In 1947, two days after clipping Cuba and Florida, a hurricane was drifting out into the Atlantic. All predictions had it remaining at sea without further landfall, making it the perfect test subject for the newly minted Project Cirrus, a U.S. government- backed project bent on discovering a way to disable deadly hurricanes. The researchers planned to seed the hurricane’s clouds with dry ice, hoping that the ice would interact with the clouds and disrupt the cyclone’s internal structure, thus weakening it. So on Oct. 13, 1947, a plane flew over the storm and dumped 80 kilograms of dry ice into the storm’s swirling clouds.
What happened next was a worstcase scenario: Instead of dissipating, the storm furiously swung nearly 130 degrees to the west and smashed into Georgia, where it caused $2 million worth of damage. Threats of lawsuits soon followed, with Georgia residents blaming the government for the devastation. Project Cirrus was all-but shut down before it truly began, and any research into weather manipulation was repudiated for decades.
