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Feb. 26, 2021 - InfoWars Films
39:22
Ben Livingston: The Father Of Weaponized Weather (2009)
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*Bell rings* My name is Ben Livingston.
I'm the first person to ever see a cloud with the intention to cause it to do military damage.
I know I can say that, and I did it several times before the next person did it.
Tell me what these clouds are we're looking at.
These clouds were located up in the southern part of North Vietnam, and we needed to make rain down on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Highway 1. But there weren't any real clouds around.
There were a number, this was the end of the monsoon season, but there were a number of these small clouds that reached, barely reached the freezing level, and by putting a small amount of silver iodide in there, we got them to collect and start to build.
And as they built, we just worked on the largest tower in the group.
Until in a very short time, we had clouds that were...
You told me this cloud got 14 inches of...
Well, this cloud, of course, this is all the same cloud.
I was clear, top secret.
I was only...
I was as high as you could get.
I got interested in weather modification when I was a farm boy.
I never could understand why the clouds weren't bigger, had a little more shade, and was chopping that cotton.
So I got in the Navy.
I managed to get into meteorology school, and I think that's really where I learned most of my physics.
I was assigned to the Typhoon Squadron in Guam, where I served for three years as a flight meteorologist and meteorological engineer.
From there, I came back to some additional school at Texas A&I University down in Kingsville.
And from Kingsville, they sent me to the Hurricane Hunter Squadron in Jacksonville, Florida.
That squadron, of course, had just become involved in Project Storm Fury.
So when I reported to that duty station as a meteorological engineer, I was immediately designated the military member of the Storm Fury Advisory Board.
We were doing quite a lot of testing work out over the test range at Channel 8, California, where we dropped cloud seeding flares or silver iodide generators into clouds or just wherever we wanted to to see what the reaction was.
And it was there when I learned for sure that you could really change a cloud by the amount of silver iodide you put in it and where you put it.
This cloud here, from the time it started raining until it quit, it put out a little over 14 inches of precipitation.
What did that do to the North Vietnamese?
Well, it just washed all the roads out, and there was a bridge attached to a mountain that had bombed and could not get rid of it.
This heavy rain washing down that river took that bridge out.
So you guys finally got it done.
This was on October the 13th.
These are cloud seeding.
Dispensing units on the side of C-130s.
As you can see, these dispensers held 52 units.
And under here on this F-4, we had these camouflage so they looked like they were...
Did you fly those?
Yes.
You piloted the F-4?
Yeah.
So you're a jet pilot too, huh?
Yeah, I did.
I did these for about seven years.
You fly at all, huh?
That's neat.
And these were our own airplanes.
The airplanes I had in my commercial flight team business.
See?
I had a Duke and a turbocharged Duke, of course, and a Cessna 310 and a turbo 210, and we built the flyers that built them into the wings of our airplanes so that they...
As little resistance as possible or drag as possible.
And this right here, these are pyrotechnics that we've cut in sections and fused them so that they could burn either singles or a pair or cut half in two or cut in three pieces or cut in five pieces.
So you can see obviously here, although these are dispensed in the vertical, they are essentially horizontal.
That's how we made these clouds like in Vietnam work because we could take a cloud, take a pyrotechnic like this that had a little bitty piece in it and would fly by and just barely, just barely touch the cloud with one part.
So that kept from blowing the thing apart, blowing the cloud up.
But what we would do and like in Carla or We would maybe use, this is just one, this is one cloud seeding device here, cut into five pieces.
But one like this, you may be flying 350 miles an hour, kicking one out every 200 or 300 meters and just essentially seed the whole area on the horizontal and the whole top would blow away.
Amazing.
We were the first ones to fly into hurricanes for the purpose of modifying them.
If you will, that was Project Storm Fury.
I began to be extremely confident that we could do about what we wanted to with a hurricane.
Project Storm Fury had been going on since 1961, and they had already done or had done two experiments, one in 1961 and 63. Well, by 1964, when I was there in 1964, I wrote the plan.
