WHERE HAVE ALL THE INSECTS GONE? Satellites are taking them, every one

The least noticed and greatest assault on Earthly life rains on us from the sky. Nature’s wires strung above us from horizon to horizon, carrying the electricity that helps power our bodies, and the information that informs our growth, healing, and daily lives, now carries dirty electricity — millions of frequencies and pulsations that confuse our cells and organs, and dim our nervous systems, be we humans, elephants, birds, insects, fish, or flowering plants.

The pulsations pollute the Earth beneath our feet, surround us in the air through which we fly, course through the oceans in which we swim, flow through our veins and our meridians, and enter us through our leaves and our roots. The planetary transformer that used to gentle the solar wind now agitates, inflames.

The lake pictured above is the United Kingdom’s largest. Located in Northern Ireland, Lough Neagh swarms so densely with flies every spring and summer that residents shut their windows against the living smoke. Clothes left out on a line are covered with them. So is any windshield on a vehicle traveling around the lough’s 90-mile shoreline. Until 2023.

Last year, unbelievably, no flies were to be seen. Windshields and hanging clothes were bare of them. None flew into open windows. Other species that used to eat them were gone as well — ducks, frogs, fish, eels, and predatory insects. Fly larvae were not there to keep the lake bottom clean. Little was alive in the lough except an overgrowth of algae. “Has the ecosystem of the UK’s largest lake collapsed?” asked The Guardian in a February 19, 2024 article.

Has the ecosystem of the entire Earth collapsed? we ask, for the same is happening all over, according to reports I have been receiving for a year from almost everywhere on every continent.

56 Years of Global Vandalism

On June 13, 1968, the United States completed its launch of the world’s first constellation of military satellites. Twenty-eight of them, more than twice as many satellites as were in orbit around the Earth until then, were lofted to an altitude of 18,000 miles, in the heart of the outer Van Allen radiation belt. The “Hong Kong” flu pandemic began two weeks later and lasted for almost two years.

For the next three decades, the skies slowly filled up with hundreds of satellites, mostly for military purposes. Then in the late 1990s, cell phones became popular.

On May 17, 1998, a company named Iridium completed its launch of a fleet of 66 satellites into the ionosphere, at an altitude of only 485 miles, and began testing them. They were going to provide cell phone service to the general public from anywhere on earth. Each satellite aimed 48 separate beams at the earth’s surface, thus dividing the planet into 3,168 cells. Reports of insomnia came from throughout the world.

Iridium’s satellites began commercial service on September 23, 1998. The effect was devastating. I contacted 57 people in my network in 6 countries, plus two nurses, one physician, and a support group for patients. 86% of the people I interviewed, and the majority of patients and support group members, became ill on Wednesday, September 23 exactly, with headaches, dizziness, nausea, insomnia, nosebleeds, heart palpitations, asthma attacks, ringing in the ears, etc. One person said it felt like a knife went through the back of her head early Wednesday morning. Another had stabbing pains in the chest. Some, including me, were so sick we weren’t sure we were going to live. We were all acutely ill for up to three weeks. I suddenly lost my sense of smell on September 23, and did not recover it for six years. Mortality statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control revealed a 4% to 5% rise in the national death rate beginning the last week in September and lasting two weeks. Some people reported a reddish sky the night of September 23.

In early December 1998, I again received telephone calls from far and wide asking me what had changed. Orbcomm, providing data service to industries, had gone commercial on November 30 with 28 satellites orbiting 500 miles up.

On July 25, 1999, another company, Globalstar, achieved worldwide cell phone coverage with 32 satellites, 876 miles up, and began testing. I again received calls from people who were certain the earth felt different again.

On February 28, 2000, Globalstar completed its constellation of 48 satellites and went commercial. Nausea, headaches, leg pain, and respiratory problems were widespread, both among people who called themselves electrically sensitive and people who did not. The effects were felt starting on Friday, February 25, the previous business day.

