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It's calm now, but could you imagine this river growing 25 ft, two stories tall, in 45 minutes? That's exactly what happened in Kerr County, Texas in July of 2025. Multiple flash flood evacuations this 4th of July. Go back further. All of this happened during a storm that nobody anticipated overnight. There's people in it. Oh my god, there's so many people in it. More than 16 in of rain slammed into the Texas Hill Country that night. The National Weather Service called it catastrophic.
By the time it was over, 135 people were dead. While the state of Texas and the local community searched for answers, a parallel narrative snowballed. The government keeps doing this nonsense over and over again. Before the floodwaters receded, videos and posts circulated online claiming that the flood was engineered. Just the latest incident in a worldwide conspiracy alleging that a cabal of elites that control everything from banking to global politics were also manipulating the planet's most powerful force, the weather.
There's an entire atmospheric terraforming geoengineering manipulation that Right where the floods occurred is where the rain enhancement projects are taking place. Does the government just flat out, do they have the ability to manipulate the weather? Yes and yes. [snorts] From hurricanes to floods to wildfires, after every major natural disaster, the weather modification conspiracy theory consistently explodes online. This is what weather warfare looks like. But this theory hinges on two huge questions. What would be the elites motive to control the weather? And more importantly, does the technology actually exist to create disasters on this scale?
My first step towards answering that question, I'm not just meeting with anybody. I'm meeting with Augustus De Ricco, the CEO of Rainmaker Technology. A company at the forefront of cloud seeding technology. And that faced initial blame for the Guadalupe River disaster. People online have accused both me and Rainmaker of having caused the floods. There have been threats leveled against us, but I'm grateful to be on here tonight just to set the record straight and clarify what cloud seeding can do.
Augustus. Pleasure to meet you, Mike. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for coming out. I'm actually really surprised to see how low the snow is out here this time of year. That's exactly why we're cloud seeding because if you look around, there's a historic lack of snow. There's right over here a burn scar from wildfire because there hasn't been enough water in the state. And so, what I'm about to show you is one of the ways that we're trying to bring more water to Colorado and to the rest of the Rockies. So, let me show you what we got going on up here in the mountains. Yeah, please do. I'm not here for a simple company demo.
I'm here to understand if what Augustus is doing has the potential to tip a storm from harmless to deadly. One way that we make more snow with cloud seeding is with machines like this. This isn't what I was expecting it to look like. This ground generator aerosolizes silver iodide, which then is ejected out of that cylinder up top and is lofted into the clouds, which then freezes small liquid drops into big enough snowflakes so that they fall. So, what you're saying is it doesn't really have to create a cloud on its own, it just has to create sort of a chain reaction in an existing cloud Mhm. that magnifies the amount of snow that probably be made.
Precisely. Yeah, we haven't figured out how to make clouds yet, but making existing clouds snow a bit more we can do. What is the contribution that you would estimate you make to the snowpack each year? A little over 30 billion gallons of water. 30 billion gallons of water over all programs. Across all of our operations in the western US. You can see how that would scare somebody. That's that's that's a flood. That's a monumental flood. If it was 30 billion gallons all in one place over a week, that could be a problem. But, it's actually less than a centimeter of snow per each of our
operations and our operations go over the course of the entire winter. If you're making water to basically supply the Southwest, why does cloud seeding attract so much conspiracy suspicion? And why are there so many critics to cloud seeding? Most of the time once people actually find out what cloud seeding is, they're pretty on board and excited about it. But, most people don't know the difference between cloud seeding and what they believe to be chemtrails. And so, it all gets lumped together. Though the technology Rain Maker has developed may be aimed toward helping people, cloud seeding has had a darker chapter.
Ultimately, to control the weather and he who controls the weather will control the world. At the height of the Vietnam War, the United States launched Operation Popeye, a classified program to seed the clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail with silver and lead iodide to increase rainfall and disrupt Viet Cong supply lines. This is not a rumor, it happened. Operation Popeye was successful at extending the monsoon season for months in targeted regions. The weather wasn't necessarily weaponized, but it was what we call a force multiplier, and it was perfectly deniable. It worked so well that by the 1970s, the United Nations had to put in place a ban on environmental modification for military use. But here's the thing, if
this was possible 60 years ago, how probable is it that we can engineer storms and weaponize weather with more scale and precision today? Which brings us directly back to Augustus and the Guadalupe flood. What's to prove that event wasn't in some way tied to this technology? So this is some of our uh post-op analysis. If you look at those operations, we were working on July 2nd, and we released 70 g of silver iodide 100-plus miles from where the floods occurred. I would be surprised if you could enhance it more than 10%. Based on the current capability? Based on the current capability.
