HAARP: What's Going on in Alaska?

Weather, am I right? What’s going on with all this weather we’re having? Floods, wildfires, hurricanes, snow dumps, storms that suddenly get so bad they’re called “bomb cyclones”. Has it always been this bad?

Can we put everything down to climate change? What if we don’t believe that humans have trashed the planet so badly we’re actually mucking up the natural meteorological cycle of the world? What’s the answer then? Obviously, it’s something that’s being done on purpose.

Why? Oh, there are many reasons, don’t you worry, but obviously none of them good. And who’s doing this exactly? “They” are, of course.

And who are “they” you might be wondering.

Well, nobody’s really been able to pin “them” down but we all know roughly who “they” are: the shadowy uber elites who secretly run the world and may or may not be lizards. There are definitely going to be some kind of secret weird meetings going on where everyone dresses in hooded robes and hopefully has some kind of cool symbolic jewellery, maybe a pendant on a necklace or some sort of brooch. I’m definitely interested in the trappings of illuminati merch.

Anyway, clichéd ideas of cabalistic meetings aside, any viewer of this channel is likely aware of this mysterious “they”, whether it be a section or sub-section or secret offshoot of a country’s government, a mysterious independent agency or a secret worldwide circle-jerk of the quietly rich and powerful. You have to be extremely low-key to be in this elite group. I’m thinking that Elon Musk has not been invited but can definitely see Bill Gates flashing some sort of pendant from inside his hooded robe. Man, I want to belong to a secret society. Actually, I just remembered that I was personally invited to join the Illuminati by someone called “Cristiane Bendels” via email in 2021. I searched for that exact name just now and it returned zero results! Mysterious indeed. In order to join, I had to email illuminatiinvitation66@gmail.com for more information. I didn’t do this at the time as it seemed a disappointing email address for a secret worldwide organisation but if you want to, go ahead.

Anyway, the point of all this is to say that secret networks are still being blamed for pulling the strings behind all kinds of global activity, including, the weather. And they’re not even doing it that secretly! An ex-US government project called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, thankfully abbreviated to HAARP, has routinely been blamed for everything from creating and directing hurricanes to controlling people’s minds. So what is this HAARP thing and should we be worried about it?

It’s time to decode.

What are we HAARPing on about?

This is like the Kozyrev Mirrors episode for me in that no matter how many times I read about something, I still have no idea what’s going on. But because I’m paid to write about this stuff, I attempt to make it seem like I know what I’m talking about. I spoke to my mum just now and when she asked what I was working on, I told her it was about a US governmental program that shoots radio waves into the ionosphere and which people are now trying to claim was attempting to rig the recent US election.

This is true and was said quite confidently so I think she was impressed with my obviously high level of knowledge. While some of you, I’m sure, are intimately familiar with the inner workings of our beloved ionosphere, I’m also sure that most of us are not so, for the benefit of us poor dummies, let’s find out more about HAARP and what it says it’s doing.

While it was originally set up as a government scheme, it’s currently being run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks so here’s what they say about it on their website:

The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is the world’s most capable high-power, high frequency (HF) transmitter for study of the ionosphere.

Ok, thanks for that. Is there any more to it, we wonder? Such as, what the principal instrument might be? Oh look, they go on to say:

The principal instrument is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a phased array of 180 HF crossed-dipole antennas spread across 33 acres and capable of radiating 3.6 megawatts into the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. Transmit frequencies are selectable in the range of 2.7 to 10 MHz, and since the antennas form a sophisticated phased array, the transmitted beam can take many shapes, can be scanned over a wide angular range and multiple beams can be formed.

Interesting, interesting. I admit, they’ve really intrigued me here. And how about transmission shelters? How many of those bad boys do they have? Ah, here’s the answer:

The facility uses 30 transmitter shelters, each with six pairs of 10 kilowatt transmitters, to achieve the 3.6 MW transmit power.

Wow, thanks, University of Alaska Fairbanks, that’s all we need to know about HAARP, no further questions.

Oh, would that it were so simple.

Unfortunately, non-science heads like me don’t really understand this explanation at all so let’s break it down into more laymanic terms. In a remote spot in southeast Alaska, there’s a large, almost square arrangement of 180 metal poles, 12 down and 15 across. These poles are antennas and are 72 feet or just under 22 metres tall.

That’s 15 Danny DeVitos, maybe with the top one wearing a tinfoil hat. Each antenna has four long arms extending out of it near the top which are technically two “crossed dipoles”. These can be put in a variety of modes and are controlled individually.

The overall effect looks like a load of creepy spy antennas in very rigid formation in the middle of nowhere. If you happened to be driving past, which you most likely wouldn’t be, you might think it was some sort of high tech non-moving wind farm or a power station set-up or something like that. But HAARP is all about the ionosphere so let’s find out more about that.

The ionosphere is part of Earth’s upper atmosphere. According to NASA:

The ionosphere stretches roughly 50 to 400 miles above Earth’s surface, right at the edge of space.

It’s where all the charged particles in our atmosphere can be found and it’s in a constant state of change. It’s also the area where most of our satellites can be found, meaning that GPS and radio signals travel through the ionosphere all the time. See, it’s not so confusing now that we’re explaining it all nicely.

You may recall that HAARP stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program so here’s where the “Auroral” part comes in. I’ll admit that I had been skimming over that word and just reading it as “Aural” for some reason and literally only just saw it was “Auroral” as in “Aurora”, as in the Northern Lights type of light phenomenon. Let’s just pretend that we knew that the whole time.

The ionosphere is constantly aglow because of a combination of sunlight hitting atoms and molecules up there and ionised atoms hitting electrons. Basically, photons are being released all over the shop and as these are light particles, the ionosphere is seriously lit. The preferred term for this is “airglow” and scientists can use it to study the behaviour of gases in the ionosphere, for example, as they all let off different colours.

HAARP has even been able to produce its own form of aurora, although it’s extremely weak and unimpressive compared to what nature does on its own, and only visible using sensitive cameras, not to the naked eye. But if they’re mucking about in the sky with this kind of thing, what else are they getting up to? When HAARP was set up in 1990, it was a joint project between the United States Air Force and the United States Navy. According to the University of Alaska Fairbanks site: “Its goal was to research the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere, which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems.”

So that’s where the shooting radio waves into the ionosphere part comes in. The antennas at HAARP send up radio waves to interact with the electrons and ions in the ionosphere. This creates what are called “small perturbations” which sounds quite funny and I think most of us would be at least a little perturbed if someone was shooting stuff into our glowing areas as well.

These perturbations are just little, temporary changes in areas of the ionosphere that scientists can examine, track and measure. They could do this without blasting up radio waves as perturbations do occur naturally, but this doesn’t happen that often and they wouldn’t necessarily know where to look, so creating the anomalies themselves means they can study the effects whenever they want.

As per HAARP’s current website: “With a facility like HAARP, it is possible to perform an experiment at will to create plasma structures and irregularities, use the ionosphere like an antenna to excite low frequency waves, create weak luminous aurora-like glows and a variety of other experiments.”

The program cost around $290 million to set up back in the 90s and seemed to be the pet project of Ted Stevens, the Senator for Alaska at the time. He died in 2010 and in 2014, the US Air Force said it no longer had the desire of funding for the project so the whole thing was going to be decommissioned until it was eventually transferred to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in August 2015.

So that’s the basics of HAARP and, in general, it seems like something that those people in Alaska can just get on with and it shouldn’t have any effect on the rest of us. Right? Well, if you’d forgotten, this is an episode of Decoding the Unknown and we’re just about to get to the weird stuff.

Pulling on the HAARP Strings

Add together a government program, weird metal antenna, nebulous sounding mission statements and a remote location and you can see how this can equal shady stuff quite quickly. Let’s go through the main things people have accused HAARP of being behind over the years.

Mind Control

As well as beaming radio waves up into space, HAARP have been tagged as beaming things into peoples’ brains too. I suppose it makes sense - these are high frequency transmitters so if they’re capable of sending waves hundreds of miles into the air, surely they must easily be able to affect our brains here, just a few metres below them. This theory was strongly promoted in the book “Angels Don’t Play This HAARP” which I suppose I should begrudgingly give pun points to but it doesn’t make that much sense overall.

Also, as I’m about to tell you, one of the authors is a bit of a loon so I don’t want to give him any credit at all. These theories usually rotate around a book written by a self-important white male and oh look, who do we have here?

This was written by Jeane Manning and Dr Nick Begich, although apparently this was more of a stylised “Dr” as, according to reporter Dermot Cole he had a: “1994 honorary doctorate from a diploma mill in Sri Lanka, the Open International University for Complementary Medicines.”

There are a lot of Begiches in the family tree and it doesn’t help when this one, who was originally known as Nick Begich Jr upgraded himself to Nick Begich Sr, although his son is still Nick Begich the Third. See? Confusing. Nick Begich the Third is also trying to run for Congress representing Alaska, and literally now, at the time of me typing this, he has just been confirmed as the winner.

He seemed to be in with a good shout the whole time, though, which is probably why his dad’s kooky publishing website, Earthpulse.com was taken down at some point last year. I had to use the Wayback machine to find it but then also found another link to the same old guff at shop.thehiddenmonks.com if you fancy a gander.

See, Begich Senior, or Junior, or the Second, or Doctor, the one who wrote the book anyway, is quite a well known name in conspiracy circles and has featured regularly on such DtU frequent flyers as Coast to Coast with Art Bell and Infowars which has recently been bought by satirical news site, The Onion, much to the world’s delight.

Anyway, the theory that HAARP can alter brain chemistry or be used as a giant transmitter or whatever to read minds was touted in this book which was published in 1995. HAARP had only just been built by 1994 and didn’t really start on its project properly until 1999 so Begich and Manning were pretty on the ball here. I guess there’s not that much else going on in Alaska.

This book has very positive reviews on amazon, but with things like this, you’re either totally into it or just not into it at all. One five-star reviewer, Peter A. Kirby mentions: “Begich and Manning lay it all on the table. They write about HAARP’s origins and history. They write about the HAARP facility’s ability to: generate earthquakes, modify the weather, control people’s minds, map the Earth’s interior, generate ultra-powerful laser like power beams, transmit wireless power, and more.”

The thing is, if this book was published in 1995, it was written just as HAARP was being constructed. Nobody would really know what it was going to be able to do. There would not have been any way to find evidence that anything had happened as no experiments would have been carried out yet. I didn’t bother reading the book as I feared it might really alter the chemistry of my brain but, from the timeline, I’m guessing most of it must be speculative and not based on any real evidence.

And aren’t I nice using the word “speculative” in place of “made up bullshit”.

While I didn’t read the book, I did watch a show which is available under two titles, either: “Mind Control - HAARP and the Future of Technology” or “Mind Control: HAARP Conspiracy”. They are the same thing and, after a disclaimer at the start that the views expressed within are not necessarily those of the film company, it’s basically Begich monologuing for an hour. He’s an extremely fluid talker and can reference articles by title, publication and date seemingly off the top of his head.

If you saw him presenting something in real life, you’d probably come away thinking there was real food for thought there. Until you got home and forgot all about it, that is.

I watched the whole thing to get a handle on this HAARP mind control idea but it’s not actually covered in that much detail. I wonder why. Basically, Begich’s idea is that HAARP can send extremely low frequency waves, or ELF waves, up into the ionosphere where they will be amplified and beamed back down to cover a potentially large geographic or demographic area. These can mess with your brain as it recognises the ELF signals and tries to mirror them.

This can induce feelings of fear, dread and anxiety in, for example, enemy combatants. If we take things into the future, these waves could be used to communicate directly into troops’ brains. HAARP was originally set up by the US military to look at ways to improve mainly military navigation and communication technology so I suppose this tracks.

As you can probably see, brain stuff doesn’t really seem like a good use of military research money as in the future, troops on the ground are likely to be replaced by drones or remote weapons anyway and security around military communications technology will also have improved to a point where beaming commands directly into a person’s brain is likely to become moot. Begich then takes this further to say that certain agencies may use this to implant synthetic memories into peoples’ heads but I think we’ve drifted quite a long way from some antenna in a field in Alaska at this point.

Radio waves and electromagnetic devices can be used to affect our brains, both in a positive and negative way. Begich references the “Radio Frequency Radiation Dosimetry Handbook” as a handy way of tabling the exact “radio frequency dosages necessary to override the function of various vital organs in the body - the heart, lungs, brain etc.” This makes it sound like a how-to guide of frequencies necessary to kill people but it’s just a report, which has had several editions, regarding the safety levels of radiofrequency radiation due to the increase in devices that emit this type of radiation.

There are lots of equations in it and again, much of it is theoretical. I’m sure many people would have a great time flicking through it but yours truly is not one of them.

Begich then ramps up the potential dangers of HAARP by saying that every time they fire radio waves into the sky, they’re basically punching into the ionosphere and “ringing it like a bell”. This is what can then potentially alter chemical reactions and emotional states in the brains of huge numbers of people on the Earth’s surface. He makes it seem like anything HAARP does has a huge effect on a large area of the upper atmosphere.

Ringing something “like a bell” indicates a force that radiates outward, causing ripples and vibrations much further afield. This is simply not true, however. Sure, we’ve only really got HAARP’s word for it, but according to them, the research they do is just in very small areas of the ionosphere and any ripples or perturbations made are temporary and extremely localised.

There is no massive pulse wave occurring in the ionosphere from the radio waves they send up and the ionosphere is, by nature, a constantly shifting place. All they’re doing is creating a convenient temporary testing environment that would naturally occur at some point anyway.

Begich also makes the dubious claim that the Persian Gulf War was won not by a superior attacking force, but because the Iraqi soldiers’ brains were affected by low frequency signals that were piggybacking on the calls to prayer being broadcast over loudspeakers. Why else would trained soldiers just give up and run off? It wasn’t because they were outclassed, outgunned and outflanked, it was because of the feeling of fear and anxiety being beamed directly into their brains, of course.

I was a child when this conflict was going on but I remember a joke going round school at the time - What does Saddam Hussein have in his pants? Scud marks.

The website for Begich’s self-publishing company, Earthpulse Press, is no longer available, presumably because, as he has the same name as his son, any searches for the Congress hopeful would have pulled up a lot of strange stuff indeed. But hey, even though Begich the Third’s campaign team has publicly disavowed any views held on the old Earthpulse site, Begich Three is named in paperwork as the Vice President, Treasurer and Director for Earthpulse. He also might be the Secretary but the “Three” is written in Roman Numerals and one of them looks a bit scribbled out so I’m not sure about that.

Anyway, he holds 16.66% of the shares. 666! Surely that’s relevant.

And in financial disclosures he had to make, according to an article from The Alaska Landmine - yes, their tagline is “Explosive Alaska News”, Begich the Third: “claimed between $100,001 and $1 million of income from Earthpulse in 2022 to date, and $15,001-$50,000 of income from Earthpulse the prior year.”

There is quite a wide variance between these numbers but maybe that’s just the ranges in the boxes you have to tick. Also, Earthpulse is given the classification of “vending machine operators” as opposed to a publishing company so who knows what’s going on there? Suffice it to say, while Begich the Third might not want his dad’s views attached to his run for Congress, he sure doesn’t seem to mind profiting from the sales of books and dvds relating to mind control and other conspiracy related stuff. I found the link to the Alaska Landmine site on a reddit forum called “Nick Begiches are weird” which pretty much sums them up.

I’ve always wondered about things that are supposed to read large numbers of people’s minds. Is it like Cerebro in the X-Men? Is there someone honing down until they find the one person they’re looking for amid a sea of people’s thoughts? And what do people think when they’re thinking of stuff?

If I’m watching tv or whatever, I don’t believe I’m actively thinking anything, I’m just watching the screen like a smooth-brained fool and also probably playing a match 3 game on my phone. Don’t judge me, you’re doing something similar that no-one knows about until an advert pops up and you forgot the volume’s on and everyone’s going “what’s that?”

Anyway, anyone looking at my brain will see a whole heap of nothing apart from maybe some shapes being swapped around. I’m pretty sure most people don’t go around actively narrating state secrets in their heads and then there are those who apparently can’t picture things in their minds at all. Maybe these poor sods will end up being the saviours of mankind. I can just imagine the movie version of the villain stretching out their hand to pull the thoughts from some average Joe, then stopping in confusion as their intended victim says: “Joke’s on you, Big Brain, I have no inner monologue!”

As for HAARP itself, there’s a question on its FAQ page asking “Can HAARP Exert Mind Control Over People?” The succinct answer is: “No. Neuroscience is a complex field of study carried out by medical professionals, not scientists and researchers at HAARP.”

We can probably leave it there.

Aliens

Oh gawd, do we have to go here? Well, as we’re talking about transmitters beaming up to the heavens, I suppose our little green friends have to make an appearance somewhere. There actually isn’t much of a consensus about what HAARP’s up to when it comes to all things extraterrestrial. There are those who think the transmitters are communicating with aliens although, as you might expect, evidence for this is pretty thin on the ground.

Maybe the HAARP transmitters are actually weapons, used in some sort of Space Invaders style way to shoot down UFOs, although again, who knows where the remains of these craft end up.

I saw an old post on an internet forum with one person saying that HAARP was tracking UFOs that were on course to arrive on Earth in December 2012, just when the Mayan calendar was ending. Remember that? Wonder how that theory panned out.

According to Rational Wiki: “Some claim HAARP can create atmospheric ‘vortexes’ where flying saucers may frolic in the skies above stunned ‘UFO experts’.”

These claims are always impressive until you realise that nobody has ever managed to film or photograph a single convincing shred of evidence. Believe me, if my neighbours are capable of covertly filming people who neglect to pick up their dog’s poop from 50 paces away, there’s no way they’d miss something as large as flying saucers frolicking about in front of an intergalactic wormhole.

HAARP has actually leaned into this aspect of the conspiracy theories surrounding them as they have a merchandise page where everything on it is branded with a picture of a transmitter in front of a swirly vortex and “Area 49” underneath. If you can’t beat them, you might as well join them and make some irony bucks along the way.

The aliens theory of this episode is even more far-fetched than the mind control bit, so let’s move on to more substantial things.

Chemtrails

I was tempted to just put “see Chemtrails episode of Decoding the Unknown” but I suppose we do need a bit of explanation if you missed that one. One thing about chemtrails is that if you believe in chemtrails, you really believe in them and nothing we’re about to say will change your mind so feel free to jump ahead to the next chapter.

Now that those kooks are out of the way, here’s the basics. So called “chemtrails” i.e. trails of chemicals sprayed out by planes to land all over the population or environment below for nefarious purposes are not real. What you see in the sky behind planes are “contrails” or trails of condensation or water vapour.

No, they do not last longer than when you were a kid. If they look like they do, it’s because there are many more planes in the sky and the trails are affected by atmospheric conditions such as air humidity, so some do hang around longer depending on the conditions and height of the trails. Also, you’re probably paying more attention to this kind of thing now, whereas in the past you had more important stuff to be getting on with.

Because so-called chemtrails are a staple in the conspiracy world, HAARP is going to be linked to them at some point but again, this is totally nothing to do with anything. If you recall, and you should unless your brain has been manipulated in the last few minutes, HAARP is all about sending radio waves into the ionosphere to heat up small parts of it for study. This has nothing to do with planes, water trails, chemicals or anything of that sort.

In a slight coincidence, remember that Amazon review quote I picked more or less at random about Nick Begich Junior Senior’s book? It was by a Peter A. Kirby and here he is popping up again! Small conspiracy world.

He wrote a book called “Chemtrails Exposed: A New Manhattan Project” in 2016 and earlier, in 2012, wrote an article called “Smoking Gun: The HAARP and Chemtrails Connection” which was published on Activist Post.com. In this article he says that HAARP can be used to move particles around in the sky, which will then modify the weather:

Chemtrails may enhance this connection between the lower and upper atmosphere. Then, when HAARP manipulates the ionosphere, the lower areas of the atmosphere (where our weather happens) can be manipulated accordingly.

He also goes on to say: “If HAARP is powering the chemtrail airplanes, this would be a great logistical advantage as the planes would not need to be grounded for fueling.”

Apparently HAARP can do it all. There are also mobile mini-HAARPs which can be located all over the place and Kirby even posts a picture of a so-called “mobile HAARP ship” and says: “It has been speculated that this HAARP ship was used to trigger the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake.”

These are dangerous claims, big man!

I checked the photo that he posted and it appears to be something belonging to the US, of course, called the SB-X, a “high-tech, sea-based X-band radar” which was initially built to detect and analyse any missiles coming from North Korea. If you didn’t notice or can’t see the picture, it also looks the complete opposite of the HAARP dipole array - those were tall antennas with four arms and this thing looks like a giant golf ball. I suppose the antennas could be inside but I don’t know how much affecting of the atmosphere one lone little boat chugging around in the Pacific is going to do.

He ends by saying: “We know HAARP can modify the weather. If one could, don’t you think they would? Weather control is god-like power. Chemtrails may be sprayed to enhance the effectiveness of these operations. If this is the case, our government’s pattern of lying and obfuscation about HAARP makes perfect sense and is consistent with behavior exhibited by others associated with every aspect of chemtrails, geoengineering and the related activities I outline.”

OK Kirby, riddle me this. If one could, don’t you think they would? And they haven’t, really, have they. Unless they can’t control the machine which is why there’s all this shit weather everywhere all the time.

Although that’s easy for me to say, I live in Southern California where I guess the brains behind HAARP also live because it’s pretty nice here most of the time. Apart from recently when there was a wildfire and my neighbourhood was on the edge of an evacuation zone. Why didn’t you order some rain then, HAARP, why??

Here’s HAARP’s response to whether it creates chemtrails: “HAARP doesn’t produce water in the atmosphere, has no capability to release gases or liquids, and does not interact with existing water in clouds.”

Case closed.

Weather Manipulation

We’ve already blundered across this line thanks to our new friend Peter A. Kirby, so let’s expand on this theory. The main accusation levelled at HAARP is that it can manipulate, direct and even manufacture adverse and destructive weather conditions for whatever reason people see fit.

This has even come up recently with the 2024 US general election. When an uncharacteristically strong snow storm dumped three times the normal amount of snow Iowa sees in January during the presidential caucus, people got suspicious. Or, let’s be honest, Trumpers got suspicious. I don’t think Democrats were particularly bothered one way or the other. Laura Loomer, far-right conspiracy theorist and Trump simp wrote on X:

Is the Deep State activating HAARP to disrupt the Iowa Caucus?

We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military industrial complex. She’s losing in Iowa, and now Iowa is set to get hit with a ONCE IN A DECADE blizzard as Donald Trump is set to dominate the Iowa Caucus.

Is the Deep State using HAARP to rig the Iowa Caucus?

Looks like weather manipulation to me.

Well, I guess she’s the expert. MTG also jumped on the HAARP bandwagon and no, don’t get your budgie-smugglers in a twist Kevin, if you’re listening, we’re not talking about your funny little card game here, we’re talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene, far-right conspiracy theorist and Trump simp - are we seeing a pattern here - who also happens to be a Congresswoman.

On October the 3rd 2024, in the run-up to the presidential election, Greene tweeted a picture of a map of the Southeastern United States, basically showing that a hurricane was going to hit a lot of states that were likely to be voting Republican. Which storm she was referring to specifically is unclear - Hurricane Helene had just passed and Milton hadn’t yet hit but when it did, only Florida was affected in the US. The map itself isn’t very easy to understand and Greene’s caption was:

This is a map of hurricane affected areas with an overlay of electoral map by political party shows how hurricane devastation could affect the election.

The top replies say things like:

So hurricane season is just a conspiracy during an election year?

and

This is stupid. I’m in Charlotte NC. You’re showing a map like it affected our voting process. It didn’t.

Basically, Greene was suggesting that natural disasters were making it look bad for Republicans as it was going to affect areas where they were most likely to vote in big numbers. This was only a slight nod at a conspiracy theory, it could also have been seen as someone putting it down to sod’s law but then she upped the stakes by tweeting later that same day:

Yes they can control the weather.

It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.

Again with the “they”. Presumably “they” are Democrats. Well, look how that turned out. Either “they” were shit at controlling the weather or “they” turned out to be Republicans, which makes MTG a part of them and she just outed them all. Oopsies.

While you may have some nagging thoughts about weather experimentation and modification in your mind, it is sort of true. Localised cloud seeding happens which is where planes or generators on the ground release stuff into clouds to try and increase the precipitation they produce. This is either because more precipitation is wanted, or to try and make the clouds shed their loads early before a planned event, for example, Beijing tried doing this before the Olympic Games opening and closing ceremonies.

This has been going on for decades but the science community is on the fence about whether it’s actually that effective or not. Cloud seeding would not be able to produce tropical storms or snow storms like the one in Iowa this year but apparently a giant radio transmitter could.

As neither a physicist nor a meteorologist, I’m not really sure how this would work. HAARP heats up electrons in the ionosphere, potentially hundreds of miles above our heads or above anyone who happens to be in Alaska. How does this translate to a snow dump 3000 miles away or a tropical storm that originated nearly 5000 miles southeast of the facility? It doesn’t, it’s nonsense.

As it turns out - the ionosphere as a whole cannot affect the weather on Earth but the weather on Earth can affect the ionosphere so maybe we should be thinking about that instead.

We haven’t reached a stage where we can control or create things like tornadoes or tropical storms. These are huge forces of nature and while we are probably responsible for creating conditions that make them more likely to happen, humans in general and “they” in particular, cannot do this, at least at the moment.

Most non-military weather manipulation experiments have been to try and stop things like tornadoes from forming or attempting to find ways to disperse them, not redirect them or make them stronger. Unfortunately, not much progress has been made here either, leading to the conclusion that humans are not yet at that level of “god-like power” Kirby was talking about when it comes to controlling the weather.

As for military weather manipulation, I guess this is a bit shadier. In 1978, lots of countries including the US and the then Soviet Union signed the “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques”. This included agreeing to things such as: “Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party.”

Yay, sounds great, but we all know that a lot of the time, things aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. As cited in the Chemtrails episode, when referring to the military and weather manipulation experiments, Deborah Gordon, director of the energy and climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is quoted as saying: “There’s a lack of transparency in the research. We don’t even know what people are working on. You can’t govern something you can’t see.

And that’s for peaceful applications.”

But what does HAARP have to say for itself when asked if it’s capable of manipulating the weather?:

No. Radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits are not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere—the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather. Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather.

The HAARP system is basically a large radio transmitter. Radio waves interact with electrical charges and currents, and do not significantly interact with the troposphere .

Further, if the ionospheric storms caused by the sun itself don’t affect the surface weather, there is no chance that HAARP can either.

See? Nothing to worry about. HAARP is just one of those things that was doomed to be attached to conspiracy theories from the start. It was originally funded by the US military.

It was built in a remote area of a sparsely populated state. It has a weird looking set up of strange metal antennae and a mission statement that contains words most people have never heard before. Even now it’s difficult to wrap your head around what they’re actually doing and why they’re still bothering so it continues to be blamed for bad weather events. It might be a strangely American thing too, as per the HAARP page on Rational Wiki:

HAARP is not even unique: there are several other similar radar systems, such as KAIRA in Finland, LOFAR in the Netherlands, the EISCAT network with 4 facilities in Sweden, Norway, and Finland, and the SuperDARN network, which consists of 35 radars all around the world, yet nobody seems to give a fuck about them.

Maybe that’s because not many other countries have politicians belching out such far-flung theories on social media platforms, although that’s not strictly true here. Hugo Chavez blamed the US for manufacturing the Haiti earthquake of 2010 and this was reported in Venezuelan media as being linked to HAARP. For the record, the earthquake was caused by the usual method of tectonic things slipping around under the surface of the earth.

Doctor Senior Junior Nick Begich also talked about weather manipulation in his show, mentioning how HAARP can apparently move jet streams around and manipulate gravitational waves which can both then affect weather systems. He also brings up things called electrojets which are streams of electric currents in the ionosphere. There’s one called the equatorial electrojet which is found above the magnetic equator and there are two auroral electrojets found at the higher latitudes around each polar cap.

While Begich et al might have you believe that HAARP is in some way harnessing these electrojets to do their evil bidding, this isn’t what’s happening and I don’t think that’s even possible. Under a subheading called “Why HAARP is actually cool” on the Rational Wiki site, it explains that HAARP basically uses the ionosphere and the auroral electrojets as a virtual extremely-low frequency antenna which can then make it easier to communicate with submarines as ELF signals travel easily through water. These signals would still need specialised equipment to be picked up, however, as they would be so weak and therefore the risk to human health would be nil as there wouldn’t be any humans floating up in the area of the ionosphere HAARP would be heating.

At least I’m not alone in finding all this a bit over my GCSE Physics level of understanding. There’s a section on HAARP’s FAQ page that says: “This is all very confusing.” and the answer starts: “We know! Space physics isn’t an easy field of study.” So that makes me feel a little better.

My son just asked me what I was doing and I said it was about a radio wave station that some people thought read people’s minds and controlled the weather. His response? “Hmm. Seems a bit fake.” He’s 9.

So what can we conclude? If you think that the University of Alaska Fairbanks really is up to some shady shit on behalf of the US government, I doubt any of this will have changed your mind. If you didn’t know that much about it, I hope you found it entertaining and not too confusing. As for me, I don’t think we need electrojets beaming extremely-low frequency signals into our brains to induce feelings of fear and anxiety; there’s more than enough stuff going on in our day-to-day to do that already.

To counteract it, I recommend copious amounts of Fact Boi, maybe in podcast form as you’re walking about in the sun. Just don’t worry about those trails in the sky.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is HAARP?

HAARP stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It is a research program that uses a high-power, high-frequency transmitter to study the ionosphere, which is part of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

What is the ionosphere?

The ionosphere is part of Earth’s upper atmosphere, stretching roughly 50 to 400 miles above Earth’s surface. It is where charged particles in our atmosphere can be found and is in a constant state of change.

What is the principal instrument used by HAARP?

The principal instrument used by HAARP is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a phased array of 180 HF crossed-dipole antennas capable of radiating 3.6 megawatts into the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.

What are the main conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP?

The main conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP include mind control, alien communication, chemtrails, and weather manipulation. These theories suggest that HAARP is used for nefarious purposes, such as controlling people’s minds, communicating with extraterrestrials, spraying chemicals into the atmosphere, and manipulating weather patterns.

Can HAARP control the weather?

No, HAARP cannot control the weather. Radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits are not absorbed in the troposphere or the stratosphere, the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather. Therefore, there is no interaction and no way to control the weather.

What is the purpose of HAARP’s research?

The purpose of HAARP’s research is to study the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere, which can affect military and civilian communication and navigation systems.

Who currently operates HAARP?

HAARP is currently operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was originally a joint project between the United States Air Force and the United States Navy but was transferred to the university in August 2015.

What are the dimensions and structure of the HAARP antenna array?

The HAARP antenna array consists of 180 metal poles arranged in a large, almost square formation, with 12 poles down and 15 across. Each antenna is 72 feet or just under 22 meters tall and has four long arms extending out of it near the top, which are technically two ‘crossed dipoles’.

What is the significance of the ionosphere’s ‘airglow’?

The ionosphere’s ‘airglow’ is a constant glow caused by sunlight hitting atoms and molecules and ionized atoms hitting electrons, releasing photons. Scientists use this glow to study the behavior of gases in the ionosphere, as different gases emit different colors.

What is the role of the auroral electrojets in HAARP’s research?

HAARP uses the ionosphere and the auroral electrojets as a virtual extremely-low frequency antenna, which can make it easier to communicate with submarines. These signals are too weak to pose any risk to human health.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: HAARP: What’s Going on in Alaska?
• Hero image source by SkylerScott101 / openverse, by-sa.