A critical analysis of Bill Rostron's presentation on the Cloud
The Cloud: Just the Facts • Intro • Prophesied? • Location? • Cause? • Rostron Debunked • Timing?
Responding to Bill Rostron
"When it's all said and done you'll either have to say one or two things — I don't know what that is, it's a mystery — and brother Bill will say enough to that the world will have to admit we don't have an answer. But the Bride has an answer." — Pastor Luke Gibson, introducing Bill Rostron's series
Five Hours in Defense of a Story Branham Never Told
Bill Rostron is exactly the kind of person Message believers need making arguments on their behalf. He spent 46 years in the nuclear power industry doing quality assurance and root cause analysis. He knows how to build a chain of evidence. He takes his work seriously. And in his nearly six-hour series In Defense of the Supernatural Cloud (March 2020), recorded at the Tabernacle of the Lord in Townville, South Carolina, he applies genuine technical skill to the question of whether a Thor rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base could have produced the famous cloud over Flagstaff on February 28, 1963.
The result is a presentation that is methodologically serious in parts, fatally flawed in others, and — most importantly — never once asks the question that actually matters.
What Rostron Claims, and What He Admits He Can't Prove
Start with what Rostron himself says at the close of his series:
"All of the things we've said today doesn't prove that God did it, but it sure does prove that man didn't do it."
That's an honest statement. Credit where it's due. Rostron is not claiming to have scientifically proven a supernatural event. He's claiming to have eliminated the rocket as a natural cause.
But by the end of the evening, Pastor Gibson is telling the congregation that they don't need an answer — they already have one. The crowd is singing. The cloud has become proof of Revelation 10:1–7 and divine confirmation of William Branham's ministry. The gap between "man didn't do it" and "God did it" has been closed by emotional momentum, not logic.
This is the first and most important error of the entire presentation. Ruling out one natural explanation does not establish supernatural causation. That logical gap is not a technicality — it is the entire structure of the argument. Rostron builds a case against the rocket, and the congregation quietly converts his inconclusive findings into proof of the miraculous. No one in the room challenges this move. It should be challenged.
The Self-Defeating Moisture Argument
Rostron spends a significant portion of Video 1 and Video 2 establishing a genuine point of atmospheric physics: natural moisture gets "wrung out" of the air as altitude increases, and by the time you reach the stratosphere and mesosphere, the water vapor content is so low — he puts it at about five parts per million — that cloud formation is essentially impossible under normal conditions.
He's right about this. Natural clouds do not form at 43 kilometers. This is not disputed.
But Rostron then uses this fact to argue against the rocket hypothesis. Here's the problem: the rocket hypothesis does not require natural moisture. The entire premise of the rocket explanation is that the Thor, when destroyed at 44 kilometers, introduced water and combustion products into an environment that would not otherwise contain them. That's precisely why the cloud appeared where natural clouds don't.
Rostron's atmospheric moisture argument doesn't undermine the rocket hypothesis. It actually explains why the rocket hypothesis is necessary — because something had to put water up there. His own analysis establishes that the cloud required an external source of water, then pivots to arguing the rocket couldn't have been that source. But he never actually closes the loop on the water source question. He's eliminated natural formation and claimed to eliminate the rocket. What he hasn't done is identify where a non-supernatural source of water would come from. The argument proves too much: if no natural process could produce the cloud and the rocket couldn't either, he needs a third candidate. "God did it" is not a third candidate in a root cause analysis — it's an admission that the analysis is over.
The Mass Calculation: A Critical Omission
This is where Rostron's engineering rigour breaks down most clearly.
His key quantitative argument is this: he estimates the cloud required approximately 2.2 million pounds (about 1 million kilograms) of water to form. He then points to the Castor-1 solid rocket boosters attached to the Thor and notes they contained roughly 12,000 pounds of solid propellant each. Three boosters, therefore about 34,000–36,000 pounds total. That's vastly less than 2.2 million pounds of water. Ergo, the rocket couldn't have done it.
The problem is that Rostron has analysed the wrong part of the rocket.
The Thrust Augmented Thor that was destroyed on February 28, 1963 was a liquid-fueled missile. Its main engine burned RP-1 kerosene with liquid oxygen — not solid propellant. The Castor-1 solid boosters were strapped-on assist motors that burned for approximately 37–40 seconds during the initial ascent, reaching around 10–15 kilometers altitude, after which they were jettisoned. By the time the range safety officer destroyed the vehicle at 44 kilometers, those solid boosters had been gone for over two minutes.