I'm not going to lie, man. I see the upside, but the downside seems significant also. This could quickly be weaponized. That makes me feel like the conspiracy theorists out there may not be that far off target by pushing back against this technology. Forget the geopolitical dynamics. Without these kinds of innovations, we wouldn't live in as abundant world. And like it's better that people have more abundant lives. So How old are you? I'm 25. Have you been to battle? No. Cuz I'm telling you right now, if I could choose this as a fighting tool rather than American men and women, I would choose this 100% of the time. So you might see the upside as being abundance for everyone,
but I promise you that the elected officials that you put in office see it as much more than that. Mhm. Technology has been applied for worse and for better, but if you talk to the farmers that we work with, if you talk to the ski resorts that are dependent on us, if you talk to the conservationists, they know that they need more water and they know that they need cloud seeding. Augustus, this has been an incredible conversation. I've learned a ton. Agreed. The internet is full of claims that something or someone is controlling the weather. While you're busy keeping up with the headline, Arkansas's flooding.
Why is this wildfire in California shaped like a laser beam cut it into the mountain? Research harp, research chemtrails. These claims may sound fantastical, but there are dozens of weather modification programs going on all over the world right now. I'm looking at a website that has them listed worldwide, including weather modification programs all across China and parts of Asia, greenhouse gas removal in Europe, solar radiation management in the Middle East. By far the most common topic in the geoengineering conspiracy theory are chemtrails.
Chemical trails left behind commercial jetliners intended to modify the weather for a multitude of reasons. And in the past couple of years, the idea that chemtrails are real has taken on a life of its own. What are these lines in the sky that we have all seen? They're sprayed particulate dispersion. Tucker, they're being used as a form of warfare. I want to know once and for all what is the truth behind chemtrails. It's something we see in the skies above us all the time. The long white lines that aviation experts call contrails, but conspiracy theorists call chemtrails.
Perhaps the greatest lie ever perpetrated on populations all over the world is the condensation trail lie. Some believe that it's about poison being sprayed into the atmosphere. Barium salts are in chemtrails. They are 10,000 times more toxic to your nervous system than lead. Still others say that the strange lines in the sky are there to reflect the sunlight and cool the earth. You'll want to know what that was that came down last night, yeah? Get yourself a magnet, scrape it off your car, and watch this.
Metal broth. Metal. Others believe chemtrails are actually full of aerosolized metals. They claim those metals are secretly activated by invisible frequencies sent by antennas hidden in cell phone towers or research facility in Alaska called HAARP. The frequencies heat up the metals to supercharge storms or even change their direction. Tell me that HAARP can't steer storms. This is the third hurricane in a row that was supposed to whack the East Coast that all of a sudden took a 90° right-hand turn out into the middle of the ocean. So, what's really going on? Is it even possible to keep a conspiracy of this
size under wraps? And if so, who would have the motive to weaponize the skies? When I was at the Air Force Academy, I went through flight training, so I know a lot about this topic. But one thing we learn at CIA is to remain objective in case there is something being overlooked. When I think about the US government's top secret HAARP facility in Alaska, the whole HAARP program, they could create, control, and steer or kill hurricanes. It's actually not that top secret. There's no evidence it's blasting frequencies in the atmosphere to control storms in North Carolina. In reality, its antenna are used to study things like how solar storms affect GPS in your car. It's now a
civilian-run research facility, and if you make it up there, you can take a tour for yourself. I'm on my way to meet with an aviation engineer who actually runs a flight school that trains the same pilots that go on to fly the large commercial jetliners that many people believe are involved in this chemtrail conspiracy. I'm hoping that she'll be able to help me separate between the facts and the fear. Shelby. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, nice to see you. This is a beautiful thing to walk into. Oh, thank you.
Now, I'm trying to dig deeper into the conspiracies surrounding chemtrails. And chemtrails are a uniquely aviation-based conspiracy. As somebody who's dedicated your life to the sky, what do people misunderstand versus what do conspiracies believe about how these machines work? First of all, what is a contrail, right? So, anytime you have a combustion reaction, you're always going to get water vapor in that combustion reaction. And when you're up in the atmosphere where it's -30°, it's going to immediately freeze into ice crystals, and that's what you're seeing with a contrail. So, when we say contrail, we're talking about a condensation trail.
