The Mysterious Blob of Doom™ on the WHNT-TV weather radar Tuesday afternoon.
A strange thing happened in Huntsville, Alabama yesterday. Weather radars with a view of the city saw a thunderstorm bubble up west of Huntsville, pretty close to the Redstone Arsenal, and just sit there. Granted, thunderstorms in Alabama in June are as common as spittle on the set of Hardball, but this was weird in that there was no thunderstorm over Huntsville. It was partly cloudy and, by all accounts, a relatively nice day. So what gives?
The Mysterious Blob of Doom™ sat over Huntsville on the radar image for most of the day on Tuesday. What's even more mysterious (dare I say...suspicious?) is that the storm seemed to be centered over the Redstone Arsenal, which conducts top secret tests for the US military. This incident gave an overnight breath of life back into a few popular conspiracy theories about weather control, all of which are easily debunkable to those who care about science. The Dale Gribbles of the world won't listen, but rational people will.
Radar glitch?
Weather radars show weird things all the time. This had to have been a glitch in the radar software. It's obvious!...ly wrong. The Blob of Doom™ showed up on every radar that covers Huntsville. If it showed up on just one radar image, it would be plausible that it's just a glitch, but since it's more than one, the idea got shot down pretty quickly.
Doppler radars can show some pretty weird stuff sometimes. Take the following image, for instance. All that fuzzy stuff around the radar looks pretty suspicious, but it's just birds. Early in the morning and late in the evening, radars pick up birds and bugs flying around while they play the ultimate game of cat and mouse. There are enough birds/bugs in the sky that they actually reflect the radar beam back to the station, and it registers as a return. And you wonder why your car gets so crappy.
A radar capture from the USGS' website concerning the "evening feeding patterns of waterfowl." In other words, a literal shit-ton of birds showing up on radar.
Here's another strange appearance on radar that sends conspiracy nuts into a tizzy. When the sunrise or sunset hits just the right angle in the sky, the strongest rays of the sun can shine directly into the radar beam, reflecting it back to the station as a very strong return (akin to a hailstorm). This causes a long spike to show up on the radar. This happens at many radar stations at once if they have a clear sky and good view of the sunrise/set. It's called a radar spike, and it's harmless. Just physics in action.
Oh, and the movement of the sun in the sky isn't perfectly east/west. In the winter the sun rises in the southeast, and during the summer it rises in the northeast, so the spikes point in the corresponding directions.
The government cannot control the weather through weather radars. They can barely control the weather radars themselves, these days, given how much bandwidth they eat up.
Since the Mysterious Blob of Doom™ showed up on more than one weather radar at the same time yesterday, it rules out glitches in the software. What else could it have been, then?
HAARP!!!!!!111111
I love my HAARP groupies. They're so crazy it's adorable. HAARP is a real thing. It's an acronym for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. HAARP. It's a large farm of antennas in Glenallen, Alaska that are operated by the US Air Force. The point of the station is to test how the ionosphere -- the very tippy-top of Earth's atmosphere -- affects high-powered radio communications.
Conspiracy theorists say that the government uses the high-powered frequencies in HAARP to control the weather down to the square mile, and that every severe weather outbreak is a result of the government using this super duper secret classified military installation to create deadly storms to wipe out the sheeple.
It's so secret that we have pictures of it. See:
The super-secret HAARP facility in Alaska that the government took a picture of and posted online.
It's so classified and sensitive that we even have its street address!
High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program Site
Mi 12 Tok Cutoff
Glennallen, AK 99588
Obama clearly doesn't want us to find it because he had it scrubbed from Google Maps:
Wow, so secret!
And here its classified website.
And here's a top-secret live webcam of the antenna farm.
Now that we've established how secret and classified HAARP is, let's address the elephant in the room. We all know that Obama used HAARP as a weather weapon to create tornadoes and thunderstorms and floods and hurricanes! Duh!
Well, no. That conspiracy started with Alex Jones, a very smart man who makes a lot of money manipulating his sheeple his low-information listeners to believe anything because science is hard.
There are also websites that claim to have exclusive equipment (by the makers of ghost hunting devices) to measure the strength of HAARP signals. The stronger the HAARP signal, the worse the severe weather outbreak. It's certainly a coincidence that these HAARP maps lag a few hours behind the National Weather Service forecasts. They're certainly not taking the government's weather forecast and using it to paint pretty colors on a map. Noooo. Conspiracy theorist leaders would never manipulate The Truth like that.
