Myrna Klupenger

Can consciousness participate in physical processes at scales larger than the brain? This presentation investigates the controversial but historically persistent concept of weather-working through three complementary lenses: shamanism, parapsychology, and orgone energy. Rather than treating rainmaking traditions, psychokinetic claims, and Reichian cloudbusting as separate investigations, we examine them as distinct interpretive frameworks for a shared question: whether intention, attention, ritual, or altered states of consciousness can ever result in measurable atmospheric change. First, weather-working is situated within shamanic and Indigenous traditions, where weather is approached relationally rather than mechanically: as a living field of reciprocal participation involving land, community, emotion, and ceremonial practice. We then consider the parapsychological literature on mind-matter interaction, especially field consciousness and group-intention studies, as a possible bridge between first-person reports and empirical methods. Throughout, we ground the inquiry in established atmospheric science, asking how anomalous claims might be evaluated within the ordinary dynamics of moisture, instability, and chaos theory. Two case studies are presented and detailed. The first, “Rain on the Parade,” recreates Roger Nelson’s “Wishing for Good Weather” natural experiment by examining long-term rainfall patterns surrounding the Florence, Oregon, Rhododendron Festival. Using historical precipitation records, the study asks whether a community’s coherent desire for a rain-free public event corresponds with anomalously reduced rainfall during the festival period relative to surrounding days. In an analysis using three-day bins centered on the festival period, rainfall during the festival was significantly reduced relative to surrounding periods, with an estimated probability of 1 in 10,000 under the null hypothesis. The second case study examines a 2016 rain-enhancement experiment in California, designed during extreme drought conditions around an already unstable convective atmosphere. The weather-worker targeted selected cities during a defined meditation window, with special attention to the cities of Bakersfield and Visalia. Radar observations showed noteworthy convective developments near the intended targets, including a later thunderstorm near Visalia after ordinary daytime instability was already decreasing. While not proof of a consciousness-atmosphere interaction, these qualitative results, obtained under predefined target and timing conditions, suggest a promising basis for future prospective experiments. There are broader philosophical implications to this line of work. The atmosphere may be an unusually valuable natural laboratory for consciousness studies because it is a nonlinear dynamical system in which small perturbations can, under the right conditions, become amplified. If mind-matter interaction exists but is ordinarily subtle, atmospheric processes may offer a domain where small effects could become more observable through instability, thresholds, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Given the long and persistent historical claims of large weather-working effects, this may be a particularly useful place to look. Weather-working therefore invites a disciplined, open inquiry into the hard problem: not only how matter gives rise to experience, but whether experience has any place within the behavior of the physical world.

Myrna Klupenger received her Master of Science degree in Integrative Holistic Health with a focus on energy medicine. She created and taught an introductory class to Energy Medicine at her local community college. Her 2015 master’s thesis investigated the effect of human intention on the weather.

Dani Caputi received her PhD in Atmospheric Science at the University of California, Davis in 2020. Her dissertation helped piece together the meteorological story of how ozone pollution episodes happen in California. Dani pursued consciousness research as a secondary academic endeavor, investigating the possible links between chaos theory and human intention.

Myrna Klupenger and Dani Caputi, co-authors, will soon publish Rainmakers and Weather-Workers: How People Influence the Weather.