Citation Needed - Storm Chasers

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chasing-tornadoes   National Geographic article on Storm Chasing called Chasing Tornadoes.

Hello and welcome to citation needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Noah. I'm going to be leading this expedition, but I'll need some assistance. First up, the earth, wind, and fire of the podcast, Tom, Cecil, and Heath. Makes sense. I do have a natural funk about me. Nice. These guys are so jealous that I am wind. So jealous right now. I'm so mad that you're wind. Are you earth? Are you fire? I think I'm Earth. You're Earth on fire. Yeah. I gave you the best one.

I expected to win it would just be a fire chook. It is. And I'm jealous. And we're also excited to welcome in the world's leading Eli substitute from the No World's Experience. And skeptics with a K is the one and only Michael Marshall. Thanks very much. I am in my element to be here.

Oh, well done, sir. And before we get going, I want to remind everybody that our patron dollars don't just go to frivolous shit like rent and food. Sometimes we need to pay ransom. Incidentally, Eli will be back next week, but how many fingers he has may or may not be up to your willingness to pony up some fucking Patreon donations. If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept phenomenon, or event what we'll be talking about today? Today we're going to be talking about storm chasing. Oh, awesome. So Tom, you read an article

about it, and it's a metaphor for your daily existence. Are you, you ready to tell us about storm chasing? I am at the very least ready to read about storm chasing. All right. All right. So, Tom, tell us about your subject. But more importantly, tell us about yourself. Look, sometimes when I'm looking for articles to use for this show. Let's go around to icebreakers before we get into it. Sometimes when I'm looking for articles to use for this show, I come across one like today's article, an article so breathlessly in love with its own importance. It forgets it's just a long book report about the movie Twister, which this article from National Geographic totally is, and which is also full of purple pros and hyperbo-filled

bullshit, and it's perfect recitation needed as a result. I need to share it with you. And with Helen Hunt, who I'm quite sure as a listener. Hi, Alan. Wait, seriously? Yeah. Oh, and also, I edited out all the boring sciencey bits. If you want to learn real things about tornadoes, this just is not the place. Yeah, here in the UK, we call them tornadoes. It's like a tornado tornado situation. Before we get into it, Tom, do you want to tell us how this topic is like the struggle of man-finding meaning in a cold, uncaring universe? Well, you know, I would like to, Cecil, but, you know, of course, the image of a man huddled underground while a churning maelstrom above reduces all of his worldly possessions to rubble and ruin.

Okay, don't turn this joke on me. Curling his efforts and his dreams and the sweat of his brow and air like. the play things of a capricious god laughing at our desire to simply build something to be able to get to maelstrom as quick as he did right anything he's like this every week isn't he turning saline and secure safe in a world defined by the random cruelties of our faiths well he is cecil just doesn't work as a metaphor for me is what i'm saying all right this is chasing tornadoes from national geographic and this is by carston peter Down dinner hour on June to 24, 2003, the entire hamlet of Manchester, South Dakota, walls and rooftops, sheds and fences, TVs, refrigerators, and leftover casseroles.

Lifts from the earth and disappears into a dark, thick, half-mile-wide tornado. The pieces whirl high and the twisters 200-mile-an-hour winds, like so much random debris swept clean from the landscape. Okay. Opening with the destruction of Manchester. But for a guy who lives in Liverpool, perfect way to welcome me up the show. Thanks, Tompahy. Yeah, right, right. It's never a good sign when the writer's pad and the word count with a list that includes leftover casseroles in his opening paragraph.

I'm just going to say it. A mile or so north of town, 36-year-old Rex Geyer pulls the curtains back from the window of an upstairs bedroom and watches Manchester disappear. Rex stands frozen. The tornado seems to be standing still, too, not moving one way. or the other. It takes him a fearsome minute to realize what that means that the deadly storm

is coming straight for him. Or it just came into the area and forgot what it was looking for. You know, just standing there. Tornado starts faking a phone call. What? The hospital? What? How can I run back this way?

