Send in the Clouds
Wyatt Williams on weather modification, conspiracy culture, and the theology of meteorology
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Send in the Clouds
Wyatt Williams on weather modification, conspiracy culture, and the theology of meteorology
Last July, 139 people were killed as a result of flooding along several rivers in central Texas. The disaster was caused, we were told, by what the experts refer to as an MCV, or mesoscale convective vortex. To many observers, however, this explanation was far from sufficient. Wasn’t it much more likely, an odd coalition of free thinkers began to propose, that the flash flooding that weekend was the inevitable consequence of the government attempting to control the weather?
In fact, Texas, like many other states, maintains several active projects that involve the practice of cloud seeding, which dates to the postwar discovery that natural precipitation can be enhanced by the use of agents like silver iodide or dry ice—a technology that has been revitalized, improved, and widely embraced in recent years. As recently as a month prior to the flooding, cloud-seeding operations had been performed (it was discovered) in central Texas by a startup called Rainmaker, which quickly found itself under fire from lawmakers, pundits, and others who prided themselves on puncturing official narratives.
For the June 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine, the writer (and, briefly, Weather Channel journalist) Wyatt Williams waded into the unusual controversy, spending time with the founder-CEO and engineers at Rainmaker while also narrating the perspective of those at the outer reaches of the opposition, notably a militia leader who evangelizes against the government’s meddling in God’s design. I spoke to Williams about the history and future of weather modification, and what outsiders might not understand about its most strident believers and opponents alike.
Will Stephenson: What about your experience reporting on the weather have you found most unexpected?
Wyatt Williams: I hadn’t expected the weather to be such a personal beat.
From one perspective, which is about where I was when I started writing about this subject, the weather is happening at this higher level above us and to everyone, everywhere, all of the time. It should, by definition, be the most impersonal of subjects. The weather doesn’t care if we have a baseball game that day. It just doesn’t care at all.
Writing about it, I had thought I should be similarly impersonal, like writing the telephone book. This is the number you call if you want Thai food delivered. This is the temperature outside on Saturday; you should probably bring a jacket. This is how a cloud forms. This is how many died in the flood, et cetera. Of course, that is what a lot of writing about the weather tends to be.
Almost immediately, I realized how wrong that was. (I love finding out that I’m wrong when reporting; it tells me there’s actually something to find out here.) As soon as I started talking to people who were really invested in the weather, I realized how personal the subject was to them. It’s there in the morning with you when you’re getting dressed. It’s with you while you’re walking your dog. It’s there at night, when you’re having a drink after work and looking up at the sky.
Doing interviews about even the most mundane weather, I found all of this personal stuff almost immediately came into the conversation. People kept wanting to talk to me about God or how they imagine what their children’s lives will be like or what it was like to wake up looking out their bedroom window. Keeping it impersonal was almost impossible. It turns out that the impossibly large and impersonal presence of the weather is this immediate door into people’s intimate lives, their most private acts and thoughts and beliefs. I probably wouldn’t still be chasing the subject if I hadn’t found that.
Stephenson: I think I can trace the idea for this piece to the weekend of the Texas flooding last July, when you sent me a news item about an incident of weather-radar vandalism and mentioned that your inbox at work was flooded with cloud-seeding conspiracies. That technology isn’t new, as you write in the piece. What was it about that weekend or what’s changed in the past year or so that this has become such a salient issue?
Williams: On a straightforward level, the July 4th floods in Texas were horrible, tragic, and, as often happens with politics, that tragedy was used as an opportunity by a group to push their agenda of weather-modification conspiracy theories. For a lot of people, the flood seemed unprecedented and they were, understandably, looking for some kind of new explanation. There were plenty of precedents to what happened in Texas (the Big Thompson River flood in Colorado, to name one) but that doesn’t necessarily matter at the moment. When it comes to weather, our memories are no match for keeping track of the history. All of that made sense to me.
What I wanted to understand better was why these theories and explanations, which are on their face outlandish and unbelievable, were appealing to so many people. We happen to live in a moment in history when a somewhat larger number of people is open to the idea that some secret, malevolent group is pulling the strings of the world around us. You can see this in some of the more outlandish but still mainstream theories about Jeffrey Epstein.
Anyone who takes a glance at the billionaire class today knows that the influence and power of this small and rather private group of people has reached a historically significant level. Trying to articulate what that actually means is rather hard, though. More often than not, the real answers are a little boring. They aren’t particularly good stories and our human brains are always a little inclined to a good story. That the military—or the billionaire class or some other group of global powers—is controlling the paths of hurricanes or thunderstorms is a good story, if it were true. It isn’t, of course.
The weather is famously good for projection. Our inclination is often to simplify complex things into recognizable shapes. Hamlet saw whatever he wanted to see, or didn’t want to see, in the clouds. Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused by wind trapped in caves, probably because he spent a lot of time in caves. The history of weather observation is littered with confirmation bias. So it makes a lot of sense that we’re seeing a projection of how some people believe the world works (or are afraid that world works) in these theories about the weather today.
