Can the government control the weather?

Well, the answer isn't no — but it's not quite yes.

Peter Gietl, managing editor for Return, is well-aware that weather modification systems like cloud seeding “sounds like some sort of crazy Alex Jones-level conspiracy” — but it’s far from it.

Cloud seeding was invented in the 1940s by Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard Vonnegut, and the technology was reportedly used to attempt to increase monsoons in Vietnam by the U.S. government.

“So the technology itself has actually been around for awhile,” Gietl tells Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson of “Blaze News Tonight.”

“Instead of thinking of it as controlling the weather, it’s kind of augmenting the weather, or making it a little worse. So they can shoot silver iodine and other particles up into the air and basically it’s trying to cause the rain to fall out of it. So they can increase storms, increase rainfall,” Gietl explains.

“We saw it in Dubai, it can cause flooding,” he says. “We don’t know a lot of the long-term ramifications of what it can cause, what the environmental effects and whether or not we should be trying to control and affect the weather.”

It’s important to be skeptical of the hands the technology has ended up in and how it’s being used, and many Americans are beginning to wonder if their own government could be using this technology against them.

“A lot of people on the internet and elsewhere are looking at these hurricanes and thinking, ‘I don’t trust the government anymore, and I don’t trust any institutions anymore, and is someone playing God here?’” Peterson says.

“We don’t really see any evidence of that, that these hurricanes were manipulated or enlarged by this technology, and I think it would be very hard to try and even steer a storm in a certain direction,” Gietl says. “Theoretically, you could make a storm worse, but at the moment, we don’t have any direct evidence that there was any manipulation of these two hurricanes.”

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