“Today,” Sheldon continued, “two superpowers have the ability to control weather around the world: the United States and Russia. Other countries, probably China and North Korea, are working feverishly to catch up.”

As this article was being written the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina were still being felt in the southeastern United States, after it caused billions of dollars in damage along the Gulf of Mexico coast, and the death toll from the killer storm was still being tabulated.

Could this devastation have been avoided? Could Katrina itself have been avoided as a death-dealing hurricane?

The answers to both questions are probably “Yes.” The ability of Russia and the United States to create storms of this magnitude definitely exists.

The big question that remains is, why, then, wasn’t Katrina stopped before it devastated three states—Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi—along the Gulf Coast?

There could be any number of reasons, but all would be mere speculation, as the fact is nothing was done to stop Katrina.

Those who doubt that Katrina, or any other hurricane, could be stopped—or created—can find substantiation in a long-forgotten article by Chen May Yee in the Nov. 13, 1997, issue of The Wall Street Journal.

The article recounts an offer by the Russians to aid Malaysia to create a typhoon to dissipate a pall of smoke that hung over the country—and still does—caused by the burning of large sections of the rain forests in Indonesia and Sumatra.

To quote from the article: Datuk Law Hieng Ding, Malaysia’s minister for science, technology and the environment at the time, said his country “would use special technology to create an artificial cyclone to clean the air.”

The article went on to say that a Malaysian company, BicCure Sdn. Bhd., would sign a memorandum of understanding with a government-owned Russian company to create a cyclone that would cause torrential rains and thus cleanse the air over Malaysia of the smoke and ash.

What Russian company was the Malaysian official talking about?

On Oct. 2, 1992, The Wall Street Journal reported that a Russian company, Elate Intelligent Technologies, Inc., has weather control equipment for sale and uses the advertising slogan of “weather made to order.”

Igor Pirogoff, director of the company, said “Elate is capable of fine-tuning weather patterns over a 200-squaremile area for as little as $200 U.S. per day,” the newspaper reported.

A year before the article was written, Hurricane Andrew caused $30 billion in damages as it plowed through the South. Pirogoff said Andrew could have been turned into “a wimpy little squall.”

According to a UN pamphlet, titled Basic Facts about the United Nations, which was published in 1994, the world body negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques in 1977. This “prohibits the use of techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and cause such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves, and changes in climate and in weather patterns.”

Getting back to Malaysia, where the potential for creating or dissipating cyclones seems to have made its first appearance, there was never any follow-up to the stories about Elate and whether in fact the cyclone was created, although it was approved by the Malaysian government.

A call by American Free Press to the Malaysian Embassy in Washington found no one there with any knowledge of the subject.

However, there was more success when the Malaysian delegation to the UN was contacted in New York. There, a spokesman claimed to have no knowledge of the creation of a cyclone, but was willing to discuss weather control in his country.

The official said that, by using weather control technology, rain could be created and was being created over the nation’s capital of Kuala Lumpur.

He said that often rain was created over the city to cleanse the air of the smoke emanating from Indonesia, and particularly Sumatra.

He indicated he did not know if the technology being used had been obtained from Russia, but it would appear that such technology to create rain on demand would not have been developed in a Third World country like Malaysia.

There have been numerous reports in recent years about strange changes in the jet stream, which have created alterations in the weather.

In 1982 a report by a Pentagon researcher, identified as L. Ponte, noted that “the Soviets have made advances in bending the all-important jet stream that sweeps across Siberia to set global wind patterns. By using explosive devices in the jet stream, scientists are trying to make it dip and rise in a wave that could replace the frigid Siberian winters with milder air from the South.”

How this would affect weather in other parts of the world was not reported by Ponte, but there have been dozens of reports since his 1982 report about changes in the jet stream’s normal behavior.

In 1996, a group of seven U.S. Air Force officers, who had prepared a research paper about weather warfare, issued a report, which concluded that there was technology under development that would provide “warriors of the future” with the means to control the course of military conflicts, including through the use of weather modification.

The study also states that manipulation of precipitation, storms and fog could improve America’s own weather but could also involve controlling the ionosphere to guarantee U.S. dominance of worldwide communications.

Is major weather control really possible? Is weather manipulation a means of conducting war? If not, why in 1977 did the United States, the then-Soviet Union and dozens of other countries believe it was a good idea to enact a UN treaty banning weather manipulation as a means of conducting war?

In the afterword of his book, Sheldon concludes:

“Weather is the most powerful force we know. Whoever controls it can disrupt world economies with perpetual rainstorms or tornadoes; wipe out crops in a drought; cause earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis; close world airports and cause devastation on enemy battlefields. “We could all sleep better if a world leader said, ‘Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it, and it was true.”