We started to have a track and a mission for every flight that was on the hurricane cloud-seating experiments.
So we had documentation for everything.
Operations at Project Stormfew are very positive.
This report said that we claim they should consider now if a hurricane heads straight towards Miami.
Some wanted to continue hurricane reductions and the other part did not want to.
It was a political football.
And there are people that were wanting to do more pure research and less application engineering wanted to kill Project Storm Fury.
So they built up an artificial barrier that prevented hurricanes from ever qualifying to be experimented or seeded for damage reduction.
NOAA research people came up with data that suggested that If a hurricane went through a certain little geographical area, there was no history in 100 years that a hurricane had been through that area and would reach land.
So they made a requirement that the storm must go through this area of, I call it an area of improbability, before it would qualify for hurricane damage reduction attention.
So after about 10 years, No hurricanes went through there, and the people, that is the scientists who didn't want to spend money on aircraft reconnaissance, decided, well, it's just too expensive.
We can't wait any longer.
So they killed the project altogether.
I am terribly disappointed that the government has decided a long time ago not to do the hurricane damage reduction anymore.
They can talk about...
The scientifically rigorous data, the inability of civilian aircraft and so forth to collect this data, and poo-poo the empirical observation that you make just by looking out the window or watching your instruments, saying it has no value.
In order to change the weather and know that you're changing it, you must have instrumentation or document it.
So my line of business really was to design and make equipment that would document changes in the weather.
You take a cloud that Mother Nature or God has provided and you alter that cloud.
Well, the reason the cloud doesn't expand on its own in most cases is the fact that there's a lot of moisture but there's no nuclei.
There's nothing for the moisture to stick to.
So when you provide the silver iodide nuclei, It causes the water to coalesce to that nuclei, and when it does, it releases heat, which means everything starts to rise.
If you produce enough nuclei at the right places in a cloud, there's essentially no limit to how fast and how far it'll grow, because it just keeps releasing heat as it goes up, and of course the heat keeps trying to rise.
It's very small, and they're put off by these flares, but then water starts attracting to it, and then it builds condensation.
Well, you put out a G into these, put out a G into these serbrite ad nuclei, and they attract water.
They just sponge it up.
But when they do, that water condenses, and it releases what they call the late heat of condensation.
The heat goes out of it, and the whole thing starts writhing.
If you're in the business of trying to kill clouds, then, of course, you go up to the area where there are some vertical shear, the wind blowing some direction or other, and you provide the nuclei at a level above where the raindrops are.
They are then so light that the wind vertical shear merely blows the top of the cloud away.
Then there's no place for the coalescence or the...
Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been wishing for quite some time in terms of years that they had some way of slowing the trucks down in Vietnam.
That led me to advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff that we had a potential weapon system, and so I was asked to start to put together a top-secret operation to go to Vietnam.
To see if we couldn't make it rain more over there as a military operation.
All the roads over there were dirt roads and when it rained it caused them a lot of problems.
So that during the monsoon season there was so much rain and water in the roads that the trucks really couldn't move very freely.
Our mission was to make it rain during the dry season.
On that particular day The clouds were very small.
There just weren't any real big thunderstorms or anything like that.
But I picked a cloud that was sitting out essentially by itself with a number of small clouds.
I'm talking about clouds that were somewhere near the freezing level but not high enough to really grow.
And I nurtured one of those clouds until it finally got it in well past the freezing level.
And then the cloud developed a lot of convective activity, and it started sucking clouds into it.
Just building up and building up, and I took a series of pictures where I called for 41 minutes.
By the end of 41 minutes, we had flown up to over 65,000 feet, and we still couldn't reach the top of the cloud.
So we knew we had a barn burner there.
And by the next morning, we had washed out everything in the world.
Did a lot of damage to people and all that sort of thing, but it was a real success as far as blocking the roads off.
We're just two of us involved, myself and a civilian, but we conducted that operation with aircraft, military aircraft, mostly from the Marine Corps, and then shortly thereafter we started involving the U.S. Air Force.
