To make a point about not wasting the time of Tennessee citizens on what he described as a conspiracy theory, Rep. John Clemmons, a Democrat, proposed an amendment to a bill prohibiting geoengineering that would also protect the mythological Sasquatch.
This amendment led to a lengthy discussion among Tennessee lawmakers on Monday in which Mr. Clemmons called Senate Bill 2691—sponsored by Republican Rep. Monty Fritts— “a very nonimportant piece of legislation” that “shouldn’t be taken seriously.”
When asked if he believed in Bigfoot during a discussion on the bill, Mr. Clemmons responded, “About as much as I believe in a conspiracy theory about chemtrails.”
Democrat Rep. Antonio Parkinson later proposed an amendment to make Bigfoot “the official Sasquatch of Tennessee.”
Republican Rep. Jay Reedy asked if Mr. Clemmons believed that the silver iodide used in geoengineering, or cloud seeding, could cause birth defects and cancer in a Sasquatch as it is known to do in humans.
Mr. Clemmons responded, “That’s a better question within the pseudoscience of cryptozoology.”
Rep. Justin Pearson, a Democrat, shifted the conversation toward the “consequences of people believing in these conspiracy theories and its effects” instead of dealing with “real issues.”
Mr. Clemmons said there are real environmental problems and that it’s a waste of time to focus on conspiracy theories.
Mr. Pearson proceeded to define geoengineering as an “erroneous belief that long-lasting condensation trails left in the sky by high-flying aircraft are actually chemtrails consisting of chemical or biological agents sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public.”
Mr. Pearson asked Mr. Clemmons if he knew of any case in which a government agency or those in the state agricultural industry have raised this issue.
“If there were something like this being done that would be harmful to the population or our crops or livestock across the state of Tennessee—or our soil—I’m confident—well, I would like to think that the Lee [Gov. Bill Lee] would have made us aware of that,” Mr. Clemmons said.
Decades-Long History of Cloud Seeding
After the discussion equating the well-documented subject of geoengineering dating back over 60 years to a creature currently undocumented within the confines of modern scientific study, Mr. Fritts addressed the legislation as written.He said it adds a new section to the Tennessee Air Quality Act that prohibits the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus into our atmosphere within the borders of the state of Tennessee for the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, and the intensity of solar radiation.”
Mr. Fritts said the legislation is needed because federal proposals to enact geoengineering operations—such as the Biden administration’s June 2023 report on solar radiation modification—have been set in motion.
The document, he said, examines how to reduce solar radiation by utilizing “stratospheric aerosol injection” and “marine cloud brightening” to reflect sunlight.
There is also the 2024 congressional Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill which, on page 119, earmarks $39 million “to improve the understanding of key cloud, aerosol, precipitation, and radiation processes,” in order to combat climate change.
“It bothers me that I have to bring this legislation to you,” Mr. Fritts said. “It bothers me further that we would take something as serious as clean air, clean water, and clean soil to grow our crops in and make a laughingstock out of it with the amendment here tonight. I’m sad to see that Tennesseans who are watching this tonight might see that some members in this house don’t take seriously their health, and I think that is quite indeed a travesty.”
He added that not much research is required to discover that there is a decades-long history of cloud seeding that has taken place in the United States.
Planes leave trails that don't dissipate but spread into cloud cover. Courtesy of Matt McGregor
Operation Popeye
This includes the now-declassified Operation Popeye, a U.S. Air Force cloud-seeding project undertaken during the Vietnam War. Its aim was to extend the monsoon season, thereby creating landslides and flooding to destabilize North Vietnamese forces along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.The operation, which involved planes seeding clouds with silver iodide, was conducted without congressional oversight.
It was one of the many covert operations disclosed in the Pentagon Papers, a collection of documents that exposed the manipulations the government kept from the public regarding its involvement in the Vietnam War.
According to a Popular Science report, cloud seeding goes back to the 1940s when a General Electric employee named Vincent Schaefer conducted the first experiment in which he discovered that precipitation could be artificially generated.
“He noticed that cloud condensation nuclei—the tiny particles around which water condensates—could be artificially produced to create rain and snow,” the report stated.
By 1967, the science was being implemented for wartime efforts, when Operation Popeye was taking off.
According to a declassified 1974 briefing on the operation, Sen. Claiborne Pell, a Democrat, expressed dismay over its secrecy and urged Col. Ed Soyster and other officials present in the meeting to release the information to the public due to what he said was his concerns over the public losing trust in the federal government.
Operation Popeye was ultimately slipped into the public consciousness through media reports by journalists like Seymour Hersh when writing for The New York Times after the Pentagon Papers’ release.
After the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention in Geneva, Switzerland, an international treaty was signed prohibiting the use of weather modification warfare.
Still, to discuss geoengineering today is to get oneself classified as a far-right conspiracy theorist, as was seen in the legislative chambers in Tennessee on Monday.
Democrat Rep. Bo Mitchell told Mr. Fritts that it was “very appropriate” that the bill was being presented on April Fools’ Day, and that he would continue to trust those at Harvard “over House Republicans.”
‘Not a Big Secret’
Mr. Fritts told The Epoch Times that despite the ridicule, he had researched the issue extensively before sponsoring the legislation, which was passed in both the House and the Senate and on its way to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk, where he expects it will be signed into law.“It’s not a big secret,” he said.
In 1967, the Texas legislature adopted a law to govern weather modification technology, according to a report from the Texas Department of Licensing & Regulation.
According to a 2021 Scientific American report, several states use weather modification technology for drought management.
Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming were at the time of the report sharing the cost of spending $1.5 million a year on cloud seeding programs to replenish the Colorado River.
Last year, ABC News reported on 42 cloud seeding projects in the United States, with 200 more on the way.
For Mr. Fritts, the problem is too many chemical experiments have been conducted on the American public without their consent, so despite the officially stated purpose of weather modification, “it seems risky.”
“I propose that what goes up must come down,” Mr. Fritts said. “We inject these aerosol, chemical compounds into our atmosphere, then they come down on us.”
From there, there are three routes for entry, he said: inhalation, ingestion, and absorption.
“We ingest them from our water and our food because they’ve contaminated our water and soil,” he said. “Or we inhale these compounds without knowing their impact on our bodies. Third, we absorb them into our skin as they fall from the atmosphere.”
Federal and state governments, he said, have no right to use taxpayer dollars to contaminate the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat.
“We have generated an entire industry over the past three decades that revolves around scaring people to death with this idea that the world is going to end because of a climate crisis based on manufactured data to increase someone’s bank account and power,” he said. “To fight this by injecting more chemicals into the air doesn’t make any sense.”
Geoengineering Watch
For over 20 years, Dane Wigington has been investigating geoengineering.He’s the lead researcher for Geoengineering Watch, an organization devoted to investigating and raising awareness about weather modification.
His background is in industrial electrical engineering, having worked on one of the first solar plants in the United States.
His early work on solar panels in Northern California brought climate engineering to his attention when he observed a 70 to 80 percent loss of direct sunlight that rendered solar panels “almost useless.”
“I lost a very substantial amount of solar power uptake from whatever these aircraft were emitting,” he told The Epoch Times. “I knew it could not just be condensation.”
He later identified through laboratory tests what he called “toxic rain,” or atmospheric precipitation loaded with chemical compounds that included aluminum, barium, strontium surfactants, polymer fibers—or microplastics—and graphene, which he said acts as a “vascular machete.”
“The official stated purpose of spraying this in the air is solar radiation management, to block some of the sun’s incoming thermal energy to slow down the warming of the planet,” he said.
Surfactants make rain soapy, and the snow slick, he said, which can lead to more accidents.
Mr. Wigington said one can speculate on the real agenda of these climate engineering programs, but there’s “no question” that agricultural regions are the most targeted.
It’s being absorbed into the soil, which he said is “annihilating the microbiome.”
“Aluminum shuts down nutrient uptake in crops and in forests, so at that point, organisms begin to die a slow, protracted death,” he said.
Its impact on people is just as much toxic, he said.
“Aluminum, which is a neurotoxin known to be a source of Alzheimer’s and dementia, is harmful to all life forms,” he said. “When it’s in nanoparticle form, it bypasses most of nature’s natural barriers, including the blood-brain barrier in human beings.”
‘Absolutely Not Contrails’
With Geoengineering Watch, Mr. Wigington produced the documentary film “The Dimming: Exposing the Global Climate Engineering Cover-Up,” which investigated climate engineering operations, its history, and its impact on health and the environment.In the documentary, several military officials who were interviewed confirmed the use of weather modification.
Ret. U.S. Air Force Brigadier Gen. Charles Jones, also a former tactical weather reconnaissance pilot, emphasized in the documentary that the sustained vapor trails seen from planes are “absolutely not contrails,” or trails composed only of water vapor.
“Contrails do not linger, dissipate, and go into cloud coverage,” he said.
The documentary cited the late former President Lyndon Johnson’s 1962 graduation speech at his alma mater at Southwest Texas State University, now called Texas State University.
President Johnson discussed the benefit of having a “space communication satellite” that could advance the country’s position in the space race.
“It lays the predicate and foundation for the development of a weather satellite that will permit man to determine the world cloud layer, and ultimately to control the weather because he who controls the weather will control the world,” President Johnson said.
However, as the adage goes: just because scientists can do something doesn’t mean they should, Mr. Wigington said.
Throughout history, attempts to control have only created more issues, he said.
Ironically, much of the unusual and extreme weather patterns mainstream scientists attribute to climate change are caused by the manmade geoengineering programs promoted to combat climate change, he explained.
“The weather system has been derailed and we may never know the full extent of the damage,” he said.