The main Thor engine — the liquid-fueled engine still burning when the rocket was destroyed — is where the water was coming from. RP-1 kerosene combusted with liquid oxygen produces two products: carbon dioxide and water. The stoichiometry is straightforward. For every kilogram of RP-1 burned, approximately 1.3–1.4 kilograms of water is produced. The Thor carried roughly 22,000 kilograms of RP-1 and 34,000 kilograms of liquid oxygen. Even if only a fraction of those propellants remained unburned at time of destruction and were subsequently dispersed and burned by the explosion, the potential water output dwarfs the solid booster contribution that Rostron calculated.
Rostron never calculates this. In a presentation framed as "root cause analysis" and "going back to first principles," he simply ignores the primary propellant system of the primary stage. A nuclear quality assurance process would flag this immediately: you haven't analysed the dominant source term.
He does show a striking Space Shuttle exhaust cloud (STS-131) as a visual comparison, but the comparison is misleading. That photograph was taken five minutes after launch, during active burning. The 1963 cloud appeared three and a half hours after the rocket's destruction. Of course they look different. Arguing that rocket exhaust in active flight looks unlike a dispersed, wind-shaped cloud hours later proves nothing about whether the rocket caused the cloud.
The Cloud Density Contradiction: Rostron's Framework Collapses His Own Math
There is a deeper problem with the mass calculation that Rostron doesn't notice — because it requires him to apply his own logic consistently, which he doesn't.
Throughout the presentation, Rostron correctly invokes the analogy of noctilucent clouds to explain one of the cloud's most striking features: why nobody saw it until sunset. He explains the physics accurately. Noctilucent clouds are visible only at twilight because they are too faint to scatter enough light to be visible against a bright daytime sky. They only appear once the background sky darkens and sunlight catches them from below the horizon. He uses this same principle to explain why the Flagstaff cloud was invisible during the day and only appeared as the sun went down.
This is the correct explanation. But Rostron never follows that logic into his density calculation.
Noctilucent clouds are extraordinarily tenuous. Their ice water content is typically on the order of 10⁻⁵ to 10⁻⁶ grams per cubic meter — roughly one thousand to one hundred thousand times less dense than an ordinary cirrus cloud. That tenuousness is not incidental to how they behave. It is why they can't be seen in daylight. A cirrus cloud, with its density of around 0.03 to 0.05 g/m³, is clearly visible in full sunlight. Something only visible during a narrow twilight window, when the background sky is dark and the sun's rays are hitting it from far below the horizon, has to be far, far thinner than a cirrus cloud.
Rostron's mass calculation uses a cirrus cloud density of 1/20 gram per cubic meter (0.05 g/m³). That's how he arrives at his 2.2 million pound figure. But he has already established — in the same presentation — that the cloud behaved like a noctilucent cloud in terms of its visibility. You cannot simultaneously claim a cloud is too tenuous to be seen in daylight and assume cirrus-level ice density when calculating how much water formed it. Those two claims are mutually exclusive.
The numbers make this stark. At cirrus density (0.05 g/m³), Rostron calculates roughly 1.35 million kilograms of water needed. Now apply a density consistent with something only visible at twilight — say, 10⁻⁴ g/m³, which is still five hundred times denser than a typical noctilucent cloud and thus a very conservative estimate:
27 billion m³ × 0.0001 g/m³ = 2,700 kilograms — about 5,950 pounds
At actual noctilucent cloud densities (10⁻⁵ g/m³):
27 billion m³ × 0.00001 g/m³ = 270 kilograms — about 595 pounds
Not 2.2 million pounds. Hundreds of pounds. The Thor rocket's main liquid-fueled engine — which Rostron ignored entirely — produced combustion byproducts including water on the order of tens of thousands of kilograms. Even the Castor-1 solid boosters that Rostron himself analysed exceed this threshold by a significant margin.
Rostron uses noctilucent cloud physics when it helps explain daytime invisibility, then quietly reverts to cirrus cloud density when he needs a large number for his water mass argument. A root cause analysis doesn't get to choose which physical properties apply and when. Either the cloud was dense enough to behave like a cirrus cloud (visible in daylight, requiring ~2.2 million pounds of water) or it was tenuous enough to behave like a noctilucent cloud (invisible in daylight, requiring a tiny fraction of that). It cannot be both.
