The ‘chemtrails’ conspiracy theory dogging the battle against drought
SALT LAKE CITY—Augustus Doricko, a mullet-wearing 25-year-old who commands a small army of meteorologists and drone pilots, stood in the parched foothills of the Uinta Mountains and squinted at the sky.
The young CEO was overseeing one of the largest cloud-seeding projects in U.S. history. He watched two drones complete their missions and touch down on a cattle ranch below. Like generations before him, he was trying to make it rain.
“This is what it’s all about,” said Doricko, who was running on two hours of sleep, coffee and nicotine patches. “If we don’t make more water for the Great Salt Lake, there’s going to be extraordinary problems.”
Since the 1950s, water districts out West have used cloud seeding—which typically involves releasing silver iodide from planes or ground generators into clouds to boost snow or rain—to benefit farmers, ranchers and ski resorts, largely without controversy.
Rainmaker, a startup that got an early boost from billionaire Peter Thiel, is updating that technology by using drones and AI-enhanced weather modeling to do this with more precision. Doricko’s goal is to use vastly expanded data collection and a fleet of drones piloted from the ground to make rainmaking more efficient, measurable and dependable.
But an intractable problem keeps getting in the way: the conspiracy theory that the government is manipulating the weather.
Doricko has received death threats and been confronted on the street by people who believe he’s part of such a plot—or an unwitting patsy. The head of Utah’s cloud-seeding program has also been targeted with threats.
A small but growing faction of Americans believes the government and companies that collaborate with it are spraying toxic chemicals from jets, creating white “chemtrails”—a play on the “contrails” produced by the condensation of exhaust from jets—to poison the population or for other nefarious purposes.
A related theory holds that the government is secretly releasing chemicals to block the sun and fight climate change, a distortion of a concept known as “geoengineering.”
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that neither is occurring. Yet online influencers and politicians are amplifying the theories.
In July, when floods killed more than 130 people in the Texas Hill Country, an online mob blamed Rainmaker, which had seeded clouds 150 miles away two days earlier, for causing or exacerbating the tragedy. Michael Flynn, the retired general who was a short-term national security adviser in President Trump’s first administration and who has said the government manipulates hurricanes, demanded Rainmaker explain itself to his 2.2 million X followers.
Within days, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would introduce a bill to ban weather modification. “I’m accepting apologies now,” she wrote on X, including a photo of Doricko. “People have had enough of chemicals manipulating our weather.”
Rainmaker said its cloud seeding in Texas had dispersed before the storm and that at best a single mission can create a fraction of an inch of rain. More than 20 inches of rain fell in some locations during the floods, according to the National Weather Service.
The stakes are high as farmers look for ways to keep operating amid the West’s worsening droughts, a trend over the past 20 years. Proponents say cloud-seeding is a valuable long-term strategy to ease the dry conditions that have hit farmers and play a role in devastating wildfires.
The test of the technology is particularly important to the area around the Great Salt Lake, which reached its lowest recorded level in 2022, down 22 feet since the mid-1980s. The lake is drying out as more water from snowmelt in the mountains is diverted for use by farms and a growing population, and from drought and a warming climate. It plays a key role in the complicated “lake effect” circulation of water over the region, and its continued decline would be an ecological disaster. The lake also contributes about $2 billion to the state’s economy, from mineral mining, recreation and the harvesting of brine shrimp.
‘Getting blasted’
As rumors spread about the Texas floods, the Environmental Protection Agency in July took the unusual step of debunking the “myths and misperceptions” around the conspiracy of chemtrails and government weather manipulation.
On a website devoted to the topic, the agency explained that what is often visible in the sky are contrails—the condensation from jet exhaust hitting cold air—much like breath or car exhaust on a frigid, humid day. While contrails may linger for hours, they don’t signal the dispersion of harmful chemicals, the EPA said.
Geoengineering refers to activities that would counteract climate change, for instance by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or putting material into the sky to reflect sunlight away from the Earth, known as solar radiation modification. The government isn’t engaged in any such effort, the EPA said.
Attempting his own damage control, Doricko flew across the country on a tour of top conservative podcasts, including Infowars and “The Shawn Ryan Show.” “I know you’re getting blasted on the internet,” Ryan told Doricko. “People are f—ing irate.”
For nearly an hour, Doricko told Ryan’s listeners what cloud seeding is and isn’t. It’s “not long streaks in the sky, it’s not trying to dim out the sun. It’s certainly not creating hurricanes,” he said.
Invented in 1946 by General Electric scientists in upstate New York, cloud seeding works because silver iodide particles resemble ice crystals. Very small water droplets in clouds freeze onto them and form snowflakes heavy enough to fall to the ground. When the temperature is warm enough on the ground that results in rain. Many studies have found that the small amount of silver iodide used doesn’t damage the environment.
Cloud seeding had its heyday in the 1970s but declined because scientists found it difficult to quantify its effects. A 2017 Idaho study showed how radar could be used to measure the amount of water produced—showing it was significant—and sparked a renewed interest. Some critics say cloud seeding can rob downwind areas of rain, but Doricko and others say this doesn’t happen because the practice taps water that would otherwise remain in clouds.