Could have been going the other way, too, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, just as easily. Just earlier, Rex had sat down to fried chicken with his wife, Lynette, who's eight months pregnant. We had heard about some wicked tornadoes down in Woonsocket where Linette's from, he would say later.

Could we not arm our British guest with a place name that American? Just ease him into Woon Socket. I'm writing it down to bully you guys forever. Woon socket, the left over casserole capital of America. He's writing that down from his home and for, I'm sure, or whatever. We were keeping her eyes on the TV, and I was looking outside and I said,

Well, geez, it don't really look that bad. But now rain is pounding down, obscuring the monster storm, bearing down on his two-story farmhouse. Rex's brother, Dan, who lives up the road, charges into the house. He almost rips a screen door off the hinges, and he's hollering. We got to get in the basement. But I just saw the Manchester debris and don't think we'll survive. into basement. So we pile into Dan's car.

Should I turn the lights and TV off when that ass? She hasn't seen the storm. The tornadoes right outside. I saw you guys turn the lights off. I saw you do that. I know you're home. Fuck you. We're making eye contact.

You're an asshole. They're trying to hide from the tornado or like they're hiding from trick or treaters. Like just pretend they're not being. You won't knock. No, no. We have to go now. They leave everything but a mobile phone.

as they flee two cars hurdle down a nearby dirt road in the opposite direction, straight at the tornado. Tim Samaras, a 45-year-old electronics engineer from Denver, and his storm-chasing partner, Pete Porter, are in a van that carries six probes, often called turtles, squat 45-pound metal discs that look like flying saucers. Through embedded sensors, the probes can measure a tornado's wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature.

Samara's mission and his passion is to plant them in the path of the funnel. His hope is that both he and the instruments survive. Everybody's hoping harder for one than the other. I have my rankings too. Photographer Carson Peter hangs halfway out the window of the other speeding car, which is driven by veteran storm chaser Gene Roe. Wait, isn't that you? That's the guy who wrote the fucking article, isn't it?

I think it is. He's going third person. He has? Oh, are we in third level gene already? By veteran storm chaser, Gene Rodin. With them is another kind of probe, a pyramid-shaped aluminum or aluminum, casing loaded with a video,

and three 35-millimeter still cameras. Tin Man, the team calls it, based on the character from the Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz, got it, yeah. Yeah. Dorothy was taken. I love this next slide. No one has ever filmed the inside of a tornado where wind can chew asphalt off a road and drive wooden splinters into tree trunks.

Karsten wants to be the first. All right. What exactly does he expect to see, though? It's just whatever stuff went into the wind, but a bit spinnier. Just film a tumble dryer on its side. You'll get the gist of the risk. It's fine. Doing my own research.

I don't know. I'm stuck. I'm stuck in the dryer. Is this a porn scenario? We're still at the very beginning here, and his prose is literally chewing the scenery. That's amazing. The chasers can hear the tornado's jet engine roar

and see its snapping power poles as they veer east onto a paved road, past the Geyer's farm, and directly into the path of the funnel. Tim skids to a halt to make a drop. We don't have time. We don't have time. Pat yelled.

The monster is plowing up ground only 100 yards, 91 meters, away, and the inflow wind is revving up as Tim leaps out just long enough to deposit a probe before scrambling back in. As the chasers speed away, they can see debris roaring in above them. Nails, wire, two by fours, whip by in winds that will soon reach 200 miles an hour. What's that in metric, by the way? 322 kilometers an hour Thank you That's very fast There's also now

Some like Saw blades and giant metal Arrowheads that they made In this thing With sensors that say Yup spinny Extra spinny Cool

I feel like how spinny Still matters Moments later The car to stop again A short distance down the road Carson and Gene Halled a 95 pound 43 kilogram

Tin man from their car on the roadside and activate the cameras while Tim drops another turtle. Two so far. Good. Good. Can I retroactively fire the editor that didn't cut the good good on this article's better? Yes. Yes. But now the tornado is chasing them.

Okay. I'm really enjoying all the way throughout the diligent conversions to Metro. clearly just to pad the word count. And I really hope we get to find out just how many liters of rain are in this tornado and what degree Celsius the air temperature is throughout. You know, maybe how many jewels of energy it contains. Heaven help them if they only give us it in foot pounds. I want jewels.