The Anachronistic Wind Data
One of the more striking methodological errors in the series is Rostron's use of earth.nullschool.net — a real-time global wind visualization website — to argue about what the winds were doing at high altitude on February 28, 1963.
He pulls up current wind patterns above Arizona, shows that the winds at 10 millibar altitude (roughly 100,000 feet, or about 30 km) are around 65 km/h in the analysis session's present, and argues these speeds are insufficient to carry rocket debris from Vandenberg to Flagstaff in 3.5 hours. He acknowledges he's watched the website "over the years" and noted seasonal patterns, but then uses a single day's reading as if it characterises the wind field on a specific day six decades earlier.
Wind patterns at stratospheric and mesospheric altitudes are highly variable. They change with season, with quasi-biennial oscillation cycles, with individual synoptic events. Knowing what the winds are doing today tells you nothing reliable about what they were doing on a specific day in February 1963. Dr. McDonald, who actually collected observational data at the time, described the measured wind speeds as "tantalizingly close" to what would be required. Rostron cites this but dismisses it on the grounds that McDonald "couldn't figure out how it would work" — which is not the same as saying it couldn't have worked. McDonald was being scientifically conservative. Rostron is using present-day wind data to argue about past atmospheric conditions. These are not equivalent moves.
A Confusion About Wind Direction
Rostron also argues that the wind direction was wrong for the rocket hypothesis. He says the cloud was observed to be "moving towards the southeast," and from this calculates a required wind origin of about 310 degrees (northwest). He then claims that a northwest wind at Vandenberg would carry debris toward Baja California, not Flagstaff.
But Vandenberg Air Force Base is located to the west-northwest of Flagstaff. Flagstaff is roughly to the east-northeast of Vandenberg. A wind blowing from the northwest — pushing things toward the southeast — would carry material from Vandenberg's vicinity toward the direction of Arizona. Rostron's claim that such a wind would instead send debris "into Mexico in Baja California" appears to reflect a geographical confusion about the relative positions of these locations. Rather than disproving the rocket hypothesis, his own wind direction data may be consistent with it.
The Question Rostron Never Asks
Here is what is missing from five hours and fifty-four minutes of technically detailed presentation: any engagement with William Branham's own testimony about the cloud.
Rostron establishes (or attempts to establish) that the cloud was not produced by a Thor rocket. He never mentions that:
Branham claimed to be standing directly underneath the cloud when it appeared. He wasn't. The cloud appeared over Flagstaff. By Branham's own account of his activities on that trip, he was approximately 200 miles away near Sunset Mountain and Rattlesnake Mesa.
Branham stated that the cloud formed when the angels left him. The cloud appeared on February 28. Branham's own sermons describe the angelic visitation as occurring on March 8 — eight days later. A cloud cannot be the departure of angels from a meeting that had not yet taken place.
Branham said nothing about any connection between the cloud and his ministry until he was shown the photograph in Life Magazine — months after the cloud appeared. If he had witnessed the angels ascending into the sky and forming that cloud, that silence is inexplicable.
A second cloud is visible in the scientific photographs. Documented in Science Magazine (April 1963), this companion cloud appears to the northwest of the main cloud, consistent with debris dispersal from a single source. No version of the angelic account accounts for a second cloud.
These are not peripheral criticisms. They are facts drawn from Branham's own recordings and from the eyewitness documentation available at the time. Whether the cloud was caused by a rocket, a natural phenomenon, or something else entirely, Branham's own account of his involvement with it cannot be reconciled with the documented facts. Rostron's entire analysis — even if every calculation were correct — only defends the possibility that the cloud was unusual. It does nothing to explain why Branham's story about the cloud changed over time, why he placed himself at its formation when he demonstrably wasn't there, or why he first learned of the cloud from a magazine.
What the Presentation Actually Establishes
To be precise about what Rostron's analysis shows and doesn't show:
He correctly demonstrates that natural clouds do not form at 43 kilometers through ordinary atmospheric processes. This is real atmospheric science and he explains it clearly.
He correctly notes that the cloud was unusual and that McDonald found it difficult to explain WHEN FIRST CONFRONTED with the data available to him in 1963. However, MacDonald's story changed by the time of his response in 1967.