Plus, all the people screaming that the Mysterious Blob of Doom™ was caused by HAARP are missing a crucial factoid (other than the fact that HAARP doesn't control the weather) -- there was no thunderstorm. Idiots.
Chemtrails!!
Please put your seatbacks and traytables in the upright and locked position while we give the sheeple below us autism through fluoride. Bwa ha ha.
Chemtrails are less silly than the HAARP weirdos, but a large scientifically-illiterate segment of the population actually believes that
contrails -- short for condensation trails; the long, white trails of water vapor left behind by the moist engine exhaust of high-flying airplanes -- are really chemicals being sprayed by the government to control the weather, control our minds, or make us sick.
The chemtrail conspiracy theorists actually have a little bit of truthiness to cling to on this one. There is an interesting history of governments and companies experimenting with something called cloud seeding, or the release of chemicals/particles from an airplane with the goal of forcing the water droplets in a cloud to coalesce around the particles and produce rain.
Cloud seeding actually works to a certain extent. But chemtrail conspiracy theorists believe that almost every contrail in the sky is really chemicals being left behind by planes to control our minds, make us sick, control the weather, or all three at once. It's another form of low-information, anti-science thinking that results from a lackluster education and an over-reliance on Alex Jones for infotainment.
Contrails dissipate rapidly or stick around for a long time depending on atmospheric conditions. They often appear in grids in the sky because of air traffic patterns -- you know, those pesky things that prevent planes from crashing into each other. They appear different colors for the same reason clouds do, because they're actual clouds! What a concept.
People who believe in a vast chemtrail conspiracy theory are actually pretty funny to talk to. They don't grasp the concept that liquids are heavy. An airplane can't carry cargo, passengers, fuel, and a full load of chemicals to spray us like that. And even if they could, United would send everyone a $45 bill for being "chemtrailed." Trust me, they would.
One of the more entertaining (and sad) things about people who believe in chemtrails is that spraying vinegar at the sky can magically make a condensation trail 35,000 feet up dissipate in just minutes.
Even if "chemtrails" were real in the way the conspiracy theorists would like to believe, the people screaming about chemtrails causing this are proving that they still don't know what they're talking about -- there was no thunderstorm. No weather modification to be had.
The Answer: Chaff!
Yes, experts at the University of Alabama Huntsville say that the Mysterious Blob of Doom™ was really chaff. Chaff is a term used for a very long list of things that can be released by an airplane in order to scramble radar beams. Chaff is usually released by military aircraft to make it harder for enemy radar to detect the plane's presence and buy enough time to complete their mission and escape the area safely.
Chaff on weather radar in Northern Florida.
The military frequently conducts chaff exercises over parts of the United States. Every once and a while, especially in Florida, the NWS posts radar images on Facebook letting everyone know that the returns are really chaff instead of thunderstorms. It looks ominous -- there's enough aluminum/fiberglass/plastic floating around in chaff releases that it can look like a major thunderstorm on weather radar.
University of Alabama Huntsville confirmed the chaff release yesterday, finding pieces of fiberglass scattered around the area right where the highest returns in the "thunderstorm" were located on radar.
A long, animated radar image from the incident yesterday shows that the Mysterious Blob of Doom™ was an actual entity in the atmosphere, as it moved around, had depth, and dissipated after wind carried it off to the northwest. This is consistent with little pieces of feathery, fiberglass chaff moving around in the wind and finally clearing out when a boundary came through.
A spokeswoman for the Redstone Arsenal released a vague, non-statement statement this morning:
“Aviation and missile technology testing at Redstone collects data that protects and improves the weapon systems that America’s sons and daughters are using in ongoing overseas contingency operations, and in forward-deployed areas worldwide. As a matter of Operational Security policy, we do not offer details concerning the circumstances under which testing activities are performed. Further, discussing specific measures and operational procedures could adversely affect the success of testing activities. We routinely evaluate and validate weapon systems and components so that we and our allies can maintain the edge over adversaries. Testing assures that war fighting capabilities are in a high state of readiness.”
It's not a weather control using radar or HAARP or "chemtrails." The government cannot and does not control the weather. They're not as all-powerful as conspiracy theorists would like to think.
The Mysterious Blob of Doom™ was just the military carelessly littering a major city with fiberglass in the name of testing. No biggie.
2:30 PM PT: As people have noted in the comments, dropping feathery threads of fiberglass over a populated area isn't the brightest idea. What are the health risks with this? I'd love for someone more investigative journalist-y to dig into that.