Every one of these people knows the foot pounds of torque of their truck. 100%. They blast down the road once more and Tim deploys a third probe. Tin Man and two of the three probes take direct hits. The tornado reaches... Tin Man. Yes, yes, yes. So there you go.

It has tornado in that story. The tornado reaches one probe a mere 80 seconds after Tim sets it in place. What's 80 seconds in metric? But suddenly, the fury is spent. Their tornado changes shape, stretching out long and ropey before rolling limply to the side. And then it simply evaporates. Yeah, it happens. Just give it 10 minutes and a gatorade.

It'll be ready to go together. North Dakota is really pretty. No, it isn't. Our main nowcaster. Stop trying to make nowcaster work. Is Eric Rasmussen, a tornado researcher with the University of Oklahoma and one of the brightest stars in severe storm and meteor island. Okay.

same much. Through numerara. Damned with faith praise as he was. Through numerical computer models constantly flowing weather maps and intuition. He can sit at home in his bathrobe and calculate where the best super cell will arrive each day by 6 o'clock

p.m. Magic hour for tornado formation. It's me against the atmosphere, he says. I try to outguess. fucking relax over there and put some pants on you do this your bathroom you're talking all sexual about the numbers relax

I try to out guess it how many guesses does it get with it turns out hey man we can all do shit in our bathroom we can all do this record in our bathroom it's just that most of us have more self-respect than that you can do almost anything in a bathroom you just choose it all to do that too

I would just need to get a bathroom I could get a bathroom you know Heath are you not wearing any thinking he's not even in a bathroom whatever I'm wearing Marsh. Are you peeing off the side of a yacht? You have to try and you're being off the side. Exactly one tornado probe.

That is what I'm wearing. This is a HIPAA violation. On May 25th, Eric points us to the Texas panhandle, where conditions look right for spawning a super cell. Our task is to find this insipient monster if it forms. Get just to the southeast of it.

The best position for Carston to get revealing backlight. Watch it develop and ensure we can make a getaway if things get dicey. You keep taking rights away in Texas. He's sure to spawn a cell of some kind. That is for sure. When we arrive in Texas, we're not alone. In tornado country, especially since the 1996 motion picture twister,

storm chasing has become a phenomenon. During peak season, hundreds of people fan out over tornado alley, a belt between South Dakota and Texas. doubling the region's population. Their vehicles bristle with radio antenna and radar dishes. Their dashboards outfitted with computers and satellite-linked televisions. Also truck nuts because it's still South Dakota to Texas. Everyone can read the weather maps now, said Stephen Haudanish, a lightning specialist with the National Weather Service,

whom we meet in a honky talk one night. The information is shared. We don't hide it, so we all know where to go. Back of the day, only Dave could read him. Now we're all sophisticated. Some tornado chasers think of it as a clever computer game come to life. Others become intimate with the atmosphere. The way a trail guide learns to know the woods.

Hey, relax and pants. Relax. I'm writing this in my bathrow. Recently, skilled chasers have formed companies that take tourists on tornado safaris, competing to see who can get clients the best views of the storms. But it's not like going to, say, Niagara Falls, which stays put. Tornadoes are unpredictable, and a wrong decision can be hazardous. I've seen tour buses with windows shattered from hail.

the passengers shaken but exhilarated. Wouldn't be the first time this week that ice shattered some windows. You know what I mean? We reached Texas in time, but Eric's designated storm dissipates into a ragged line of squalls that runs off into the Gulf of Mexico. We don't chase squall lines, said Anton. They don't have the vorticity.

I thought you would have driven into the Gulf of Mexico if it had been a more promising storm. Fuck you. They don't want them to get away. I didn't want to chase him. That's cool. That's what I wanted that. I'm glad.

Go out there. Go to the Gulf of Mexico. Good. Yeah. In your face. Stupid forticity. Gulf of America. They don't twist, in other words.