He raises legitimate questions about whether the Castor-1 solid boosters alone could account for the cloud's size. This is a fair point, though he reaches it by ignoring the primary propulsion system. He also ignores the amount of water vapour required for noctilucent clouds.
What his analysis does not establish is that the rocket could not have caused the cloud. His wind speed calculation uses anachronistic data. His mass calculation omits the main engine. His moisture argument supports rather than undermines the rocket hypothesis. And his conclusion — that supernatural causation is therefore implied — does not follow from his premises even if those premises were correct.
A Word for Those Who Are Watching
If you've sat through this series, or heard someone cite it, or had it shared with you as the definitive answer to critics of the Message, you deserve to know what it actually proved and what it didn't.
Rostron is a capable engineer who spent months on this project. He clearly cares deeply about his faith, and he is trying to be rigorous. That's admirable. But rigour has to go all the way through — including to the question of whether the person whose testimony you're defending actually told a consistent, verifiable story. The scientific question of what caused the cloud is genuinely interesting but Rostron fails to disprove the rocket argment... in fact, he helps to prove it.
But the problem with Branham's cloud story was never primarily scientific. It was always about why a man who claimed to stand under a cloud was 200 miles away when it appeared, why the cloud preceded his vision's fulfillment by eight days, and why he never mentioned any of this until a magazine brought the photograph to his attention.
Those questions don't get answered by atmospheric physics. They get answered — or not answered — by Branham's own words.
The honest thing to do is listen to those words again, carefully, and ask whether the story holds together. Not because critics want it to fail, but because the truth matters. A faith built on a story that doesn't hold up isn't safer for not being examined. It's just more fragile.
The TAT Agena D: Staging Sequence, Altitudes, and What Rostron Actually Said
What the Sources Say
The vehicle had three distinct propulsion systems:
1. Castor-1 solid strap-on boosters (× 3) Per Astronautix and Wikipedia – Castor (rocket stage):
- Manufacturer: Thiokol (Morton Thiokol)
- Gross mass: 3,852 kg (8,492 lb) each
- Propellant mass: 3,317 kg (7,313 lb) each (gross minus 535 kg unfuelled casing)
- Burn time: 27 seconds
- Thrust: 286 kN (64,295 lbf) each at sea level
- Lit at ground level simultaneously with the main engine; jettisoned after burnout
Three boosters: ~9,951 kg total propellant (~21,940 lb). Burnout at T+27 seconds.
Altitude at Castor-1 jettison: No source gives an explicit figure for the TAT configuration. Based on the 27-second burn time from ground level, a rough kinematic estimate (1.5–2g net upward acceleration) gives approximately 4–8 km. A useful benchmark from another Thor destruction event: the Starfish Prime test had the Thor at ~9.1–10.7 km at T+59 seconds without solid strap-ons. With extra initial thrust from the Castors but a shorter burn, jettison altitude for the TAT is realistically in the 5–8 km range — well below the troposphere/stratosphere boundary (~12 km) and far below the 44 km destruction point. (Wikipedia – PGM-17 Thor)
2. Main Thor liquid-fueled stage (DSV-2C / MB-3-III) Per Wikipedia – PGM-17 Thor:
- Engine: Rocketdyne LR79-NA-9 (MB-3-III)
- Propellants: LOX + RP-1 kerosene
- Total vehicle propellant load: approximately 100,000 lb (vehicle gross mass 109,800 lb minus 6,889 lb empty weight)
- Main engine burn time: 165 seconds
- Thrust at liftoff: 150,000 lbf (670 kN); vacuum: 170,000 lbf
The rocket was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer at 44 km altitude on February 28, 1963. (Wikipedia – Thor-Agena) At 165 seconds designed burn time, and assuming destruction occurred somewhere between T+90 and T+150 seconds (given the rocket had traveled from ground to 44 km), the main engine was unambiguously still burning when the vehicle was destroyed. The Castor-1 boosters had been gone for over a minute.
The combustion chemistry of RP-1/LOX is straightforward: approximately 1.3–1.4 kg of water produced per kg of RP-1 burned, plus CO₂. The Thor carried roughly 30,000–35,000 kg of RP-1 at launch (based on propellant mass and ~2.25:1 LOX/fuel ratio). Even if only a fraction of that remained unburned at time of destruction, the water-producing potential of the main engine vastly exceeds anything the solid boosters could produce.