Well, we actually began...
The 3rd or 4th of September and by the 13th of October we had a couple of storms that had actually washed out bridges and the results were so successful until I was called down to Saigon to bring the generals, the Air Force generals, the Army generals down there and they suggested that I need to go make this report to President Johnson back in Washington DC. They were excited about it but they had no authorization if you will.
To use this as a military weapons system.
I was there in very top secret classification as a research project.
That's the way we were able to conduct a mission without the international community, if you will, being apprised of what we were doing and how we were doing it.
It was kept top secret for a long time.
It was first reported that this was going on in 1972. That's the first time the Congress ever heard about it.
So, as you can see, it was not something everyone knew about for a long time.
It must feel good, though.
You're the father of something.
You used weather weapons first.
Well, it's okay.
And for all we know, is that the only time they'd been used?
Well, that same project went on through 1972 when we got out of Vietnam.
But the Air Force was still doing it.
But was it only used in Vietnam?
Never anywhere else?
No, it's the only place ever.
We've had no requirement for it anywhere else that I can think of.
But it could be used anywhere.
Did you ever do any testing in the U.S.? Did I? Oh yeah, a lot, yeah.
You were the head of what base?
You were the head of an acting commander of what base?
I was the acting commanding officer at the Corona Naval Weapons Research Center.
And they worked on a lot more there than its weather weapons, didn't they?
Yes, they do, but my main contribution at Corona was to write a plan for weather modification control for the whole world at any given time.
We could send a number of airplanes with materials and dispensing equipment we had and probably control the weather all the way around the world.
Why?
Because you said it's on several major, seven major front lines?
Well, there are only from five to seven major troughs around the world at any given time, and they undulate just like ocean waves move back and forth and back and forth.
And at any time, there's a front associated with those where all the thunderstorms are located.
And with having a few airplanes...
A couple of airplanes at the right place.
You could run down that line of thunderstorms and do whatever you wanted to with them.
This is out of the June 1974 Science Magazine.
And this article was actually written in 19, well it says it was written in 1974, yeah it was, 1974.
And this is when the Senate got wind that something had been going on in Vietnam that they didn't know about.
And they wanted to know about it.
Well, it's interesting to note that this project ended in 1972. It started in 1966. So you can see the secrecy.
Senator Pail was a kind of aggressive senator about People doing things that the Senate didn't know about.
He got wind of it and he asked for a briefing.
And Colonel Satcher, I believe his name was, may have been something else, but a Colonel, Air Force Colonel, gave him a briefing, gave his committee a briefing and told him it had been going on since 19, in a research configuration from 1966 to the present time.
President Johnson was very mild.
It turned out that He had known my father.
So we had a little old homecoming there for just a few minutes.
And then he asked me what I was doing and told me he had read and been briefed on what we were doing and how we were doing it.
And he asked me my opinion of it and asked if I thought that we could continue that.
I said, well, I see no reason why we can't continue it because we'll have the same kind of weather coming up again in March of next year and we can seed and make rain right into the monsoon system.
And we can then extend the monsoon system well past this August in to maybe the first week in November.
He didn't say a whole lot about it except he thought it was real weird, if you will, that people could take a little weather modification and change the whole climate in the country.
To the states where I had time to do something as far as weather modification was concerned, I went back to my duties, if you will, as being the military member of the Project Storm Fury Advisory Committee.
Without getting anything classified, can you tell us about some of the tests you did in China Lake?
We had different manufacturers of these cloud seeding devices.
We had different yields for them.
We had different burn times on how fast we wanted to put all this nuclei out.
And so we tested all those things at China Lake.
We'd pick a cloud out in the middle of the desert out there.
We had 100 miles test range out there that belonged to the weapons center.
And we'd just pick a thunderstorm and go to what we wanted to with it.
By 1969, we had...
All the latest state-of-the-art equipment in a number of airplanes and we also had aircraft equipped with dispensing equipment to put silver iodide into a hurricane.