We caravan and the Texas panhandle for days. Merle Haggard on the radio, tooling down the straightest roads in the world, chasing storms that only lease and don't deliver. Get the fucking writing. H-B storms, Tim says, disgustedly. High precipitation, pieces of crap. Sleep and nutrition, suffer. Sometimes dinner's a bag of corn chips.

It's a beef jerky and a Coke. Okay. I mean, I get what he's trying to do, but like walking nachos are great, right? Yeah. Sounds braggy. By the middle of June, we give it up. Leaving 2001 is a good year for those who live in Tornado Alley. But a total bust for us.

Oh, nobody lost their house and their family. Tough break, y'all. But hold, so wait, so you left, we went out and ate a bunch of beef jerky, but didn't see any tornadoes in your article? Start later. Jesus, right, yeah, clearly. The following spring, 2002, that's how numbers work, we carry our own technology instead of relying on nowcasters. Tim is customized Anyway

Tim has customized his white Dodge caravan into an intimidating Stormbusters vehicle No he hasn't No There's uh no

Literally I don't know Will that flame throwers on a Dodge caravan Still not intimidating No No Guy shredding an electric guitar on top With a flame thrower Still not intimidating

Still not Intimating I know you're going to the pickup line at a middle school with that flamethrower on top. That's all you're doing right now. Also, who's he trying to intimidate? Is it the tornado? Is he trying to back the tornado into a hole?

A domed television antenna sits on the roof. Screens display weather channel broadcast, global positioning system redouts, national weather service data, and NOAA satellite images. The van is like a submersible, diving into the atmospheric sea. Is it?

Because all you've described there is the mystery machine, but for weather nerds. Squeen to the now, Dodd Caravan. Nope. A now, castor is continuously pouring through the data, says Tim, but I'd rather pour through the data myself and then look out the window to see what's developing. On the early morning of May 23rd, we're in a cheap motel room in Salina, Kansas, clutching foam coffee cups, pulling weather, reports off the internet. The Midwest is a chess board, says Anton. We stopped play last night,

but the atmosphere made several moves overnight. So we tune in to see what they were. And now we have to make our move. Kind of sucks chasing a storm in a van that can only go two spaces forward and then one to the side. It's like really awkward. Also, I'm not being funny, but my opponent went to sleep so I made several more moves.

Isn't how chess works? It's like a chess world. This is like Mario Kart in demo mode. and they think they're playing. And like the word chess felt smart. So they're... It looks promising. A heavy wind has been unloading on the prairie,

twisting the cottonwood leaves under their pale backside, leaving grain fields squirming. Such a weirdly haughty way to say that. It's been a better way to say that. Thank you. Thank you. It's weird to say, I feel like this guy wanted to fuck a cornfield,

but it would be, It would be stranger not to acknowledge it at this point, right? Oh, hey there, cottonwood leaves. Oh, the other side of the cottonwood leaf, huh? We head out with the skies overcast, like dirty fleece hanging off an old sheep. What? Thunderstorms are raging to the south. We haul across the Oklahoma border and reach again into the Texas panhandle.

By 4.40, we're in cattle country, where the towns are. raw-boned, as if the buildings had been scoured into packing crates by the prairie winds. We pull into Lipscomb, Texas. Lipscomb, come on. And a car full of local women rolls up.

Come on. Really? I can tell from my computer screen there were horny women in the area. Could be them. Yeah, there to be raw-boned, yeah. I drive a Dodge caravan ladies They're too intimidated

Are you intimidated? Don't be afraid It does have lots of cup holders Yes it does Great question Would you like to stow and go You boys bring in bad weather here It's not like we want it for you, I reply

Huh it's not like we're not used to it they were from Canada you don't know they were hot though could you imagine writing that exchange down and a car full of local women

rolls up in your article also like you're admitting we had a meaningless exchange right and you had like no reply you like that's such a stupid reply like the rest of us would go to bed that and I think it's not like it was wanted for you

that was so dumb. That was fucking this idiot. Put an idiot in his fucking arm and the one. Right.

Also, they were there. He punched himself in the head. It was a colorful of women who were there and that made them local.

