2 weeks Ago By By Rick Brockway
A month or so ago, I was driving home from Oneonta and noticed some strange clouds in the sky ahead. There were several jet streams stretching from horizon to horizon, evenly spaced as far as I could see. “That’s strange,” I thought.
So to get a better look, I drove up on my hill. From there I could see from beyond Oneonta in one direction and past Morris in the other. I counted them, looking in both directions.
I could plainly see nine ‘jet streams’ from where I stood. The next day we were on the hill getting ready for our new house. Since there was no snow on the ground, Pat wore flip-flops.
Within an hour her feet were covered with a black substance that was very difficult to wash off. The same stuff was on my good hiking boots. Where’d that come from? Was that a coincidence? Man has tried to control the weather for years.
I remember some old Western movies from my childhood when some guy would show up in a town that was suffering from a drought. He charged them a sum of money to make it rain. All he did was put on a fancy show and wait for nature to do its thing.
Eventually, it rained. It always does. I’ve read about cloud seeding in the past, so I went on Google to see what I could find.
According to the New York Times, our government was trying to affect the weather when our soldiers were dying in Southeast Asia. They were seeding clouds there to extend the monsoon season along the Ho Chil Minh Trail to make it harder for the enemy to move troops and supplies from North Vietnam. Were those white streaks that I saw in the sky made by cloud seeding? With a little more research, I found that they are spraying silver iodide and lead iodide from jets on a regular basis.
If they can affect weather patterns, I have to wonder why. I also wonder if those chemicals get into our water and eventually into our food supply. We can’t have lead paint or water from a lead pipe, but they can spray it in the air.
What do they say? “What goes up must come down.” Is that why we’ve had 32 tornados so far in New York State this year? Does this “seeding” and the manipulation of the weather have anything to do with the massive hurricanes in North Carolina and Florida? Weather manipulation is nothing new. In 1959 Disney produced a documentary film “The Future of Weather Modification.
” Watch it online. So, if you think this is all a hoax, think again and do your homework. And then there is the Aurora Borealis.
Now I’ve been around for 78 years and have only seen the northern lights a handful of times until recently. What else is happening? According to NASA scientists, the increased number of sightings is because of the eleven-year solar cycle. Okay, but do you remember seeing the northern lights almost every night back in 2013? I don’t.
In years past, the northern lights have just been a reddish glow in the northern sky for one night every few years. My wife and I were sitting in our hot tub one cold, winter night a few years ago. Off to the north we saw red on the horizon.
It looked like some farmer’s barn was on fire. Then I realized it was an aurora. As beautiful and bright as the northern lights have been, they can’t compare to the ones I saw while hunting caribou north of the Arctic Circle in Quebec many years ago.
We came out of the dining tent and the sky was alive with multiple colors. It was actually bright enough that you could have read a newspaper. Weather patterns affect all of us, but there’s an old saying: “Don’t mess with Mother Nature.
” It’s a reminder that we should respect nature and its balance. It’s a life-giving and nurturing force that can kick back if we treat her too harshly. Rick Brockway is an outdoors writer from the Oneonta area.
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