Yes. Water vapor that's released out the back of an engine. It's just ice crystals. And that's why sometimes, too, you'll see a plane flying along and there's no trail, and then all of a sudden you'll see one because it hits that layer where it's the perfect conditions for that to form. But what many conspiracy theories focus on is something called a chemical trail. A trail of chemicals that are left. Yeah, I've heard that people think that they come from either the fuel system or maybe that sometimes there's an external system. So, if somebody were to install something into the fuel that could then
be released into the atmosphere, how feasible is that? So, uh these airplanes won't work very well if the fuel is not exactly what we need it to be. You're going to see that in the performance, and it's it's not going to be great. We check the fuel every time, so you're always getting a sample of fuel. It doesn't matter if it's a small aircraft or really big jet. How regulated is the fuel industry for aircraft? Incredibly, incredibly regulated. Um so much so that we have a really hard time getting new fuels approved.
Now, what about the idea that there could be some sort of hidden tank in an aircraft or some sort of hidden storage unit that carries a chemical for distribution? In aviation, there are so many people that have access to the airplane itself, mechanics, people who work in maintenance. They know what's happening with the systems all the way to the pilots. I mean, we're talking about a massive amount of people who would have to be willingly poisoning everyone that they know and love. So, that never really made sense to me. One of the biggest arguments I hear about is that there are so many more contrails in the sky now than there ever were before.
Yes. How do you explain that? Um commercial aviation has increased 980% since the '70s, even 75% since 2010. Seems like there might be better ways to do it than with an aircraft. Yeah, this would be a very difficult route to go down. But also, you know, our weather is changing. I'm I mean, that's a scientific fact. I can understand people wanting to put a reason behind it and point fingers to different entities um instead of thinking that there's something more outside of our control that's happening. This conversation with Shelby was really helpful in understanding how complicated a conspiracy like the one behind chemtrails would have to be.
I've been talking to a number of my friends who are still in the aviation industry, and here's what they've explained to me. Every flight requires a minimum of two pilots, two mechanics, and eight ground crew, equaling a total of 12 personnel per flight. In addition to that, there are 27,000 flights a day. 27,000 flights * 12 people give us a total of 324,000 interactions between flight operations and a human being per day. So, at a minimum, there are 324,000 interactions a day on all aircraft among the 548,000 employees who work in passenger travel every day. That is a massive amount of people to keep a secret. You know the old maxim, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. In covert operations, I would not bet on
those odds. So, I'm left wondering, what is connecting all these conspiracy theories together? I'm so deep down this rabbit hole of weather modification, and I really feel like I understand the parts, but I'm not understanding the whole. What exactly is the conspiracy? What is it that brings all these different ideas together? I need to talk to someone who's been covering this for years, who talks directly to the believers, but isn't a believer himself. So, I'm going to reach out to Eric Spitznagel from the New York Post. He's one of the preeminent journalists on this topic, and I know he'll have answers that fill in the gaps that I can't seem to fill myself. Eric, I've heard about geoengineering, cloud seeding, weather modification, uh
chemtrails, but what I'm not understanding is how they all tie together. In a lot of ways, it comes down to this sense of control. There's no fact that sometimes weather just happens. It has to be, who's doing this to me? Uh it's usually has to do with the billionaire class is doing something to us. There's somebody in control, that nothing happens without a reason. There are current efforts out there specifically to geoengineer a solution to global warming. How does that tie in with global conspiracies about weather modification?
People are so determined to believe that there's evil happening here. The more often researchers come out, scientists come out and say, "Yes, there is technology. We are seeding. We are doing things." But there's no evil behind the scenes trying to sterilize people, people want to believe. So the science is received as further proof of a cover-up. What you're saying follows what I learned at CIA, that people make the leap from protection or defense to weaponization [clears throat] or offense on their own. That's right. That's 100% correct. You've mentioned that the kind of center villain in this controversy consistently is the wealthy. Why do you think that is the target group? Why do you think they are the villain?
It's this mistrust. It's a Some of it's deserved, but there's a mistrust of billionaires that somehow the elite, the billionaire class, want to drive out communities off valuable lands. That the elite are in charge of making sure that they get the most resources. So the details change, but what stays the same is this belief that a hidden group is secretly reshaping the world from above, and that the sky itself is almost a crime scene. The sky itself is a crime scene. That's the making of a killer New York Post headline.
