Mid-20th century America was dealing with what it does best: a self-inflicted identity crisis dressed up as a national emergency. Enter the labor problem. Or, more specifically, the Mexican labor problem. By the 1950s, the U.S. had invited in hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers through the Bracero Program—a guest-worker system launched during World War II to keep American crops from rotting in fields while our men were off fighting Nazis.

From 1967 to 1972, deep in the murky haze of the Vietnam War, Operation Popeye unfolded — not as a myth, but as a classified weather manipulation campaign. Officially denied for years, this operation didn’t just flirt with science fiction; it punched a hole in the clouds and made it rain.