Iridium, which had gone bankrupt in August 1999, resumed full commercial cell phone service worldwide on March 30, 2001 after signing a contract with the U.S. military. The night of March 30 was accompanied by an even more intense and widespread red sky than the one that had accompanied its initial launch of service two and a half years previously. A red aurora was seen in the northern hemisphere as far south as Mexico, as well as in the southern hemisphere. There was a catastrophic loss of Kentucky race horse foals in late April and early May, and since mares abort several weeks to a month after a viral infection or other triggering event, this put the triggering event at about the end of March. Similar foaling problems were reported at the same time from Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland, Texas, northern Michigan, and Peru. Breeders also reported both newborn and older horses with unusual eye problems, and adult horses with pericarditis.

On June 5, 2001, Iridium added data to its voice service, including connection to the Internet. Hoarseness was a prominent complaint of many who contacted me during the next few weeks.

For the next two decades, Iridium and Globalstar were the

GLOBAL EXTENT OF BIRD ARMAGEDDON

Anders Brunstad alerted me to the installation of one of the most powerful radar stations in the world on the Varanger Peninsula in Finnmark, Norway just before tens of thousands of birds fell dead all over the peninsula. The southern and eastern coasts of the peninsula also have 4G+ and, increasingly, 5G service, added recently.

At Ekkerøy Nature Reserve, on the southern coast of the peninsula, at least 15,000 endangered kittiwakes died at the end of July and beginning of August 2023. They nest there in the summer on high cliffs where they are directly in the line of fire of the radar, which is 50 kilometers away. The restaurant at Ekkerøy was forced to close for the summer because it was “raining down” dead birds. The total population of these seabirds in Norway was only about 50,000. Dead terns and other kinds of gulls have also been collected. Half of the cranes at Ekkerøy have died.

The radar, called Globus III, was built by the United States on the island of Vardøya in Vardø, the easternmost city in Norway, which is across a bay from northern Russia. It appears to be part of a civil defense network called the Space Fence. Details about this site have been kept secret, but I found a Request for Information published on February 22, 2022 on the U.S. government’s website, SAM.gov. It states:

“This system is a one-of-a kind design which will be fielded in 2023. The program is a bi-national, collaborative specialized collection system. The GLOBUS program is a dual band ground-based radar system consisting of an S-band solid state phased array, an X-band dish antenna, an Integrated System Controller (ISC), and a Mission Communications Suite (MCS) hosted at an Outside Continental United States (OCONUS) location.”

Other Space Fence radars are located on Kwajalein Island in the Marshall Islands, and in Western Australia. These S-band (2 GHz to 4GHz) phased array radars each have 36,000 transmitting antennas, a peak power of 2.7 MW and, when focused into a narrow beam that scans the sky in all directions, a peak effective radiated power of several billion watts.

The conflagration is not confined to Finnmark, or to Norway. Last summer I reported on mass deaths of nesting seabirds in locations near new antennas in the Netherlands and France (Birds on Texel Island; Sea Birds’ Last Refuges). This summer the situation is immensely worse. The continued proliferation around the world of 4G and 5G cell towers and antennas, as well as offshore wind farms, has killed millions of wild birds on five continents, together with foxes, skunks, raccoons, fishers, badgers, martens, black bears, grizzly bears, bobcats, lynx, mountain lions, wild boar, otters, Virginia opossums, seals, penguins, and other animals.

Last year, 40% of the Dalmatian pelicans nesting in Greece died, along with 20% of those in Romania, and large numbers in Montenegro and Albania. By May 2023, more than 50,000 dead wild birds of all kinds had been reported in the United Kingdom, 40,000 in eastern Canada, and tens of thousands in the United States. By July 31, 2023, China was reporting 5,100 dead birds in Tibet. Reports of mortality have come from every state in the United States, across 129 species of birds. Huge numbers of bald eagles have died. Just in November and December 2022, more than 50,000 seabirds died along the coast of Peru, including 16,890 Peruvian pelicans and 4,324 brown boobies, both endangered in Peru. In Chile, as of January 1, 2023, perhaps 10,000 seabirds had died, including pelicans, kelp gulls, Belcher’s gulls, grey gulls, guanay cormorants, Peruvian boobies, elegant terns, and turkey vultures.