There’s a school of thought that says we shouldn’t pay any attention to the people who are pushing these blatantly false theories, that the right thing to do is ignore them. I couldn’t disagree more. I think they call for close examination; they tell us something very important about what it means to be alive at this moment in history.
Stephenson: What did you find most compelling in researching the history of weather-modifying technology?
Williams: I think many people would be as surprised as I was to learn the ways that the history of weather-modification technology, as well as of weather modeling, is intertwined with our military history. I think I understood, on some gut level, that the tornado sirens I sometimes hear outside my window here in Iowa City are the same system that would have warned a city about an approaching air raid in the Second World War.
Cloud seeding, weather modeling, the Doppler radar, and so on, all emerged from the same cohort of scientists, engineers, and companies that benefitted from the massive boom of the military-industrial complex in the first half of twentieth century. (I keep recommending Benjamín Labatut’s 2023 novel The MANIAC, a fictionalized account of John von Neumann’s life, to anyone who will listen.) That connection, I think, goes a long way to explaining why some people want to invent some kind of malevolent-military weather-control theory.
The innovations from that time are still continuing to play out, but I think we’re entering a new crossroads. For much of the twentieth century, investing in weather-modification research seemed like a foolish, egotistical idea. Who would really claim to change the weather? The long history of our attempts to change it is filled with charlatans claiming that they could do something that they couldn’t.
The big shift I see here is that we’ve finally reached a scientific consensus that we are already changing the weather every day, whether we want to or not. We can see now that cutting down a forest or planting a new one will have some effect on the weather, just as the cars we drive and the meals we eat do. Now that we’re beginning to recognize that all of these behaviors are incidental forms of weather modification, we’re entering a push to better understand and develop deliberate forms, as well.
Stephenson: At one point, as I remember it, you essentially asked Rainmaker if they could change the weather for you on command. How did that work out?
Williams: Well, this is a little embarrassing, because my initial idea betrays some misunderstanding of cloud seeding technology I had a year ago. But, like I said, finding out when you’re wrong while reporting is always a good thing.
Anyway, my initial pitch to the Rainmaker guys was something along the lines of asking for a magic trick. I said, “Let’s pick a time and a place, a GPS coordinate on a map. And I’ll go stand out in a field and you make it rain on my head.” Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s founder, just laughed at me, though in a polite way, I think.
I hadn’t yet grasped the specifics of how the mechanism works. For cloud seeding to be effective, particularly for the way they’re using drones, you have to target highly specific conditions (moisture content in the air, temperature, et cetera) that are changing by the minute. Picking a date on a calendar doesn’t work. Their drone teams essentially live like fighter pilots, sleeping in the hangar and waiting for the right forecast to come. When I did eventually fly up to observe their operations, I think I had maybe a forty-eight-hour notice to book my flight?
Seeing them in action would do a lot to relieve people of the notion that they’re “controlling” the weather. They may be more dependent on the whims of it than anyone. They’re modifying one admittedly small aspect of it, and they’re very much not in control.
Stephenson: Having spoken to representatives of the anti-cloud-seeding faction as well as the industry’s foremost practitioners, what, if anything, do you think these two camps misunderstand about each other?
Williams: Well, one of the reasons this story animated my interest from the beginning was recognizing that Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer—the man behind that incident of radar vandalism—and Doricko were essentially engaged in a theological debate. They’re both self-professed Christians who see the work they’re doing in the context of a biblical mandate. To Meyer, to modify the weather is to go against God’s wishes. To Augustus, seeding clouds to make rain plentiful is exactly what God would want.
They’re both, I think, trying their best to interpret this idea of “dominion” from Genesis: that God gave us the earth to be good stewards and care for it. I’m not sure if they’ve both fully appreciated that they’re coming from the same place.
In a lot of ways, I can understand how Meyer’s position against weather modification can be pretty sympathetic to a lot of people, even if they’re not on board with his more fantastical ideas or militant positions. We’re all too familiar with stories of how technology has caused massive ecological problems; I think it’s fair to be suspicious of some weird technology that can make rain fall from the sky. (I observed a similar dynamic years ago, when I was writing about the conflict between the factions of industrialized and sustainable agriculture.)
To Doricko’s credit, I think he’s sympathetic to that skepticism, though the death threats that he gets may have worn through some of that sympathy. He’s made a good case, I think, of how cloud seeding could be of real ecological and societal benefit in the right settings, even with those skepticisms in mind.
Could the two of them have a real conversation about that and see that common ground if they were in the same room? I don’t know; maybe not. Part of the reason I wanted to write their stories together is to imagine the essay as a kind of room where they could be placed alongside each other.
Labatut's MANIAC is a book that I've ordered and had shipped, unannounced, to three friends. So far. A+++