On Sunday afternoon, Michael Meyer, the founder of anti-government extremist group Veterans on Patrol, posted a warning on his Telegram channel.
“Due to the recent weather weapon deployed against Texas, which resulted in a high number of child murders, efforts to eliminate this military treason are being escalated,” Meyer, who is commonly known as Lewis Arthur, wrote.
Hours later, a man broke into an enclosure containing the NextGen Live Radar system operated by News 9 in Oklahoma City, damaging its power supply and briefly knocking it offline. The man also damaged CCTV cameras monitoring the site, but footage shared by News 9 shows the cameras captured a clear image of his face before they were destroyed.
Captain Valerie Littlejohn of the Oklahoma City Police Department tells WIRED that no arrests have been made but that the department is “aware of the Veterans on Patrol group.”
Meyer, who declined to tell WIRED whether he knew the identity of the perpetrator, says the attack was part of what he calls Operation Lone Wolf, adding that he’s in discussion online with over a dozen people who are willing to carry out similar attacks.
“Anyone that's going out to eliminate a Nexrad, if they haven't harmed life, and they're doing it according to the videos that we're providing, they are part of our group,” Meyer tells WIRED. “We're going to have to take out every single media's capabilities of lying to the American people. Mainstream media is the biggest threat right now.”
Nexrads refer to Next Generation Weather Radar systems used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to detect precipitation, wind, tornadoes, and thunderstorms. Meyer says that his group wants to disable these as well as satellite systems used by media outlets to broadcast weather updates.
The attack on the News 9 weather radar system comes amid a sustained disinformation campaign on social media platforms including everyone from extremist figures like Meyer to elected GOP lawmakers. What united these disparate figures is that they were all promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that the devastating flooding in Texas last weekend was caused not by a month’s worth of rain falling in the space of just a few hours—the intensity of which, meteorologists say, was difficult to predict ahead of time—but by a targeted attack on American citizens using directed energy weapons or cloud seeding technology to manipulate the weather. The result has not only been possible damage to a radar system but death threats against those who are being wrongly blamed for causing the floods.
“I think that we've probably received in excess of 100 explicit death threats on either email or X, [with] probably about one order of magnitude more calls for my incarceration,” Augustus Doricko, the founder of cloud seeding company Rainmaker, tells WIRED.
“NOAA is aware of recent threats against NEXRAD weather radar sites and is working with local and other authorities in monitoring the situation closely,” NOAA spokesperson Erica Grow Cei tells WIRED.