HAARP Being Retired

In 1993, a facility was established in Alaska known as HAARP or High Frequency Auroral Research Program.  It is operated as a joint project by the US Air Force, US Navy, University of Alaska and DARPA.   HAARP was built by BAE Advanced Technologies on a site owned by the US Air Force.  Much of the administration is handled by the University of Alaska.  In it’s two decade history, the facility has cost tax payers roughly half a billion dollars in both construction cost and annual operating expenses.  This is not a huge sum of money for a military research program, given the number of years it is spread out over.

HAARP has a number of different scientific instruments and systems on site.  These include UHF and VHF radars, geomagnetic sensors and radio receivers.  However, the heart of HAARP is a very powerful HF transmitting system, connected to a phased array of upward-pointing high gain antennas.  It directs a beam of up to 3.6 megawatts of RF energy upward at the ionosphere.  The operating frequency is between 2.8 and 10 MHz.

HAARP is an ionospheric heater.  It uses this energy to excite the ionosphere over the site.  The heating and excitement of the ionosphere allows measurements to be taken of the general state of the ionosphere.  Some of the energy is reflected back to the ground and can be received and analyzed. Pumping the ionosphere with RF energy can also produce a temporary controlled plasma turbulence effect.   The overall effect, however, is relatively modest and highly localized.  The 3.6 megawatts of RF energy a facility like HAARP can produce is quite small compared to the effects of geomagnetic fluctuation and solar wind particles on the ionosphere.

HAARP is basically a research facility.  There are a number of types of research conducted at HAARP.  Much of it is public, although some of the activities are military related and classified.

 Some of the classified military-related research that is either being conducted at HAARP or which has been credibly speculated to be conducted at HAARP include:

• General purpose ionospheric science
• Measurements of ionospheric bending of radio waves in order to improve HF direction finding
• The effects of ionospheric disturbances on GPS reliability
• HF communications jamming and countermeasures to jamming
• Next generation over the horizon radar
• Improved understanding of how ionospheric events, such as solar storms or nuclear weapon detonations can impact communications
• The use of ionospheric stimulation as a means of generating ultra low frequency radio waves, which are vital to submarine communication and typically require very large antennas to transmit

Most of the science that goes on at HAARP is public, but even the potentially classified activities are, by most accounts, pretty innocuous, as far as classified research goes.  After all, it’s really nothing more than a big radio transmitter.  There’s nothing on site that has any real potential to be used as an offensive weapon.

That has not stopped conspiracy theorists.  HAARP is one of their favorite facilities.  It’s been linked to every other bogus claim from chemtrails to mind control.  It’s been said that HAARP can control the world’s weather, that it is responsible for earthquakes or major weather events.  Others have claimed that it is the cause of everything from chronic fatigue syndrome to the downing of aircraft and the 2003 loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Conspiracy theorists can’t seem to agree on what kind of evil goes on at HAARP, or if it does everything that it has been blamed for.  Regardless the theories have managed to get quite a bit of attention.  Both the European Parliament and the Alaska state legislature held hearings about HAARP. The Russian government has also investigated the facility. However, none of these official inquiries seemed to find anything worrisome, although a Russian military journal speculated that ionospheric tests could “trigger a cascade of electrons that could flip earth’s magnetic poles.”

Jesse Ventura visited HAARP for his show “Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura” a couple of years ago. He was outraged that he was not let into the facility or given a full briefing on all the evils going on at the site. He probably would have been able to get in, however, if he didn’t just randomly show up one day and demand entry at the gate. Most of what HAARP does and the existence of the facility are not secret, after all.

In what is sure to be a major twist to conspiracy theorists, it has been announced that HAARP will be permanently shut down

Via Live Science:

Secret Weapon? Conspiracy Theories Abound as US Military Closes HAARP

The U.S. 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. In 2010, Venezuelan leader Huge Chavez claimed that HAARP or a program like it triggered the Haiti earthquake.

For the record, the Haitian quake of 2010 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 370 miles (600 km) up. The program has been funded by the Air Force, the Navy, the University of Alaska and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Most activities at the site were suspended last year as a result of a change in the operating contract. It now seems that those activities will not resume.

By most accounts, the facility is now shut down and dismantlement of some of the equipment occurred as early as this past summer. Final decommissioning of the site should be completed by the end of the year. Not all of those involved are happy, also according to Live Science, there are at least a few researchers who would like to see the unique capabilities of the facility preserved, even if its military role comes to an end.

The reason for the shutdown of HAARP appears to be a combination of tightening military budgets and the fact that the facility seems to have accomplished its mission for the military, having conducted the research that it was built for.