It's not like he asked them where each of them lived and checked that they were within like a five mile radius. They were local because they were there in a car. Local to him then.

Every car that rolls up to him is local to him in this way. This is just local and sense of proximate. That's not what you don't use that word for. but we're late and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm,

we won't have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to punch the core of the thunderous. Oh, strong down. Okay. Forcing our way into the Bears Cage, an area between the main updraft and the hail. It's an apt name. Chasing tornadoes.

This is why I picked this essay, this line. Chasing Torpedo. tornadoes is like hunting grislies. You want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Literally, you got to get inside and start. They're like two seconds away from talking about twist control. I like so close.

It's amazing. Nicely done. Sometimes. Say it, Tom. Say it. sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you. Shut the fuck, I.

It's raining out. Let's write 2,500 fucking words about it. Well, hopefully there's more of the old stranger from the big Lebowski wisdom to come. But for that, I guess you'll have to wait for the other side of apropos of nothing. All right, gentlemen, it looks like it's. too late for us to go around the back door so we're going to have to punch straight up the funnel. We're going to have to...

We're going to have to what now? Yeah, I know. It's dangerous. But if we edge along the veil of the skirt long enough, I'm sure we'll find a way to slip in. Okay. Yeah, sure, we'll have to power through her hymen of rain, Shear, but...

Terrence, Karets, can I stop you for a second? We don't have a lot of time. Okay, it's just that pretty much all the stuff you say about storms seems like really sexual yeah sexual yeah like crazy sexual

is this because I described the hail as milky white ribbons of stormy manhood well it's not not because you said that I think you guys are reading too much into this stuff

Terrence Terence don't take this the wrong way but do you want to fuck a tornado no no okay you all heard him say that

with a question mark right okay honestly what the fuck are we doing out here if it's not for that. I knew that's why there was the waist-high holes along the van. Just think of the suction. And we're back

when we last left off. They were punching the core with what seemed like insufficient lubrication. I guess we're going to find out Tom, what happened next man? Wow. And so, we head straight into the storm and find

ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour, 97 kilometers an hour. On a two-lane road. threatening to hydroplane visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. The hail in the Bears cage smashes windows and car tops. He shouts, grinning. Stop saying Bear cage.

Bear's cage. Oh, damn it. Bear's going to get you. The smaller stuff was kept a loft by the updraft and only the large chunks fall. It's like small meteorites banging down. No. Who is it? Yeah, except there are orders of magnitude slower.

and made of less dangerous stuff. But other than that, come on. It's raining pretty much bears now. With spares. When the storm spits us out rather than swallow, we stop to look back at the supercells steaming across the prairie. Nobody's sure whether that was added by you or that was actually in the article.

It's top of shit. shaped like a giant anvil and lightning flashes from it like artillery. Stacks of cumulonimbus clouds, pompadour from its top, and dark wisps of clouds curl like imps from the wall cloud that is dropped from its rear flank. Do imps curl? Yeah. Is that a thing? Like imps, yes.

That's why it's a famed simile. It's a very famed simile. Pompadour, the verb. They do that sometimes. They pompadour. They pompadour. The imps curling. Is that curling themselves?

or curling other things. Like, or like the Canadian thing that the Canadians do with the brooms and the... Oh, I see. Yeah, that makes sense. Oh, nice.

Did you ever watch a really small demon play that game? They're fucking crazy. It's way longer than you think, Washington on TV. It's really far away. That's where tornadoes are known to originate.

We sprint into position down a country road and how does this happen? Pull into a field full of at least 10 other chase cars. Ah, fucking map readers everywhere. This storm has the only tornado warning in the nation this evening, Tim

explains. We're standing in the right place with all the others. Down the road are the headlights of local spotters, many of them sheriff's deputies. Spotters will react on the side of caution and account for many false tornado sightings. Sheriff Nato's,

some chasers call these, but spotters' vigilance, saves lives and property. Dangerous thing about the sheriff Nato's is dodging all those flying pin on stars that come on there. I feel like the sheriff Nato should be the ones that hit primarily black and brown neighborhoods. Oh shit, dude. Okay, all these storm chasers, they're hanging out together and there's a storm about to happen. I'm picturing it's like they see it out there.