3. Agena D second stage Per Gunter's Space Page – Thor-SLV2A Agena-D and Rostron's own transcript ([4:29:44]):
- Fuel: ~32,850 lb of nitric acid + UDMH (a hypergolic fuel)
- This stage never ignited — the vehicle was destroyed in the first stage burn.
What Rostron Says (with Transcript Timestamps)
On the solid boosters — [2:59:38] and [4:31:00–4:31:44]:
"Those are the Castor-1 boosters made by the Morton Thiokol company... they contain... about 12,000 pounds of solid rocket material. There's three of them, so that's 36,000 pounds total."
Rostron calculated this by taking the physical dimensions of the Castor-1 and estimating its propellant volume at 90% fill. He arrived at ~5,400 kg (~12,000 lbs) per booster. The published gross mass is 3,852 kg (8,492 lb), and the propellant-only mass is 3,317 kg (7,313 lb). Rostron's figure is 41–63% higher than the actual specification, because he derived it from geometry rather than looking up the published data. Three boosters at the correct propellant mass gives ~21,940 lb, not 36,000 lb — still, of course, vastly less than his 2.2 million pound requirement.
Crucially, Rostron never mentions the Castor-1 burn time of 27 seconds or estimates when the boosters separated. He treats the solid boosters as "the claim" — the thing critics pointed to — and calculates only their chemistry. He never addresses the timeline question of where those boosters were in the flight sequence relative to the 44 km destruction point.
On the main Thor engine — [4:29:33–4:29:36]:
"The main rocket is 110,000 pounds of kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel."
Rostron names it. He lists it. He then immediately pivots to the Agena D second stage fuel and the Castor-1 chemistry, and never calculates the water output of the main engine. At [5:22:29–5:22:53], he acknowledges that the Soyuz — which uses the same RP-1 fuel as the Thor — produces "mostly carbon dioxide and water" as combustion products. He uses Soyuz exhaust plume dissipation time as his closing argument against the rocket hypothesis, but again without calculating actual water mass for the Thor's own main engine.
On the destruction altitude — Rostron never states the altitude at which the Castor-1 boosters separated. He also never explicitly states that the main engine was still burning when the vehicle was destroyed at 44 km. This omission is the heart of the error: the solid boosters he spent hours analyzing had been jettisoned at roughly 5–8 km altitude, approximately 36–39 km below where the cloud-forming explosion occurred.
Summary of the Discrepancy
| Factor | Published Technical Data | What Rostron Analyzed |
|---|---|---|
| Castor-1 gross mass (each) | 3,852 kg / 8,492 lb | ~5,400 kg / ~12,000 lb (overstated ~40%) |
| Castor-1 propellant (each) | 3,317 kg / 7,313 lb | Used gross mass figure |
| Castor-1 burn time | 27 seconds | Not mentioned |
| Castor jettison altitude | ~5–8 km (estimated) | Not mentioned |
| Destruction altitude | 44 km | Correctly stated |
| Main engine fuel | ~100,000 lb LOX/RP-1, 165-second burn | Named but never calculated |
| Main engine status at 44 km | Still burning | Never addressed |
| Water from main engine combustion | ~1.4 kg/kg RP-1 burned | Acknowledged (via Soyuz) but never calculated for Thor |
The practical consequence: Rostron compared 36,000 lbs of solid propellant against a 2.2–3 million pound water requirement, and called it a decisive refutation. The actual comparison that should have been made — the water output of 100,000 lbs of LOX/RP-1 burning at altitude, at the moment of destruction — never appears anywhere in six hours of presentation.
Sources:
- Castor 1 – Astronautix
- Castor (rocket stage) – Wikipedia
- Thor (rocket family) – Wikipedia
- Thor-Agena – Wikipedia
- PGM-17 Thor – Wikipedia
- Thor-SLV2A Agena-D – Gunter's Space Page
- Space Launchers – Delta (braeunig.us)
Evidence from the Branham Family
Rebekah Branham Smith, William Branham's daughter, also wrote on the Cloud and specifically details the timing of the events surrounding the appearance of the Cloud in the Only Believe Magazine, "Road to Sunset".
- Only Believe Magazine, "Road to Sunset", Page 1
- Only Believe Magazine, "Road to Sunset", Page 2
- Only Believe Magazine, "Road to Sunset", Page 3
- Only Believe Magazine, "Road to Sunset", Page 4
You are currently on the page that is in bold.
Footnotes