I don't ever recall anything like this in the summer in my life. Is it just me? These devices heat up small parts of the air above the site. But the science behind the program is complex, and has given rise to numerous far-fetched theories. The Truth or Fake team spoke to Mick West, a science writer who specialises in this type of conspiracy theory.
They've even taken some videos out of context to convince others of the existence of this secret weapon. The U. Air Force has notified Congress that it intends to shut down HAARP, a controversial Alaska-based research facility that studies an energetic and active region of the upper atmosphere.
Conspiracy theorists are abuzz about the news, given that HAARP short for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program has long been the center of wild speculation that the program is designed to control the weather — or worse. For the record, the Haitian quake of was caused by the slippage of a previously unmapped fault along the border of the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates.
HAARP is a research program designed to analyze the ionosphere, a portion of the upper atmosphere that stretches from about 53 miles 85 kilometers above the surface of the Earth to miles kilometers up. HAARP sends radio beams into the ionosphere to study the responses from it — one of the few ways to accurately measure this inaccessible part of the atmosphere.
If this doomsday scenario sounds outlandish, then the possible response may sound even more improbable: injecting radio waves into the atmosphere to force these energetic electrons out of orbit. Yet this is exactly what the US Department of Defense is looking at in a major ionospheric research facility in Alaska.
It consists of radio transmitters and antennas, and covers some 14 hectares near the town of Gakona about kilometres northeast of Anchorage. With 3. At its heart is a phased-array radar that emits radio waves that are partially absorbed between kilometres and kilometres in altitude, accelerating electrons there and 'heating' the ionosphere see graphic, right. In effect, HAARP allows scientists to turn the ionosphere, the uppermost and one of the least understood regions of the atmosphere, into a natural laboratory.
It is one of several ionospheric heaters scattered around the world. The facilities create unique opportunities to study the fundamental physics behind how plasma and electromagnetic waves interact. Researchers have already used HAARP to create an artificial aurora and otherwise study the basic physics of how charged particles behave in the ionosphere.
Experiments have been ongoing for several years, but the facility didn't reach full power until last June. As yet it may be too early to assess whether its research potential has been worth the time and money invested in it, particularly given the ever-changing justifications for building it. The facility, which has been passed around varying military agencies, including the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA , is perhaps the only research facility that has had to justify itself as being neither a death beam aimed at Russia nor a mind-control device.
So prevalent are the conspiracy theories that HAARP has even been referred to in a Tom Clancy novel, in which a fictional facility is used to induce mass psychosis in a Chinese village. In fact, HAARP is a unique case of cold war-era military goals meshing with scientific research, and then maintaining that linkage even after the end of the war. If the conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP draw on fantastical ideas of death beams, then the real history of the facility is almost as colourful.
HAARP traces its origins back to cold war-era concerns over nuclear annihilation, when US and Soviet submarines prowled the deep seas, engaged in an elaborate game of hide and seek.
By staying underwater, the submarines avoided detection, but they also couldn't communicate well — the deeper they went, the weaker the contact signal became.
Then, in , Nicholas Christofilos, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, proposed using extremely low frequency ELF waves to communicate with submarines underwater. His idea, adopted as Project Sanguine, eventually led to the development of operational facilities in Michigan and Wisconsin.
But these were mired in controversy. They were huge — needing kilometres of antenna wire to transmit the signal — and many took exception to their goals and to the possible detrimental effects on the health of people living nearby. The Navy eventually closed them down in , saying that they were no longer needed. Another approach to ELF submarine communication was to take advantage of electrojets — currents of charged particles that flow through the ionosphere and could act as a virtual antennas, transmitting messages to submarines.
Once this idea was proven experimentally 1 in the mids, physicist Dennis Papadopoulos, then of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, began trying to drum up support for a new facility. At the time the Pentagon was shutting down over-the-horizon radar sites that had been designed to detect Soviet bombers attacking the United States — including one in Gakona, an ideal location because it is underneath an electrojet.
So Papadopoulos, who is now at the University of Maryland in College Park and has served as a scientific adviser for HAARP since the project's inception, argued for building an ionospheric heater there. The facility would help the Navy to study ELF waves, it would provide scientists with an ionospheric heater and it would guarantee continued life for the military site in Alaska, something that Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, famous for steering congressional dollars to his home state, also liked.
The IRI is an intimidating sight. Comprised of phased array antennas, each standing 72 feet tall, the antennas are spread out over about 30 acres in Gakona, basically the middle of nowhere Alaska. One can see how conspiracy theories start under those conditions.
Others say it can control the weather. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said it was used to create the devastating Haiti earthquake.
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