One of them's like nut check and runs out there. Why do they need to be there by themselves? Is it whole tonne? Not enough to go around. Like, there's 10 of years. It's fine. There doesn't need to be one person chasing it. 10 cars.

It's fine. It's a massive tornado. Also, how does knowing where the tornado is going to be save your property? Do you get to put your house in its basement? Well, they sell their footage to like WXY mudstick fuck or whatever it's called for the local town. So I guess, like, they only have so much budget. It's only like one of them can sell. Also, if you know what it's going to be, you can get your super intimidating truck out to scare the

turn away. That's how that it was. The supercell moves in with an immense, dark rolling tapestry of clouds that leaves us gaping. What? Hail roar. Hailstones clattering against each other as they fall from high in the storm

resonates like a Harley Davidson. The storm does not deliver a tornado, but after it passes, lightning scorches the sky for half an hour. Brad Carter, Tim's chase partner for this trip, takes his head. It took me four or five years of driving before I saw my first tornado, he says, and I've been out here nine years now. If I had seen one right away on the first

trip, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so hooked. Okay, or maybe if you lived somewhere where there was literally anything else to do, you wouldn't have spent five years chasing weather you'd never fucking seen before. The 2003 tornado season is another matter entirely. Oh my God, we are three years into this article now. You can start an article wherever you want. You can start it just whenever. You can start when something happens, for example. There you go.

Just as a starting point. It starts with an explosive string of may storms that roar through Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri, leaving entire towns for dead. But we're still either a step behind or a step ahead. Okay, it's definitely not the second one. No! We might have already. he won at chess against the storm

if you think about it. Don't think about it. On the way to Colorado, my chase partner, Scott Elder and I pull into Pierce City, Missouri, we're just two weeks before an F3 had flattened homes and left the tidy brick shops and restaurants in the town's main

street in rubble. Just one really proud pig next to his brick store that's still standing. Were they checking to see if the tornado was going to return to the scene of the crying now? They get a big ass magnifying glass and they're just walking down the street. Looking for footprints.

We don't have a grocery store left in town, says the police chief, Mike Abramovitz. It's amazing. Only one person got killed. That was James Dale Taunton, 51 years old, who had positioned himself in the doorway of the town armory, helping people who sought shelter in the building's basement. 60 survived there. By June 4th, we're in a caravan of four cars barreling back down to Texas, where we chase a supercell tagged with a tornado warning into Clayton, New Mexico. On a farm road between fallow cornfields, we find ourselves perpendicular to the storm's inflow wind.

Hail hacks at our rooftops. Red brown soil flows across the road like liquid waves. Okay, I was just curious, so I googled how do storm chasers make? make money and the answer was they don't. Like truly I could try to sell money but they mostly was money.

Love the hypothetical game because some of them have never seen a tornadoes or any of the game in theory. And then the world seems to simply disappear. I can see nothing but Tim's red

brake lights in front of us. The convoy grinds to a halt as the sandstorm rages. Its winds approaching. 70 miles an hour. 113 kilometers an hour. Tim estimates. Somewhere out there

a tornado may be brewing. Tim's van begins to rock. Do not knock right now. Whatever you do. Clearly. Anton's face turns ashen. We can't see the road. Only the tops of telephone poles. 20 minutes

pass. Tim finally radios us. His GPS shows a T intersection in the road ahead that we could reach and so we roll blindly, foot by foot out of the sandblaster. What's that in meters? You want to give us foot by foot? 30 centimeters at a time.

Some storm, Tim says later. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. We had east with dirt still caking our cars. The fenders budding tumbleweeds as big as washing machines. We learned later there was a tornado somewhere in that storm, but we sure as hell couldn't see it. But that night we found its hook hanging from the handle of the car. Amazing.

Just turn it in the back seat of the car. It got into the gas station. Is it caravan? Very intimidating. I like the sheer, Tim says, into the walkie-talkie. There are two updrafts, maybe three dead ahead of us. actually a bit of an anvil coming eastbound. We got to get off the highway and assess the situation.

Sky is now rotating majestically, and a confused bird flies into our windshield with a thump, leaving a stain of blood and feathers. Okay, weird to blame the bird for that. You hit a bird is what you're saying. And then a triangle of cloud lowers and sharpens into something pointier and leaner. It gathers into a funnel like an elephant trunk. Those are cylinders, aren't they? More than tunnels?

With the texture of soft gray cotton, it whirls like an apparition, no more than two miles. Three kilometers. From us, looking alien in the landscape, as if a spaceship had landed. So, it's happening. After three years of futility, I'm finally going to see a tornado. And I came far. Got excited. Soft gray cotton. The tornado snakes down to the fields where it's chewing up a maelstrom of soil and vegetation. It seems to stand almost still and suddenly it's gone.

It just lifts up as if the sky were withdrawing a finger back into its fist. You definitely want your first tornado to be a finger and not a fist. Absolutely. 100%. But we are still racing toward the core of the storm, which will probably spawn more tornadoes. Yeah, tornadoes stays put you back in,

like the tin man with no lube. That's the moon right there. Flashing lights and he-haw sirens of emergency vehicles roar by. The sky looks heavy enough to sink and crush us when we see another twister bullying across the fields, a squat malevolent looking wedge. But it's already passed and we're too late to catch it. We drive to Orchard, Nebraska.

The hail still pelting the cars in the approaching darkness. Anton had switched from calling the meteors to little ice bullets, which we all agree sounded more bad ass. We're gleeful just to have seen tornadoes, but Anton tosses cold water on the celebration as we heat sandwiches in a gas station microwave. Guys, stop celebrating because of what's happening in our lives right now. Just looking at that sandwich.

You got it from the thing. This is all cold water. Did you get the one hot dog from the spinning metal hot thing? We had two quality tornadoes across roads and we were out of position, he lectures. Had we been three minutes earlier to the first storm, we would have been there for deployment. This was a total project failure. Oh, well, way to suppose. all the joy out of their celebration of

reheated gas station sandwiches and time. The hot dog just sadly lowering a bottle, a Chateau Diana wine food product back on the shelf. And then the Manchester tornado

hits. When the tornado retreats into that fearful twilight, Tim and Carson find the countryside obliterated of landmarks. It's an eerie situation, says Carson. First, this beautiful perfect structure coming toward you in this smooth rushing noise and then everything is eaten up everything power poles are sucked up out of the ground all the steel wires are ripped off metal

fences and the fences are blown down flat leaving nothing but a pristine meadow it's really crazy is crazy the word you were looking for there man whole lives are ruined ancestral homes destroyed Pets killed. It's pretty weird. What? Rex Geyer and his family drive through the remains of Manchester with terror in their hearts. They look north. Their tan two-story farmhouse should be there set in a grove of trees. Please, please. But I knew right away, says Rex, there was nothing left. No trees, no house, no nothing. Just the foundation picked clean. Two large, full fuel tanks had been blown into the guise. buyer's cellar, completely filling the space.

Those tanks would have crushed anyone taking refuge from the wind. Less than an hour before Tim and Carson had left three probes and Tin Man in the path of the storm. Sobered. They now retrace their steps, hoping to find the instruments intact. I'd swear we put one of the probes here, Tim says, arriving at a crossroads, but nothing looks the same. Oh, yeah. Where could those probes have gone when the destroy everything death wind hit? It's a total mistake.

No idea. I also, I love the admission that nobody even thought to note the GPS coordinates as they're dropping the fuckers off. Come on. The air is juicy with the tang mangled vegetation. What? And evaporating. Juicy. And evaporating moisture.

Among the first of the scene, they checked the bleak remains of another missing farmhouse. Harold Yost's home, but no one's there. In Manchester, home to only six people, it seems a miracle that no one died since they all decided to ride out the storm. One couple survived by crouching in a bathtub. A neighbor was literally sucked through the wall of his trailer home.

