Anti-government group threatens crucial weather radars, NOAA warns
An anti-government group is making threats against weather equipment that it says is a “weather weapon” controlled by the military, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned employees.
In emails widely shared with National Weather Service staff this month and obtained by The Washington Post, the NOAA Office of Security warned of threats it said are being coordinated by Veterans on Patrol, an extremist group motivated by anti-government beliefs and conspiracy theories.
NOAA’s central office said in the emails that there were no specific or credible threats at this time, but it did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we are asking all regions to notify their field offices and radar technicians to maintain increased vigilance when at or near radar sites,” NOAA’s central office informed leadership across the country in a May 1 memo, which advised NWS staff to notify local law enforcement of any suspicious behavior.
Experts who track domestic extremism say the group has not taken overtly violent action before, but they say its rhetoric comes amid a rise in domestic extremism fueled by conspiracy theories about the government’s legitimacy. Veterans on Patrol often mobilizes in communities hit by disasters, as it did in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and criticizes the government response.
Veterans on Patrol’s messaging is “just another cog in the wheel of anti-government conspiracy theories,” according to Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
Veterans on Patrol on Wednesday posted a response from founder Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer to The Post’s requests for comment to its account on the social media app Telegram. Meyer said the group will move forward with its plans to target the radars.
“We intend to take as many NexRads offline as possible once our attack simulations have prepared us,” Meyer wrote. He said he had “full authority” to do so. Meyer said the “attack simulations” would go until June but potentially into August, without giving details about the operations.
Meyer, who is not a veteran, originally founded the group as Walking for the Forgotten Ministry, according to Baumgartner and the Southern Poverty Law Center. It first aimed to raise public awareness of the disproportionate rates of suicides among veterans, before embracing vigilantism and conspiracy theories like QAnon, the SPLC said.
NOAA said Veterans on Patrol was recruiting people for “penetration drills” on locations hosting Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) systems, which are composed of white, spherical Doppler weather radars that detect precipitation, wind and thunderstorms. The equipment is also operated by the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Air Force to chart aircraft, according to NOAA.
Veterans on Patrol believes the infrastructure is a “weather weapon” controlled by the military against Americans, NOAA wrote in an email. The group’s leadership wrote in repeated messages to Telegram that the equipment was “poisoning our skies.”
The group shared images of radar sites last week, encouraging followers to investigate whether the equipment can be “easily sabotaged.” Messages sent Sunday identified an unspecified NEXRAD site supposedly in Northern California that was visited by a “lone wolf.”
The group also said it had “boots on the ground” gathering information in Washington and Oklahoma. The Veterans on Patrol Telegram group has more than 6,000 followers.
The group has a controversial past, including encouraging armed individuals to conduct border patrols in Arizona, going as far as illegally holding migrants, Baumgartner said.
Similar to other far-right groups, VOP recruits people by offering itself up as a “safe haven” to those who are struggling, he said.
“Conspiracy theories prey on the vulnerable, and they prey on those seeking answers to the questions that they have about their own lives,” Baumgartner said.
Veterans on Patrol drew national attention in October when members descended on parts of western North Carolina days after Hurricane Helene devastated the region with massive flooding.
At one relief center in a grocery store parking lot in the town of Lake Lure, members of the group began leading an effort to collect and disseminate donated supplies, including bottled water, food and clothing.
But when it became clear to some residents that the group was spreading misinformation — including claims that the government somehow steered Helene into the region so it could take land and harvest minerals, and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was directing aid toward undocumented immigrants, terrorists and criminals — they pushed back against the group, prompting it to abandon the relief site, The Post previously reported.
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• Razzan Nakhlawi contributed.