The hypothesis for how to do this has been designed and developed by Dr. Joanne Simpson and her husband Dr. Robert Simpson was the director of Project Storm Theory for a number of years.
And we followed her hypothesis, which said that if you seed enough clouds in the right-front quadrant of a hurricane where the energy cells are, you may build a second eye or, at the minimum, make the original eye much bigger, which means you have a reduction in wind velocity.
Tell us again...
Mr. Livingston, Ben, this is exactly who Mr. Simpson is.
Dr. Simpson, at the time Project Stormfury started, he was the head of the United States Weather Bureau.
With the funds being made available for Project Stormfury, they created a new department or new entity of government called the National Hurricane Research Center.
And Dr. Simpson, Dr. Bob Simpson, was the director of that group.
So he's preeminent?
He is preeminent.
And his wife, Joanne, I attended a ceremony for her induction into the National Center for Atmospheric Research Laboratory's Wall of Fame last summer, in which her name was placed on the wall as...
One of the five preeminent scientists in the nation in the 20th century.
That's his wife Joanne, who was the head of Project Storm Fury for the two years.
I worked with her for those two years.
And they're saying right here that this is conclusive.
So why aren't we saving people hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives?
This needs to be implemented.
This book Hurricane Watch here is very important because it's written by...
A person who's a former director of the National Hurricane Center.
So he's had worlds of experience in the research in these things.
And I might add that I took Dr. Bob Sheets on his first airplane ride into a hurricane in 1964. But he has documented a number of things that are important to the subject we're talking about.
In which he's described every storm, the background of those storms, what was done to them, and the results.
He's also described Dr. Bob Simpson.
He says, all in all, Bob Simpson undoubtedly has had more impact on hurricane research and forecasting than any other single person.
And I might add the second most important person in this.
Ben, what do you say to the folks that say, oh, well, if you mess with a hurricane, that might cause some unintended consequence?
You know, as if that energy has to go somewhere.
Doesn't it just dump into the ocean as cold water?
It may just spread out and blow across the ocean.
It may not go anywhere where anyone cares.
And there's certainly going to be, if there are going to be unintended consequences, You would know within an hour, if you can see a hurricane, you would know that something is not going right.
We have to go do something different before it causes damage.
So you'd have days to be adjusting.
You'd have days.
The way we planned on doing it, we'd only have two days.
We'd only work on a hurricane.
Well, this is a pretty exact science now, from Vietnam to the hurricanes you did earlier.
It seems like you guys know how to knock them out.
Well, for the operation we hoped to get last fall...
I wrote a flight plan for every flight.
How far they would go, how many pyrotechnics they would take, and statistically how many nuclei they needed to dispense.
How many tons of nuclei would it have taken?
You said two airplanes, but how many tons of nuclei would it have taken and how many airplanes to knock out Rita or Katrina?
You don't measure these pyrotechnics in terms of tons.
You measure them in terms of half pounds.
So a cloud-seating device with 14 grams of silver iodide mixture in it that produces 10 to 13 nuclei per gram weighs about a third of a pound.
So 400 of those things weighs 120 pounds.
The composition of a hurricane may have dozens of energy cells in it, and they're like the pistons in an engine.
They just chug, chug, chug.
They get stronger and stronger and stronger because they feed off the warm air below them.
And they eventually turn into this thing they call a hurricane with all these energy cells in it.
We know where those energy cells are.
We know what makes them tick.
We have the materials, if you will, to alter those energy cells and decrease the maximum surface winds.
In a hurricane.
On August 18, 1969, Hurricane Debbie was seated five times at two-hour intervals.
And the maximum wind speeds decreased by 115 to 80 miles per hour at a pretty remarkable reduction of more than 45% in damage reduction potential.
The storm was left alone on the 19th and on the 20th went back and seeded that cloud a second time and decreased the winds again to just under 100 mph or about 24% more damage reduction potential.
