Plot: First Weather, Then World

If Bob Fletcher’s right, a storm is brewing at a power tower near you.

It won’t be a squall from Mother Nature. It’s courtesy of Big Brother, his minions of scientists and a network of towers producing lowfrequency radio waves.

Fletcher, spokesman for the Militia of Montana, was among five militia leaders who told a skeptical U.S. Senate panel last month about the New World Order and growing tyranny in Washington, D.C.

But it was Fletcher’s contention that government manipulates the weather that garnered the most attention.

The notion was greeted with disbelief. With laughter. With comments on The Tonight Show.

“It’s like a big joke,” Fletcher says. “Why don’t they just shut the hell up and read the material and do some research?”

Like read the Militia of Montana’s 47-page booklet on weather control. For $10 cash or money order - no checks, please - the militia will mail out a copy, complete with a hot pink cover featuring a Xeroxed lightning storm.

Weather control could be a devastating weapon, Fletcher says. It’s also used to damage American crops, control people’s minds, and further the idea of a world government, he contends.

The booklet contains a smorgasbord of information - United Nations and government documents, a patent, news articles and a timeline.

A lot of the “proof” is old news. Most is from the mid-1970s, including a Fletcher cornerstone - a report by the Weather Modification Advisory Board, convened for a year by the U.S. House of Representatives.

James Crutchfield remembers the board with a certain fondness, akin to nostalgia for the mood ring and leisure suits.

Crutchfield, a former professor of economics at the University of Washington, served as the natural resource economist on the board.

It was a time of positive weather-control thinking. The government wanted to learn to modify the weather to prevent hail storms, hurricanes and other weather carnage. Cursory experiments showed that cloudseeding might increase rain or temporarily soften a hurricane.

The advisory board said further experimenting would require millions of dollars and somebody in charge. Congress dropped it.

“Eventually, it pretty much came to nothing,” Crutchfield says. “This is not really worth talking seriously about.”

The Militia’s weather control booklet, however, suggests this tampering is responsible for a series of calamities, including great earthquakes in Tangshan, China, in 1976 and 1977 and floods that devastated the Midwest in 1993.

It also caused a cloudburst that leveled a town called Phillips, Wis., on July 4, 1977 - exactly one year after the Soviets supposedly started manipulating the weather.

That theory amuses Phillips resident Lynn Neeck. She was in high school when the storm broke. Now she’s county treasurer.

“We just got home when it hit,” Neeck says. “We watched a cat blow down the street. Isn’t it something? The government did that, huh? Geez.”

John Brennan, who owns a clothing store in Phillips, is more direct. “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.”

Perhaps the government’s cobbled together a successful conspiracy. Perhaps nobody knows about the weather manipulation that happened.

“There’s no way, in the modern government, that there’s a conspiracy,” Crutchfield says. “It’s totally impossible to keep things sealed up. Any secretary in the office would spill the beans. The consortium of secretaries knows everything.”

But what if the conspiracy is so secretive even the secretaries don’t know?

“The Department of Defense could do it, NASA, Agriculture…” says Laura Kopelson, a General Accounting office spokeswoman, her tongue planted firmly in her cheek. “I’m the government. I’m at the root of it.”

The GAO in Washington prepared three reports on weather modification - in 1972, 1974 and 1979. They dealt with cloud seeding.

That surprises Kopelson. “Oh my God, we are part of it.”

So says Fletcher.

He points to the government system of more than 150 emergency communications towers nationwide, including one in Spokane and one in Wenatchee.

There are even more towers in Russia.

The government says the U.S. towers would provide communications in the event of a nuclear war or other disaster. Fletcher says evidence shows their hidden purpose is weather control.

The coordinates given by the Militia of Montana for the Spokane tower matches up with Four Lakes Air National Guard station, about 15 miles southwest of Spokane.

“The only tower we have up here is for a repeater for a land-mobile radio,” says Captain Pat Schibley. “No, that doesn’t control the weather or minds. I know pretty much about the equipment up here and I’ve never heard that one before.”

Bernard J. Eastlund, an inventor from Spring, Texas, is surprised the Militia of Montana relies on one of his three patents to prove the weather control case.

Eastlund’s invention aimed to use high-frequency radio waves to shoot large amounts of power into the ionosphere, energizing particles to disable incoming missiles and knock out enemy satellite communications.

Fletcher says the government could use the technology to control the weather.

Eastlund says nobody’s yet built his mammoth invention. It would be difficult to hide. If built, the antenna would be a square 20 miles on a side and 40 feet high.

That’s slightly larger than the city of Chicago. From above, the tower would resemble a network of irrigation pipes.

“You’ve got to have a healthy respect for weather,” Eastlund says. “I really feel that all you could do if you could build the big antenna is study weather.”

Fletcher says the antennae and towers are there, and they’re exercising control. He thinks he’ll be proved right, and his critics will be left outside in the rain.

“All they do is try to make fun of this stuff,” he says. “It’s like when people made fun of the Wright brothers in their bicycle shop.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo