HAARP

Opening

Near the town of Gakona, Alaska, about 250 kilometres north-east of Anchorage, stands a field of 180 antennas on a patch of land that was once an over-the-horizon radar site. It is the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP. It transmits radio waves in the short-wave band straight up into the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere, to heat a small patch of it for a few minutes so scientists can watch what happens.

That is what it does, and it has been run in the open for years. It is also one of the most durable subjects of conspiracy theory in the world: a weather weapon, an earthquake machine, a mind-control device. The theories have a few real roots, including military funding and a real patent. They do not have the physics.

Timeline

1987The physicist Bernard Eastlund is granted US patent 4,686,605, "Method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth's atmosphere, ionosphere, and/or magnetosphere". A second patent follows in 1991.

1993The Air Force begins building HAARP, with the Navy, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and DARPA also funding it.

1995Jeane Manning and Nick Begich publish Angels Don't Play This HAARP, which gives the theories wide currency.

1999The European Parliament adopts a resolution calling HAARP a global environmental concern and asking for an independent examination. Critics note the earlier committee report relied on two interviews.

2007The full array of 180 antennas is complete.

May 2014The Air Force announces that the facility will close.

August 2015Ownership passes to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

2016The university begins an annual open house each August.

Key figures

Bernard Eastlund held the patents the theories rest on. They describe a theoretical system, not the HAARP that was built.

Nick Begich co-wrote the 1995 book and has argued that HAARP is a mind-control and weather device.

Jesse Ventura, the former governor and television host, tried to visit for a programme and was refused access.

Umran Inan, a Stanford scientist, called the weather-control claims uninformed and pointed out that a single lightning flash releases far more energy.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the patents, public funding records, the University of Alaska's management of the site, and its public logs of experiments. The facility has hosted scientists from outside the military, including foreign nationals, and its logs are published. The final array has 180 antennas and a 3.6 megawatt transmitter, running on five diesel generators of 2,500 kilowatts each. It operates between about 2.8 and 10 megahertz, with a theoretical peak effective power of 5.1 gigawatts, though it normally runs well below that.

What is missing is any evidence that it has affected weather. At the ionosphere the radio intensity is under three microwatts per square centimetre, small beside what the Sun supplies. The cost to build and run it was about $250 million by 2008.

Things you might not know

• It sits on a former radar site. The control room is in a building put up for the over-the-horizon radar that stood there before.
• It can make very low frequencies. By heating the ionosphere in a pulse, it generates extremely low frequency waves that are very hard to produce any other way, and submarine communication is often mentioned as a possible use.
• It was blamed for the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes. Neither claim has any support.
• Two men were arrested in 2016. Two Georgia men were arrested for plotting to destroy HAARP, in the belief that it was a weapon.
• It appears in fiction. HAARP turns up in Tom Clancy's Net Force novels and in video games.
• The operator changed. It no longer belongs to the military. A university rents time on it to researchers.

Competing explanations

A research instrument. This is the documented answer. HAARP studies the ionosphere, and the US military wanted to know how radio waves behave there because it matters to communication and surveillance.

A military weapon. Eastlund's patent talks of using such a system against missiles and for altering the atmosphere. That is a theoretical idea, and scientists point out that the built facility is nothing like it and has too little power.

A weather or mind-control device. No one has shown a mechanism, a measurement, or a case in which HAARP's operations match a storm or quake. These claims are not testable as stated.

Later life of the case

After the handover to the university the site opened to visitors, which took some force out of the secrecy theme. The claims have not faded, and they revive after every major disaster.

Finding

HAARP is a real, military-funded ionospheric research facility with an uncomfortable origin and a very public present. The strongest reading is that the theories come from its secretive start and a real patent, while its measured power cannot reach the weather. It is documented, not a secret.

What still will not resolve: what the Navy and Air Force concluded from the early experiments, since I have not found their own assessments published.