Okay, but that was unrelated to the tornado. He just knew that hole that he drilled was going to pay off one day. The building toppled over on him, but the storm quickly whisked it off into the sky, leaving him dazed but alive. Okay, that's the story this guy tells at the bar for fucking ever. Right. Just like tornado shows up.

I get sucked out through fucking glory hole right through. It's crazy. Dick first. Yeah. Then the tornado drops the whole trailer on top of me. I'm like, hey, little help. The tornado does help.

It picks up the trailer. So yeah, I'm an airbender, NBD, whatever. Who's buying the next round? I'm an airbender. Amazing. But the turtle probes are there. The tornado has passed directly over two of them.

It's hit one probe and moved north into the cornfield, says Tim. Then it came back and crossed the road again. All right. Well, they answered a lot of scientific questions that day. For example, turns out the chicken was caught in a tornado. Amazing, amazing, shouts Carson, leaping around the road. No one sleeps that night. And his word gets out to the tight-knit chase community.

The internet crackles with congratulations. At first, Carson couldn't find Tin Man, but the next day he tracks it 160 yards, 146 meters, across the fields where the wind is tumbled at end over end, leaving a trail of great gashes in the soil. It sits poking out of the mud, its glass portholes smashed, looking like a piece of airline accident debris. the still cameras fired only a few frames before. I thought it.

I thought it. I didn't say it. I felt it. I felt it. Cheers. The still cameras fired only a few frames before being destroyed, but those images are probably the closest ever taken of a tornado. Carson flies out on June the 26th. In the final hour, he has looked deep into the eye of the beast. Okay, you got like two frames of a butthole like it's 90s dial. Relax. Tim's measurements are some of the best ever made, says Rasmussen. He's the first to measure everything.

Temperature, humidity, wind speed, and direction of a tornado. The data collected will be a gold mine. Sometimes you get the bear. Oh, God. Fuck, man. Jesus. Christ. I love it.

All right. So Tom, if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? The Doge idiots pretty much fired

all the real science guys, so tornadoes are sneaky again. Oh, fuck. Yeah. All right. Are you ready for the clips? I am indeed.

All right, Tom. What's the most famous tornado-based terrorist organization from the Texas panhandle? Hey, Toto Haram. B. Facked up.

B. Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz. is the team man. I said it earlier. Yeah, there's a whole thing. We did the whole thing. B, weather underground.

C. The Cloud Boys or D. Oh, God. Imperial. Not C. Not C. Weather underground is so good because you'd have to change anything. I'd have to do anything.

It's right there. It's right there the whole time. Yeah. No. Yeah, sure. Or maybe it's a cloud voice. I don't know. Sure.

Whatever. All right. Tom, I got one for you too. So, importantly. that was porn. We just read porn. What's the best website for the tornado kink people

like the person who wrote this in apparently third person? A. Cyclone Lee fan. Nicolently fan. Very good. Tom, it's good. Is it A? Is it A?

A. Oh, yes, I got it. Okay, Tom. What is the motto of the tornado chases? Is it A? He Who Dairs Wins Is it B? It's that one because of the way you insist on a hard pronounce You pressed it in there.

Is it B, be the chains you want to see in the world? Is it C? Is it C in God we dust? Is it D? Hurricane Horaceor Huraconquered. Very good. If you want it in Latin, venti VDVG. Or is it E? Tempest fugit.

Oh, my God. Can you give it to me in metric, though? It's got to be D. The Latin translation is what does it for. Yeah, I mean, for coming up with a joke so sophisticated, it works both in English and Latin, I think Marsh is clearly the winner this week. Okay, well, in that case,

if anybody listens to the Noro Rogen experience, they will know that I love nothing more than giving Cecil a lot of work to do, and I'm going to continue that on Cecil do the next essay. All right, sounds good. All right, well, for Cecil, Heath, Tom, and March, and occasionally, Eli. I'm Noah, thank you for hanging out with us today. We're going to be back next week, and by then,

Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can hear more from Cecil and Marshall on the No Rogan experience. You can hear more from Heath and I on The Skathing Atheist, and you can hear more for Tom and Eli on dear old dads. That's right, Tom. I'm pairing him with you now. You take him.

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