The results from the hurricane debut experiment seemed so positive that many individuals believe the project should go operational, seeding major hurricanes that threaten land.
A team of scientists at Stanford Research Institute at Stanford University did a decision analysis on all past seeding events, including the Esther, that's a 1961 and 1963 experiments.
Dr. James Matheson of that group, reflecting their views, stated, We claim they should consider seeding now if a big hurricane comes straight from Miami.
These scientists said the government may have to accept responsibility for not seeding and thereby exposing the public to higher probabilities of severe storm damage and possible higher death tolls.
A number of people, scientists if you will, who didn't necessarily endorse applications engineering in these storms.
They thought they needed more scientific data.
They demanded that A third party investigate all of what StormFury had done.
Stanford University was a party or the institution that did this study of the activity Project StormFury had done.
In summary, the results of the Hurricane Deb experiments seem so positive that many individuals believe the project should go operational, seeding major hurricanes that threaten any landmass.
And a team of scientists at Stanford Research Institute Did a decision analysis on all past seating events, including the ones in 1961-1963, and Dr. Matheson from Stanford University, the head of the Research Institute, reported that the government may have to accept the responsibility for not seating and thereby exposing the public to higher...
Probabilities of severe storm damage and possible higher death tolls.
It's interesting that we were able to do that as a result confirmed by Stanford University in 1969. Since 1947, the government has used the excuse, has used the logic or reasoning that liability is a killer for weather modification.
But that's not why Project Storm Fury was killed.
And that's not why they aren't doing it now.
In my opinion, the reason they're not doing it is well stated by a very senior official from the National Center of Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and he says, even if a well-supported theory of hurricane modification existed, the potential legal aspects of weather modification on this scale argue strongly, in my opinion, against any such efforts.
Just a few of the many possibilities include A. The storm is not modified at all, but some people perceive that it is, get hurt, and sue the modifiers.
The storm is modified according to theory, but still does not significantly damage, does significant damage, and some people blame the modification on the damage, even though the modification actually reduced the overall damage and impact.
And third, the modified storm produced winners and losers, and the perceived losers sued.
For example, what if soon after the seeding, the hurricane abruptly changed course, this happens all the time in nature, the people affected by the new course might well blame the modification effort and sue.
Yeah, if you study the situation, you may learn, and very diabolically so, that You don't like to believe this, but there's a possibility and the economics of it verifies the fact that there is so much damage done that the construction industry in general all over the United States benefits because the cost of material goes up.
So the insurance company may or may not gain from having these damage reductions take place.
As far as the energy industry is concerned.
We all know that they get their money back almost immediately by increasing the price of their product.
And it's not unheard of to believe that the actions performed by FEMA or the government is not a surefire way to buy votes.
So there may not be any political or economic motivation on the government or some major industries part to reduce the damage of hurricanes.
The materials that we put in the atmosphere are not toxic and by volume they're nothing.
It's my contention that we have a sure defense against those liability lawsuits.
We place in our seeding materials a trace element.
of zinc or some other exotic material so that any rainfall that falls that uses our nuclei to cause the rainfall or the hail whatever comes out of it all they need do is collect some of that water find some of our traces of some of our material and we would then concede that we had something to do with it Good defense is that we've had such
horrendous hurricanes the last several years.
Without any weather modification in the past 30-35 years, you sure can't blame a weather modifier for causing damage.
The other governments are using weather control for many purposes.
Indonesia, for instance, Canada, Turkey, Greece, Russia, they're all using weather control to their benefit.
And we aren't.
Well, for several years the Russians have had weather control products as one of their national goals.
They're using weather control primarily to protect the large sites or the sites where large numbers of people are congregating for celebration.
So, such as in Moscow or Stalingrad, when they have these big military events there, a parade, so forth, they bring their cloud-seating people in, and their objective is to keep it from raining or to knock the clouds down.
And it's not just the Russians that do that.
Our company, for instance, does the same thing in Calgary every summer.
The idea is to keep the hailstorm and the heavy rain down so that...
