HAARP
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Date: 1993–2014
Location: Gakona, Alaska
The Conspirators: US Air Force, US Army, DARPA, University of Alaska
The Victims: Civilian populations worldwide
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The Theory
HAARP is the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a remote facility in Alaska built by the US Air Force, US Army, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in partnership with the University of Alaska. It’s a 33-acre lot with 180 high-frequency antennas, each 72 feet tall, with a maximum transmission power of 3,600 kilowatts (about 75 times the power of an average commercial radio station). It is designed to energize a patch of ionosphere high above, for purposes as diverse as atmospheric studies, characterizing radio communications during atmospheric events, and extremely low frequency radio communication with submarines. It can even produce a faint artificial aurora, though too faint to be seen with the naked eye.
Ever since it was constructed, conspiracy theorists have claimed that HAARP has been “weaponizing” the weather by creating destructive hurricanes (like 2005’s Katrina), is able to trigger earthquakes at will (like Sichuan in 2008), and can beam mind-control waves to any part of the globe for some unspecified nefarious purpose.
The Truth
Communications are important to the military, and there are a lot of things in the atmosphere than can disrupt communications, both natural and man-made. So of course the military would build an atmospheric research program focused on communications. The fact is that the physical and electrical properties of the ionosphere are crucial to communication and navigation systems (like GPS) that rely on the transmission of radio signals, and the ionosphere can be altered a lot by space weather. HAARP allows researchers to temporarily create various conditions in the small patch of sky directly overhead, so that these technologies can be tested and adapted. It’s certainly not creating deadly hurricanes thousands of miles away.
The Backstory
The conspiratorial beliefs about HAARP first become widely known when Nick Begich Jr., son of a former Alaska congressman and career police state conspiracy theorist (and who inexplicably calls himself “Dr.” Nick Begich), self-published a book called Angels Don’t Play This HAARP in which he laid out most of the basic claims of the urban legend.
As with most conspiracy theories surrounding strange military projects, this one was warmly received by its target audience. Theorists quickly dug up what has been called the “HAARP patent,” filed by physicist Bernard Eastlund in 1985, claiming all kinds of powerful abilities using a “method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere, and/or magnetosphere.”
It sounded very compelling to some. Even a few legitimate academics—in fields outside of atmospheric physics, of course—have voiced their fears over what HAARP might be able to do.
The absurdity reached its peak in 2007 when the YouTube video “Crazy Sprinkler Lady” went viral, in which a woman pointed her camera at a rainbow made by her yard sprinkler, and explained her belief that the rainbow effect was caused by HAARP.
But some took it far more seriously. As late as 2016, two years after the facility had been shut down, two men were arrested in Georgia with a large arsenal of weapons intended to destroy HAARP to save humanity. They said that God had told them to destroy the machine so the souls of all the people trapped in it could be released.
The Explanation
Unfortunately for the conspiracy, HAARP has virtually none of the capabilities they imagine. Even Eastlund’s patent was for a theoretical device which bore no resemblance to HAARP, was one million times as powerful, and would have been at least 14 miles on a side. Neither he nor his patent ever had any connection with HAARP.
The actual intent of HAARP has been clear from the beginning—to better understand and address potential communications interruptions caused by atmospheric influences. Certain space weather events can disrupt activity on Earth. Some of the better-known include solar flares, which produce X-rays that can actually black out whole bands of the radio spectrum; solar radiation storms that bombard satellites with energetic protons, potentially knocking out their circuitry; coronal mass ejections causing geomagnetic storms on Earth that can bring down power grids; and crucially, powerful geomagnetic storms that can degrade GPS signals enough that they become useless for military or civilian operations.
At any rate, HAARP is now wholly owned and operated by the University of Alaska. Neither the US Air Force nor DARPA have any involvement anymore.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
HAARP was only very rarely actually turned on. Its power requirements are immense and expensive, and it was only active during brief experiments. Once it’s turned off, HAARP’s effects on the ionosphere directly above are no longer detectable after only one second to ten minutes, depending on the experiment performed. That fact pretty much shuts down claims from people who blamed HAARP for chronic problems like migraines or even climate change.
HAARP’s abilities to affect the Earth’s environment are limited by what it actually is: a big radio transmitter, pointing straight up, only good for frequencies up to 10 MHz, far short of what it would take to do microwave heating. There is also no mechanism by which it could direct its energy anywhere else in the world. It is located where it was built, and can study only that one patch of sky directly overhead. It cannot trigger some event in the earthquake faults beneath China any more than the cell phone towers in your neighborhood can redirect an asteroid.