On May 9, 2023, the Chilean government reported the deaths of 27,977 seabirds, and on July 21, 2023, the Peruvian government reported the deaths of 519,541 seabirds. These represented birds of 65 species. In addition, Chile reported the deaths of 2,517 Humboldt penguins, 460 Magellanic penguins, 16,856 sea lions, and smaller numbers of dolphins, porpoises, otters and other kinds of seals, while Peru reported the deaths of 9,314 sea lions and 100 other sea mammals. According to a report by the OFFLU, a global network of expertise on animal influenza, Chile has lost at least 13% of its Humboldt penguins, Peru has lost at least 36% of its Peruvian pelicans, and Chile and Peru together have lost at least 9% of their sea lions.

Ornithologists are all blaming this catastrophe on avian influenza, in spite of the fact that most of the dead birds are testing negative for any influenza virus, and the ones that test positive have all different variants of the virus so could not be transmitting it to one another, let alone to bears and penguins. For example, 233 dead birds were examined for flu virus by the Norwegian Veterinary Institute between August 14 and October 1, 2023. They found highly pathogenic H5N1 virus in 8 birds, highly pathogenic H5N5 in 2 birds, highly pathogenic H5Nx (other subtypes) in 2 birds, low pathogenic H5Nx in 6 birds, “other Influenza A virus” in 8 birds, and no virus at all in 207 birds.

Yet the United States is already stockpiling a vaccine against H5N1 in case it spreads to human beings and causes a pandemic.

The disappearance of bugs has also been in the news. Dr. Norman Leppla, a professor of entomology at the University of Florida, said that state’s lovebug infestation has completely vanished. They used to come in massive numbers in the spring and fall around May and September with a little variation depending on if you are in the northern or southern part of the state. “It’s not subtle, they’re really not here this season,” he said in an interview published October 5, 2023. But no one is blaming that on “avian influenza.”

Wind farms are also devastating birds, as documented by German scientists in an article published in Nature

Low-radiation reserve on Texel Island, early June 2023

SEA BIRDS’ LAST REFUGES

All over the Earth, birds — symbols of freedom and joy — have been disappearing, and unless we stop killing them, they will never more enliven our skies and imaginations. They are terns, seagulls, avocets, gannets, skuas, guillemots, puffins, oystercatchers, ducks, geese, godwits, pheasants, magpies, sanderlings, storks, cranes, pelicans, herons, swans, loons, sparrows, pigeons, red-winged blackbirds, owls, cormorants, grebes, dunlins, crows, ravens, bald eagles, hawks, falcons, vultures, all of them vanishing from the landscapes of our homes, forests, sea coasts and minds. It rarely makes the news, and a world grown accustomed to ever-dwindling resources and diminishing life has not been paying attention. The warning of a Silent Spring, sounded sixty years ago like a trumpet’s blare, has shrunken from a year-round emergency to the almost-meaningless ritual of Earth Day, celebrated just once a year.

But last spring, during May and June, the world was awakened to shocking tales and heart-rending photographs of dead seabirds littering their breeding grounds all over the Northern Hemisphere, nowhere so vividly as in the De Petten Nature Reserve on the island of Texel in the Netherlands, where the corpses of Sandwich terns littered the ground as if they had fallen dead out of the sky in mid-flight:

Texel Island, early June 2022

Ornithologists and bird conservation organizations, reflexively, said to themselves and the world, “This must be bird flu,” and they dressed in hazmat suits and masks as they wandered among the avian graveyards with their specimen collectors and testing equipment, while ignoring obvious signs to the contrary. Bird flu, they pronounced, is so contagious and deadly that it travels round the world in days, spreads like water between species, and kills entire colonies in weeks. While ignoring the fact that two Dutch colonies of Sandwich terns just 20 miles apart during the same breeding season had completely different outcomes: Waterdunen, whose 7,000 nesting birds were completely wiped out, and Yerseke Moer, whose smaller colony suffered zero mortality. That in France, 3,000 Sandwich terns at Platier d’Oye were entirely killed while thousands of pairs of Sandwich terns at Polder de Sébastopol had no disease at all. That bird flu was an autumn and winter disease and had never before been known to occur in spring or summer. And that it had never before affected so many different kinds of birds at once.