Today, many experts say cloud seeding can boost precipitation by roughly 10%. It’s used by state and local water districts in about 10 western states. The practice is regulated, for instance by requiring operations to cease when flooding is forecast.
Despite that, some influencers, politicians and others have linked cloud seeding to conspiracies involving the National Weather Service’s NEXRAD radar system, which is used for measuring precipitation and weather forecasting, and HAARP, an array of high-frequency transmitters in Alaska used to study the upper atmosphere, as well as jets crisscrossing the nation.
Many claim the government has weaponized weather modification technology to cause disasters, such as steering Hurricane Helene to the Southeast last year to punish Republicans there or to seize land for lithium mining. The alleged purposes range from mind or population control to addressing climate change.
The believers point to past efforts by the federal government. The U.S. military used cloud seeding during the Vietnam War in a classified project called Operation Popeye, to try to gain an advantage by extending the monsoon season, according to the State Department. In two other decades-old projects, the government tried but failed to manipulate hurricanes using cloud seeding, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he plans to crack down on what he says are government planes spraying chemicals.
Three states—Tennessee, Louisiana and Florida—have passed bills banning weather modification. Florida’s law makes it a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $100,000 fine. (After the law was enacted, supporters have been angered by the continuing sight of contrails.)
Doricko testified during the Florida bill’s debate, arguing that the vote was “whether Florida wants to regulate out of existence a safe technology with 80 years of data that can benefit its farms, prevent wildfires and help the state overall” because of a vocal minority presenting unscientific claims.
A bill supporter dressed and speaking like John Lennon said “bloody maniacs” were poisoning the atmosphere. Another commented online about Doricko’s testimony, “Throw his ass in prison.”
Legislators in more than 30 states have introduced similar bills, which scientists overwhelmingly say is a growing effort to police something that isn’t happening.
Dane Wigington, one of the nation’s most active promoters of weather-manipulation theories, said in an interview he has been tracking secret geoengineering programs for 20 years. He testified in October for Wyoming lawmakers discussing a bill. “Weather is being used for a weapon,” Wigington said, citing Jamaica “being annihilated right now” by a hurricane. Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica as a Category 5 storm on Oct. 28, causing flooding and landslides and knocking out power.
Doricko also testified, urging legislators not to sweep cloud seeding into any ban. Wyoming agricultural interests also asked that cloud seeding be exempt. Ultimately, when lawmakers advanced the bill, cloud seeding was spared from the ban, which would prohibit dispersing chemicals to alter the temperature, weather or “the intensity of the sunlight.”
Holly Jean Buck, a University of Buffalo professor who studies weather conspiracies, said they are fueled by environmental anxiety, social media and distrust in government, among other factors.
“Beliefs in chemtrails or in ongoing intervention in the atmosphere are not fringe ideas at this point,” concluded a study Buck co-authored this summer in Communications Earth & Environment, a journal published by Nature.
It cited reports such as a 2016 survey in which 9% of Americans said it was completely true that a secret government program uses airplanes to put harmful chemicals into the air. By last year, another survey showed that figure had risen to 9.9%.
‘Mullet man’
Doricko said he understands the skeptics. “Twenty-five-year-old mullet man says he can control the weather by emitting heavy metals into the clouds above you,” he said. “That is a notion that should raise eyebrows.”
Doricko studied physics at University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out two months shy of graduating. He moved to Texas, where he began attending a church and working as a personal trainer.
There, a gym client told him about the West’s water troubles. As a child, Doricko had been obsessed with a videogame called “Spore,” where he turned barren landscapes into lush new worlds. Now he wanted to do it for real. Doricko wrote code to better track water use, and he and the client started a company they later sold.
Around this time, Doricko learned about cloud seeding. He applied for a Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program that provides funding to tech-savvy college dropouts. He won and got $100,000. Rainmaker was his pitch.
In El Segundo, Calif., where Rainmaker was launched in 2023, Doricko helped form the “Gundo Bros”—a contingent of young startup leaders known for charting a course outside Silicon Valley by building what they see as practical technologies. Rainmaker is now a multimillion-dollar company.
Many of Rainmaker’s 120 or so staff are men in their 20s. They include scientists, college dropouts and former Marines. Everyone is earnest and amped.
Kaitlyn Suski, head of research and one of about a dozen female employees, hung a disco ball to counter the testosterone at the office, where for a time, a bench press sat beneath a flag that said, “Jesus Died for Our Zyns,” referring to the brand of nicotine pouches. She described her co-workers as “good-hearted.”
Traditionally, cloud-seeding operations flew planes into clouds and used flares that contained silver iodide. That required having pilots on standby, which is costly, and they often had to fly into rough or dangerous weather. The entire process wasn’t very precise.
Rainmaker developed its own aerosol dispersal system, which avoids flares and the additional chemicals they produce, and targets specific clouds with the right atmospheric conditions with a fleet of nimble drones.