So the construction business can flourish.
It's a contract we've had for nine years and every summer we send two airplanes up there or whatever it takes and their only mission is to prevent hail and keep weather from doing damages in the city limits of Calgary.
You've obviously been successful.
Well, obviously, yes.
It's just one of those things that we...
We know how to do, and since the government hasn't done it, the corporate people in America have just built the instruments.
They've installed them in their airplanes, but we have to be just as sure of what we do as the government would like to think they have to be.
The men, the materials, the aircraft, and all of the other The support equipment you need are available today to reduce the damage of hurricanes very significantly, and I'm talking significantly as being more than 35 or 40 percent.
The roof doesn't lift off the house until about 105 miles an hour.
If you reduce the damages in hurricanes by 35 or 40 percent, you're going to save 90 percent of the damages done by them.
Because once you get down below 100 miles an hour, there's not a whole lot of damage occurs from the winds and hurricanes.
The attack they've taken is that they're willing to spend money they haven't got to repair places that are not repairable, or the people to evacuate and the people come back and their house is blown away.
We think that's foolishness.
We think that we ought to be trying to save those houses, let the people evacuate, but have them.
Come back to a house with the furniture in it.
Our aircraft can carry over 400 cloud shooting units.
Now, those back in Project Storm Fury days could only carry 52. And the fact that we fly two and a half times as fast and we know exactly where we are all the time, we feel like we have a much better opportunity or better chance of reducing these hurricanes by even more than they were able to.
And Storm Fury.
Number one, we would have attacked Cortina before she passed the Southern Temple, Florida.
Coming across the Gulf of Mexico.
Because there were a lot of people, a lot of lives at stake there.
We may not have done anything with Cortina until she got out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
But from then on, and I mean the middle of...
The Gulf of Mexico.
I'm talking about to the eastern edge of the oil production.
When it got close enough to do damage to the oil drilling and producing platforms, we would have started working on Cortina right then.
And we would have seeded those energy cells in there based on data from the satellite, radar satellite information.
We would have picked the energy cells in that storm, and at least every 12 hours, we would have been out there seeding those energy cells.
Ben, why hasn't there been a lawsuit against the government for not stopping these hurricanes?
You know, I don't know.
I'm not a lawyer, but I really don't understand why, because the government certainly has renewed responsibility to the citizens of the country to protect them.
They took unlimited steps in creating the Department of Homeland Defense and spent trillions or hundreds of billions of dollars on that thing.
But yet a hurricane comes along that does more damage than that and they want to acknowledge the fact that there's some way to prevent it or slow it down.
Well the problem we have right now is that while we've contacted every senator in the U.S. Senate, all 100 of them, we've had one mediocre response from one of them.
Uh, You get the impression that they just don't care what happens about the hurricanes, and we're trying to, we have presented a proposal to them to do hurricane damage reduction for the year 2006, and it amounts to around $6,000 a month.
But we have enough airplanes, we have enough people in our company that we can do that.
We need to be out there seeding these hurricanes, and if we don't get the results that we think we're going to get, then we can say we're not ready for it.
But that's not going to be the case.
What's this, man?
This is a letter from Secretary of Navy, and it's a commendation medal to me.
And it's for meritorious services from 28 September through 1 November 1966. As a member of the Scientific Operational Evaluation Team for the Naval Order Test Station deployed to the Republic of Vietnam.
During this period, Lieutenant Livingston directly participated in project flights in a combat zone, in program planning, scientific data collection, and evaluation, in material readiness of scientific recording equipment.
and in the daily preparation of the weapons system under development demonstrating outstanding professional competence he and our procedures thereby improving their effectiveness his unyielding demand for accurate and complete data collections his relentless search for technical competence and his unwavering devotion to duty were major factors in the outstanding success of the project and were instrumental in the development of a unique Major combat
capability for the United States.
Lieutenant Livingston's outstanding performance was in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
Paul H. Nitsy, Secretary of the Navy.
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