But this was not “bird flu”, it was radiation sickness from cell towers, as documented in my newsletter of July 28, 2022. Eighteen new 4G antennas had been added to three cell towers located at De Petten, within the territory where the birds were breeding, just days before they began dying. And a large number of other antennas and towers were aimed at the reserve from across a busy shipping lane whose traffic made heavy use of those antennas. While Yerseke Moer is host to no cell towers, has far fewer antennas aimed at it, and is in an isolated location, not near a major port, and not on a shipping lane.

Similarly, in France, dozens of new 4G and 5G antennas had just been added to towers near and at the reserve at Platier d’Oye, located near the port of Calais, while the Polder de Sébastopol is on an isolated island with no towers, few human residents or visitors and far from any shipping traffic.

One year later

In August 2022, researchers were astonished to find that 600 pairs of Sandwich terns — at least some of whom had come from the colonies that had been wiped out — had decided to try again so late in the season. They laid their eggs and raised at least 300 young birds, successfully, during July and August in a new location on Texel Island, a beach at the Prince Hendrik Sand Dike, owned by the water authority, Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier (HHNK). And this spring in 2023, the Prince Hendrik Sand Dike is filled with almost 3,000 breeding pairs of Sandwich terns, while a second reserve — the island of De Bliek in the Haringvliet — has more than 2,000 breeding pairs. These two colonies, and five smaller colonies, total about half the number of Sandwich terns of previous years. They are thriving, but all of last spring’s disastrous breeding grounds, many of which had been the breeding grounds for this species for years or decades, have been abandoned. “It is striking: the areas with colonies that were heavily affected by bird flu last year remained vacant this year, including those of Waterdunen (ZL), Wagejot and De Petten on Texel (NH), Griend and De Putten near Camperduin (NH)”, wrote Ruud van Beusekom of Vogelbescherming Nederland (BirdLife Netherlands) on June 5, 2023.

Now everyone is assuming that the birds nesting successfully this year have acquired immunity from the H5N1 influenza virus. But the areas chosen this year by the Sandwich terns are lower-radiation areas. The Prince Hendrik Sand Dike, the only breeding ground for these birds this year on the island of Texel, is the quietest, least visited beach on the island. The nearest antennas are about 3 kilometers away, and because of the small number of visitors and ships they are little used and emit little radiation. Likewise De Bliek, in the Haringvliet, is an island with no people and no antennas in a closed waterway visited by few ships.

Another anomaly not explained by researchers is the fact that removing all dead birds from the colonies last year increased mortality: “Last year it appeared that collecting carcasses in colonies has a negative effect on the further spread of bird flu,” wrote Odessa Langeveld on May 12 of this year. In other words, leaving virus-infected carcasses to rot on the breeding grounds decreased the spread of the disease, while removing them increased its spread. But no one is considering that the teams of workers removing the carcasses on a daily basis were all

PLANETARY EMERGENCY

The Earth needs your help. Now.

Many are the assaults on our planet. The oceans—Jacques Cousteau said it already in 1970—are dying. The majestic wilderness is no more. The very oxygen we breathe is being converted to carbon dioxide.

Others are wrestling with those problems, and they are not going to be solved overnight. But there is one that must be: we must leave space alone.

On March 29, 2018, the Federal Communications Commission gave its approval to SpaceX’s plan to launch an unprecedented 4,425 satellites into low orbit around the Earth. And that’s only the beginning. SpaceX has applied to the FCC to increase the number of satellites to 42,000 in order to provide “ultrafast, lag-free Internet” to every square inch of the earth. 5G from space. The name of SpaceX’s project is “Starlink.” As of May 2022, Starlink already has about 2,500 operating satellites in low-earth orbit.

The global electrical circuit, which sustains all life, is about to be seriously disturbed unless we act.

