Fact Check: Radar Images Are NOT Evidence Pulses Of Weaponized Microwave Energy Are Targeting US Population

Fact Check

  • by: Sarah Thompson
Fact Check: Radar Images Are NOT Evidence Pulses Of Weaponized Microwave Energy Are Targeting US Population Bird Migration

Do archived radar images show that 5G or NEXRAD towers emit pulses of weaponized microwave energy targeting the U.S. population while they sleep? No, that's not true: An expert in radar ornithology says the radar has picked up "bird echoes" with the blooms appearing around each radar station about an hour after sunset when birds take off in large numbers for their migration. So the data does not show a pulse of energy but a period of spring bird migration activity starting after sundown and continuing in the overnight hours. The rise and fall in the number of birds in the local airspace is visible as a pulse which parallels the westward progress of nightfall and the coming of dawn.

The claim appears in a post (archived here) on Facebook published by Brett Houston on April 20, 2024. The post featured two screenshots and an eight-minute, 35-second long video. The caption begins:

This is beyond insanity. It's criminal.
[Video included for those who can't access the link]
On the 16th they microwaved most of the country with MASSIVE synchronized pulses for 12 hours straight, while we slept from 9:11 at night until 9:11 in the morning.
https://www.pauljhurtado.com/US_Composite_Radar/2024-4-16/
The 17th they started at 8:11 and went until 9:11 increasing it to 13 hours.
https://www.pauljhurtado.com/US_Composite_Radar/2024-4-17/
The 18th they started at 7:11 and went until 9:11 increasing it to 14 hours.
https://www.pauljhurtado.com/US_Composite_Radar/2024-4-18/
They are ramping it up each day.
Like the formula for boiling frogs, increasing by one incremental degree at a time so as not to trigger their reflexes of self-preservation.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

nexradsourcepost.jpg

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Sep 24 20:01:26 2024 UTC)

The caption continues:

This is using the same frequency as the microwave oven. This has the same cause/effect relationship.
This causes damage to DNA, which will result in many issues from cancer to brain/neurological damage.
A scientific study from the official Govern Mental sources that shows microwave radiation causes the misfolding of peptides. [PMC7309322]
The misfolded proteins associated with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases as well as certain cancer types such as amyloidosis can be caused by microwave radiation... The same frequencies used in Wifi/Bluetooth and such.� And there is evidence that NEXRAD towers were being synchronized and pulsing these frequencies across the country...
CJD is similar to "Mad Cow". A brain wasting disorder. [Zombie]
So many people are suffering now without even realizing it.
The scope of this fact check will not extend to the various false conspiracy conclusions drawn from an erroneous reading of base reflectivity radar imagery. Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) stations are not emitting a "synchronized pulse" that lasts for 12 to 14 hours. Radio Detection And Ranging (Radar) emits bursts of energy over a thousand times a second. A National Weather Service radar basics article explains:
This process of emitting a signal, listening for any returned signal, then emitting the next signal, takes place very fast, up to around 1300 times each second! NEXRAD spends the vast amount of time 'listening' for returning signals it sent. When the time of all the pulses each hour are totaled (the time the radar is actually transmitting), the radar is 'on' for about 7 seconds each hour. The remaining 59 minutes and 53 seconds are spent listening for any returned signals.
This conspiracy video has been reposted and remixed on other platforms, it appears in a two-minute-long clip on Rumble (archived here), at 10 seconds in on this video on X (archived here), and as a background in this 1:15-minute stitch on TikTok (archived here). Although the video's narration describes a baseless conspiracy tangent, the NEXRAD imagery linked in the post's caption, and making up the visuals of the video, is authentic unaltered NEXRAD data from April 16, 17and 18, 2024.
Archived radar loops (one for every day) have been hosted on the website pauljhurtado.com. According to his website bio, Paul Hurtado is an associate professor in the Mathematics and Statistics department, and a faculty member of the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology (EECB) graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno. While the post on Facebook we are focused on relies on videos from Hurtado's website, it does not appear that Hurtado and Houston (the author of this conspiracy trope) are associated in any way. Lead Stories has reached out to Hurtado for comment and will update this article if we receive a reply.
On the introduction page for the Radar Loop Archive, Hurtado offers a list of links and explains:
The purpose of this archive is to document bird migration events. See Surveillance of the Aerosphere Using Weather Radar (SOAR) for something similar. For more information on 'birding by radar' and night migration, check out the following online resources:
Lead Stories reached out to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology to see if the "blue pulse" visible in the archived NEXRAD loops had anything to do with nighttime bird migration. Our query, which included a link to the Rumble video titled, "14 HOURS of MICROWAVE PULSES over the USA," was forwarded to the migration ecologist Adriaan M. Dokter, a research associate with BirdCast, a program that monitors bird migration using weather radar. On September 25, 2024, Dokter replied via email:
Ha this is a good one. I had a quick look at the rumble video, and I can definitely confirm these are 100% percent bird echoes. You see the nice blooms appearing around each radar station about an hour after sunset, which is when birds take off in large numbers for their migration. These are mostly small passerine birds. The reason that the blooms appear circular around the radar is because the radar beam points slightly up, so the further you are from the station the higher the radar beam is sampling the air. At the edge of the circle is where the radar beam starts overshooting the layer of bird migration. So the birds are in fact everywhere, but each radar only detects them in a circular area around the station.
The BirdCast website has a Weather Surveillance Radar and Bird Migration Primer that explains that weather is not the only thing picked up by weather radar. The central panel in the graphic below shows how the "passage migration" of birds appears as they fly through the range of a NEXRAD station, and how that reading differs from that of bats, insects, clutter and precipitation.
radarclassification.jpg
(Source: birdcast.info screenshot taken on Wed Sep 25 18:33:51 2024 UTC)
The NEXRAD Base Reflectivity maps at pauljhurtado.com can be advanced frame by frame (there are two frames per hour of elapsed time) to pinpoint the appearance of the blue bloom at a NEXRAD station (National Weather Service map of stations here), thus enabling a viewer to read the timestamp (CDT) of the exact frame (noted in the image below with green oval).
Lead Stories referred to the website timeanddate.com to find the time of sunrise and sunset of a specific location on the dates in question. In the example below at the NEXRAD station for Midland, Texas, (circled in red) on the three successive nights in April 2024 that were highlighted in the post -- the sun set at 8:18, 8:19, and 8:20 p.m., and the sun rose at 7:16, 7:15 and 7:14 a.m. In the three linked NEXRAD loops, the blue "bloom" of birds migrating over Midland, Texas, is first recorded in the 9:11 p.m. frame in the loop, and has receded by the 7:11 a.m. frame on the morning of April 17, coinciding with the peak hours of night migration.
midland.jpg
(Source: pauljhurtado.com screenshot taken on Wed Sep 25 23:08:18 2024 UTC/ marked up by Lead Stories)
Lead Stories reached out to the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, and will update this article if we receive a response.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims involving radar can be found here.

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  Sarah Thompson

Sarah Thompson lives with her family and pets on a small farm in Indiana. She founded a Facebook page and a blog called “Exploiting the Niche” in 2017 to help others learn about manipulative tactics and avoid scams on social media. Since then she has collaborated with journalists in the USA, Canada and Australia and since December 2019 she works as a Social Media Authenticity Analyst at Lead Stories.


 

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