right.
I guess the point here is that even with storm chasing, with the little fame I get, there's always going to be these bizarre, really kind of odd things that happen with a little bit of attention.
Well, believe it or not, with a laptop and a really good cell phone company that has a nationwide-type plant you can use in any location, I can get data.
Last year, for example, there were only one or two times, and we're talking about Chase Area covers, the Chaseville area of Toyota Valley covers like 250,000, some hundred thousand miles of area.
There were only one or two times when I was in the absolute middle of nowhere where I couldn't acquire data.
I mean, I'm able to download now full-color radar.
I'm not going to be able to, I'd have to sit there and wait quite a while or the connection may not be stable enough.
But generally what I'm looking for, or what any chaser is looking for when they're out there, are surface data and the outlook, like we just discussed here for tomorrow.
That kind of written text data is generally what you're looking for.
We were trying to drive out of it and it was hitting the roof, dinning the roof, dinning the hood and one hit the windshield and it cracked and almost the same second a very large one caved right into the middle right in front of where the video cameras pointed hit right there square with a deafening sound.
The windshield was shattered and it was just kind of going in and out from the wind pulsing.
And it took another hit and I figured it was going to cave in.
So at that point I had a large map up against my chest thinking, well, you know, the next one is going to come all the way through because there's really nothing holding that windshield together.
And about that time we got through it.
And I'll tell you what, it was nerve-wracking to say the least.
But most chasers will tell you that getting into big hell is very scary.
Well, I actually have commercial insurance, which covers normal driving.
I pay the extra and go the full commercial route for the vehicle.
As far as that kind of damage goes, I self-insure myself.
As much as people might not like insurance companies, I would not take the advantage of that of going out through my own decision and damage something.
And just like that storm, I think it ended up doing $700 or $800 damage just to the windows, a couple windows it took out.
But that's all self-insured.
I pay for that.
I don't claim that because that is part of, in my opinion, part of business operations.
And now, of course, if someone slams into the back of me when I'm driving home from chasing, that's a whole different issue or something that's in the normal course of business.
All right, here's another big question we had today.
Then I'm going to get to callers.
I'm sorry, callers.
We'll be right with you.
With the tremendous wind we had here today, there was an argument that went on about whether you're better off having a window cracked open to, in some way, equalize the pressure when you're having like 100 mile-an-hour winds or near 100-mile-an-hour winds, or you're better off having everything sealed up.
A lot of people say, well, you leave something open, you give the wind an avenue to get in.
That would certainly be true in a bigger, you know, if there was a bigger opening, but I just don't know.
Yeah, you don't want to, and the other thing is you run the risk of being in front of that window trying to open it when the glass shatters and being injured.
Warren, I got a first experience and a question for you.
It was an evening many years back driving from the Colorado River, from Lake Cavasu City down to Parker.
And my dad and I decided to do a little storm chasing of our own.
And we were driving through a monsoon storm that had been building up all day long and was dissipating pretty good.
And we started following it, and it was heading along the river.
And as we were going through it, my dad decided, you know, we better remove the coax off our two-meter antenna, our radio off the pickup truck we were driving there.
So we undid the coax off of the radio and laid it on the floor.
Well, we didn't realize the coax is very close to the seat post where it bolts into the floor.
And we were driving into this storm.
There was a weird ticking noise inside the vehicle.
We couldn't figure out what was coming from.
I happened to look down by my foot and see this blue arc that if anybody knows what a blue arc spark from a spark plug to something grounding looks like, that's the way it looked.
It'd start out really slow.
Within just a couple seconds, it'd start arcing very rapidly.
But, yeah, when the antennas, you know, a lot of times, believe it or not, I've been there storms and the antennas will actually sizzle and pop.
And that is the energy building up.
Now, that doesn't necessarily say there's going to be that connection made between the ground, the cloud, the cloud, and the ground, whichever way it is.
That doesn't mean that.
And I have to tell you this story.
This is really quick, but it's awfully funny.
I was on top of a mountain here in Arizona shooting lightning a couple years ago, and there were a number of other photographers there watching what I was doing.
And I heard the antennas and some starting to pop and sizzle.
Well, I thought, I'm not staying here.
So I jumped in the truck immediately, packed everything up, and these guys are all just laughing.
There's Warren the Storm Chaser jumping in his truck when there's a little bit of lightning.
About five seconds later, a lightning bolt hit, and it must have been maybe a quarter mile away.
And these guys jumped about two feet off the ground.
So when something, you know, normally I've got like a 100-foot tower here at the house, and I've got 175 feet on each side of the tower coming off 100 feet for low band work.
And, of course, if you don't have that insulated when there's a lot of wind, you get incredible voltages.
But, or in a thunderstorm, it gets really mean.
I mean, you get big arcs that appear in the antenna tuner to ground.
But, gee whiz, for a two-meter antenna to be taking a charge like that, you're in a very dangerous area.
First of all, that you were asking about the predictability of weather, that the actual theory of chaos actually came out of weather prediction by Dr. Lorenzo.
We had a paper that came around, everybody read, and I think they sent it originally to NASA, that we're telling everybody that it was written by an aeronautical engineer, and he was postulating that a tornado was actually where it gets its power, is where it intersects the Earth's magnetic field, and actually turns itself into an electric motor.
I've never heard that before, and I don't know if there's any scientific fact to it.
Personally, from what I know and what I've seen, I would doubt that would have any effect on it, because scientists have nailed down probably better than 50, maybe 60 percent of what's happening.
There was a shot CNN got, some video footage that a pilot took that I saw recently, of a tornado in the air, like two or three tornadoes, right out this guy's window.
Yeah, amazing amount of work, considering the danger he was in sometimes as close as he was to that vortex or could have easily been another vortex form near him.
Again, you've got to understand, people don't get this.
They don't understand.
A lot of them don't.
And you can't blame them.
To them, it's just terrifying stuff.
It's not fun.
unidentified
I understand.
But I have a couple questions.
One is I have a very frustrating situation that you don't have when you chase tornadoes, and that is when I want to go to where I think a hurricane is going to make landfall, I'm not going to be able to get there because they're going to be evacuating.
You know, that was, in my opinion, the last great uncovered hurricane by the media.
to that point the media you know as Art pointed out earlier would send out one guy to stand there in the in the rain but with all the new cable stations since then and a lot of them have come on on air since then, when there's any kind of a hurricane threat now, I can guarantee you you're going to see massive coverage.
And the problem with that now is that because of that coverage, what they're doing now is they are the evacuations and the areas that are closing off are happening a lot further in advance.
With Hurricane Andrew, they didn't really get crazy there until a day or two before.
I mean, this has been going on.
They knew it was coming.
But nowadays, they close up everything real, real, real soon.
So you have to get there days and days in advance to get access.
But you really can't.
You know, that's the problem.
unidentified
You can't do that because it'll change course on you for sure.