Page 178 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

5.4 Cartoon emphasizing commercial applications of weather control, accompanying
Vincent Schaefer’s lecture for the meeting of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (schaefer papers)

of August 15, 1952, a sudden and appalling tragedy struck the little seaside
resort of Lynmouth in Devonshire, England, when 6 to 9 inches of torrential
rain drenched the area and a flash flood ripped through the town’s main street,
killing thirty-five people outright and injuring many others. A contemporary
newsreel called it the “most destructive storm in British history,” but was it a
natural one? Within days of the catastrophe, there were rumors of government-
sponsored experiments being conducted nearby, which the Meteorologi-
cal office and the Ministry of Defence flatly denied. Decades later, requests
for weather control documents and research in the archives revealed only one
thing: a gap in the records for that year. In preparation for the fiftieth anni-
versary of the tragedy, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) obtained
Royal Air Force flight records and interviewed one of the participants in the
experiment, glider pilot Allan Yates, now deceased, who described the secret
cloud-seeding trials going on at the time, called operation Cumulus, alterna-
tively known as operation Witch Doctor.
Yates recalled, “We’d assembled in Cranfield in Bedfordshire in mid-August
1952 studying clouds. on the day I’m recalling, the weather was superb, but the
cotton ball cumulus clouds were going everywhere, and it was decided to make

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