Recent History

In 1997, in my first book, Microwaving Our Planet, in the last chapter, titled “The Danger from Satellites,” I wrote: “The proliferation of satellites we are about to witness—unless this world wakes up soon—is mind boggling, and nobody seems to have considered that popping thousands of them up there like so much confetti might have consequences for our atmosphere and our climate.” I wrote about the expected ozone loss; the destruction of the Van Allen belts; global warming from the addition of water vapor to the stratosphere; toxic wastes; groundwater pollution; space junk; microwave radiation; and the vandalism of the night sky. My 1997 book is posted here, courtesy of the Spanish website AVAATE, one of the best websites on this issue: www.avaate.org/IMG/doc/Microwaving_Our_Planet_firstenberg.doc

A year later the radiation problem asserted itself. On September 23, 1998, the world’s first satellite phones became operational. Service was provided by 66 satellites in low orbit around the Earth, launched by the Iridium Corporation. They unleashed a new kind of rain that turned the sky red and emptied it of birds for a couple of weeks.

A six-nation telephone survey was done of electrically sensitive people, support groups, and nurses and physicians serving this population. The results: 86% of electrically sensitive people and a majority of patients and support group members became ill on Wednesday, September 23 exactly, with typical symptoms of electrical illness including headaches, dizziness, nausea, insomnia, nosebleeds, heart palpitations, asthma attacks, ringing in the ears, etc. Follow-ups revealed that some of these people were acutely ill for up to three weeks. Some were so sick they weren’t sure they would live. In the United States the national death rate rose by 4% to 5% for two weeks. During those two weeks, very few birds were seen in the sky and thousands of homing pigeons failed to return home in pigeon races throughout much of the country. This was all documented in No Place to Hide, Vol. 2, No. 1, Feb. 1999, pp. 3-4.

The second satellite service, Globalstar, began commercial service on Monday, February 28, 2000. Widespread reports of nausea, headaches, leg pain, respiratory problems, depression, and lack of energy began on Friday, February 25, the previous business day, and came from people both with and without electrical sensitivity. See No Place To Hide, Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2000, p. 18.

Iridium, which had gone bankrupt in the summer of 1999, was resurrected by a contract with the United States Armed Forces. On March 30, 2001, commercial service resumed. Again the sky turned red. Again came reports of nausea, flu-like illness and feelings of oppression. But the events that made the news were catastrophic losses of race horse foals that were reported throughout the United States and as far away as Peru. On June 5, 2001, Iridium added data and Internet to its satellite phone service. Again came widespread reports of nausea, flu-like illness and oppression, and this time also hoarseness. See No Place To Hide, Vol 3, No. 2, Nov. 2001, p. 15.

Additional details are provided in chapter 17 of my new book, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life (AGB Press, 2017).

Between 2001 and 2019, our skies did not essentially change. Iridium and Globalstar, operating 66 and 40 satellites respectively, were still the only providers of satellite phones. The amount of data raining on us all from space was still dominated by those two fleets. The predicted fleets of thousands of satellites had not materialized. But they are doing so now. Everything we know and love is at stake—not just hawks and geese, pigeons and race horses, not just the human race, but life itself. This is a mortal threat not just to our children and grandchildren, but to all of us.

The Details

The biggest planned fleet of satellites is the Starlink constellation being launched by Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX. But there are about 150 other companies competing with Starlink, several of which are already launching satellites. The number of satellites proposed to be operated by all of these companies totals, incredibly, more than 442,000. Almost all are proposed to be orbited at altitudes ranging from 210 to 700 miles in altitude. They will all operate at millimeter wave frequencies and they will all be phased arrays. Each satellite will have thousands of antenna elements that will aim focused, steerable beams at any desired point on the surface of the earth. The effective radiated power of each beam from each of the satellites can range up to 5,000,000 watts, depending on its altitude and how many simultaneous customers it is serving. The satellites will communicate both with individual users and with gateway earth stations, of which there will be several hundred just in the United States for just the Starlink constellation.

One of the other companies planning a megaconstellation is the UK’s OneWeb. Its founder and Executive Chairman is Greg Wyler. To build and launch its constellation of 7,088