To gather the advanced weather data, it erected 12 remote weather stations around the Bear River Basin, which feeds the Great Salt Lake. Sensors on the 12-foot metal contraptions measure wind speed, direction, temperature, humidity and pressure. They use K band radar, longwave infrared cameras to sense temperature and LIDAR, which uses lasers, to measure water and ice in clouds. The sensors also have an aerosol probe that measures particulate matter, because dust helps with snowflake formation.
Rainmaker also uses data from satellites and National Weather Service radar, and it is working to automate its weather modeling with Atmo, an AI-weather forecasting company.
Doricko points out the seeding always occurs in existing clouds—an effort to dispel the idea that the spraying itself creates the streaks some call chemtrails.
Rainmaker’s other main goal is to use advanced radar to measure how much precipitation it adds to systems. Existing radar stations in the West don’t perform well because of the mountains, so Rainmaker installed its own radar station—lowered by a helicopter onto a mountaintop in southern Idaho—to improve data collection in the area.
In keeping with Doricko’s Christian beliefs, the company calls its drone model “Elijah” and its weather stations “Eden.”
“I believe that mankind was placed on the Earth to care for it and to tend to it and make the most of it for the sake, not just of our own well being, but for the sake of God’s glorification,” Doricko said. “Rainmaker is an act of faith.”
A lake in crisis
Utah presented the perfect proving ground: desperate for water, and with a long history of cloud seeding. Many farmers and ranchers have relied on seeding for decades.
The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere. The state is trying to get farmers to cut back on water to let more flow into the lake. As it dries up, a rise in arsenic-laden dust, from miles of exposed lake bed, is a growing health risk.
Utah increased its annual cloud-seeding budget to $5 million in 2023 from $350,000 the prior year. It runs the nation’s biggest such program, with 187 ground generators that send silver iodide into clouds. It contracted with Rainmaker to see how much more water the company could pull from the sky.
“Cloud seeding isn’t a short-term solution to anything. It’s a long-term water management tool that has great impacts over decades,” said Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with the Utah Division of Water Resources.
Jennings, who heads the state cloud-seeding program, estimates it produces an acre-foot of water, or about 325,000 gallons, for $30, compared with more than $1,000 to produce the same amount with recycling or desalination. Over a decade, he said, cloud seeding can deliver an additional year’s worth of water in a given area.
Last year, Jennings hosted a demonstration of cloud-seeding equipment at an event he called “Cocoa and Cloud Seeding” to educate state officials.
Soon after, a YouTuber who saw a writeup of the event posted about Jennings and chemtrails, and Jennings received death threats, was doxxed and saw his private Instagram account overrun with attacks. “It sucked all the energy out of me,” he said. “Luckily, any time I get around the Rainmaker guys they reignite the passion I have.”
When Utah considered a geoengineering bill this year, lawmakers excluded cloud seeding.
Some citizens remain wary of cloud seeding, including Lydia Nuttall, who testified in favor of the state’s failed bill. “When you mess with Mother Nature, there are some things beyond our control,” said Nuttall, who works part time as a podcast host. She belongs to Utah Skywatch, a Facebook group where she posts photos of what she believes are chemtrails. “EPA, shm-EPA,” she said of the agency’s explanation of contrails.
Others say cloud seeding is effective but can’t provide enough water for the Great Salt Lake.
Jake Dreyfous, managing director of the nonprofit Grow the Flow, said that since most of the lake’s decline is from expanded water use, conservation could play a bigger role in delivering the annual one million acre-feet of water needed to stabilize the lake. “I see cloud seeding as a tool in our toolbox,” he said.
Rainmaker is aiming to verify that it can produce 30,000 acre-feet of water between early November and mid-April. That is a fraction of the lake’s needs, but the project would be a significant advance for cloud seeding and attract more supporters, Doricko said.
Last month, staffers in the company’s dimly lighted nerve center in its Salt Lake City office monitored the weather and drones drifting in and out of clouds on live feeds. Hours earlier, teams had departed for southern Idaho to seed clouds that would feed the region.
Meanwhile, Doricko hosted a launch party for the Utah operations in another warehouselike room. State officials, local water-district managers and investors from Japan were there.
Dan Anderson is a fifth-generation farmer and rancher whose wells have been drying up near Fillmore, Utah. Anderson called Rainmaker after watching Doricko on the Shawn Ryan podcast this summer. He said he doesn’t buy weather conspiracies.
Instead, he agreed to host one of Rainmaker’s Eden weather stations on his property, and helped raise $400,000 for local cloud seeding. “I’m hoping this works,” he said. “Water is everything in the West.”
Also at the party were six high-school girls from an FFA agricultural program in Tahoka, Texas, who flew in to perform a skit they wrote about cloud seeding. A local farmer had suggested the topic to them, and their teacher had contacted Rainmaker, which invited them to the launch.
Doricko beamed as he watched the teens act out a surreal debate between a girl playing him and another playing Marjorie Taylor Greene. The girl playing Doricko said cloud seeding doesn’t cause floods but can be the difference between a harvest and a total loss. “It’s about science, measurement and control—not guesswork,” she said, in character.
Most of the girls live on farms and had never flown in a plane before. They all said they now believe cloud seeding is a good thing.
Write to Kris Maher at Kris.Maher@wsj.com
