Fears of "weather modification"

A radar tower stands alone in northeast Oklahoma City, surrounded by a green field. It is one hundred feet tall and topped with a smooth, white orb. Hidden inside the orb, an antenna rotates while pulsing electromagnetic waves into the distance, waiting for a faint bounce to arrive back in the dish. It is not quite an all-seeing eye. The tower can identify hail, rain drops, a cloud of cicadas, the spiraling debris in tornadic winds from more than one hundred miles away. 

[On July 6, 2025] At 9:35 pm, a bearded man approached the radar tower and began to climb the chain-link fence around it.  As he reached the top bar, the bearded man paused to rock back and forth and lean his head back, yelling into the night sky some unheard complaint. He gazed around and the lens of a security camera caught his face, retinas glowing back in the dark.

On the other side of the fence, he got to work. With a hammer, he snapped open the latch guarding the radar’s million-watt power supply. There were control panels, switches, meters. He destroyed them all. Content that the tower had been disabled, he walked around the facility systematically destroying each security camera. It is unclear whether he understood that destroying cameras would not destroy the images they had captured of him. On a bicycle, he disappeared back into the night...

The following day, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, who is the leader of a militia named Veterans on Patrol, contacted media outlets and the Oklahoma City Police Department to take credit for the incident. He claimed that [Anthony Tyler] Mitchell was one of his followers, taking the direct action that Meyer had been threatening for months. The group believes that the latest generation of weather radar towers are “directed energy weapons” that the military have “pointed at the American people.” Meyer claimed that Veterans on Patrol would not stop at disabling one radar tower, that they had plans for taking down at least a dozen more.

In his statements to reporters at the time, Meyer insisted that his crusade was a divine one. The weather was being modified, there were powers out there that could control it, and this was against God.

“When the military plays God with the weather, they’re mocking our Heavenly Father,” he said.

The story about the "battle over weather modification" continues in the June issue of Harper's Magazine.