As a radio transmitter, HAARP has no potential to impact the atmosphere at all, so there go any ideas about controlling the weather. Its electromagnetic signal can only interact with the charged particles in the ionosphere, far above atmospheric weather systems. This is the same reason we don’t see TV broadcasts or cell phone signals changing the weather.
Also, let’s have some humility. Humans are smart and we can do a lot, but we can’t compete with nature when it comes to electromagnetic radiation. The maximum signal strength HAARP can generate in the extremely low frequency band is less than one ten-millionth of the Earth’s natural background field. It’s also useless during the daytime, because natural solar radiation energizes the ionosphere far more than HAARP can, so its effects are completely negated.
Finally, nothing about HAARP has ever been secret. The research performed there was done by faculty and students at the University of Alaska, Stanford, Penn State, Boston College, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, MIT, Tomsk Polytechnic University, UCLA, Clemson, and the University of Tulsa. For most of the years it was operating, HAARP even held an open house each summer for the general public.
In 2015 HAARP was turned over to the University of Alaska, which plans to continue making its facilities available to atmospheric researchers . . . not nefarious government agents.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
HAARP is not even a unique device. There are a number of similar research stations around the world, namely the Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility in Russia, EISCAT in Norway, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and the HIPAS observatory near Fairbanks, Alaska, which is operated by UCLA.
TWA Flight 800
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Date: July 17, 1996
Location: Atlantic Ocean just outside New York City
The Conspirators: US Navy, other government agencies
The Victims: 230 passengers and crew of Flight 800
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The Theory
TWA Flight 800 took off out of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1996 and almost immediately crashed, killing everyone on board. Conspiracy theorists believe it was shot down by an American missile.
The Truth
TWA Flight 800 was destroyed by a spark of unproven origin from the plane’s electronics inside the center fuel tank. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reconstructed the wreckage and was
easily able to rule out a missile strike and found no evidence of any foul play. Sometimes bad things just happen.
The Backstory
TWA Flight 800 was a Boeing 747 headed for Rome with 230 passengers and crew. The takeoff just before sunset was uneventful, but twelve minutes later the plane exploded and broke up in midair over the open ocean. Rescuers found no survivors.
Many eyewitnesses on the shore saw what they believed was a missile streaking upward and then striking an aircraft with a tremendous boom, so conspiracy theorists immediately said the plane was downed by a missile fired by the government. Some claimed the missile had been fired from a ship (either accidentally or deliberately), and some believed that a shoulder-fired missile could have been launched from either a boat or the shore. Either way, they claimed that an American missile was what must have destroyed it.
Another TWA pilot, Robert Stacey, and journalist James Sanders became so persuaded that a missile had brought down the plane that they actually managed to steal bits of wreckage from the NTSB reconstruction site, hoping to find proof. They were, of course, convicted of the theft of government property. Sanders wrote two books claiming the United States shot down Flight 800 with a missile, The Downing of TWA Flight 800 (1996) and Altered Evidence (1999).
In addition, William Donaldson, a retired naval officer who referred to himself as the “Associated Retired Aviation Professionals” (why this was plural was never explained), wrote a 127-page manifesto titled Interim Report on the Crash of TWA Flight 800 and the Actions of the NTSB and the FBI. He went on to promote it as the Donaldson Report. He considered two scenarios: an accidental shootdown by the US military and a terrorist shootdown using a missile fired from a boat, both of which he described in great detail, though entirely speculatively. He considered the terrorist scenario more likely. Donaldson’s explanation for why the government would cover this up was the upcoming presidential elections, though this was not persuasively argued.
After the NTSB investigation found no evidence of any missile interference, the theory morphed into that of a government cover-up. The government must have known, they reasoned, that they had shot down the plane themselves, thus the NTSB investigation would be a sham.
The Explanation
In one of the most amazing debris recoveries in all of history, the NTSB managed to retrieve the bodies of all the victims, as well as 95 percent of the aircraft wreckage. Investigators were incredibly able to reconstruct a 93-foot section of the fuselage where the explosion had happened, allowing detailed study of the wreckage.
Unfortunately, what was eventually learned was that the cause of the explosion will probably always remain unknown.
Damage to the aircraft structure reveals a lot about the way it was damaged. Investigators were able to easily rule out any type of missile strike or external cause, as these would have left unambiguous evidence that is clearly not there. They were also able to rule out a bomb on board the plane, as this would have also left clear signs.
What was learned for certain is that the explosion came from inside the plane’s 17,000-gallon center fuel tank, which sits beneath the floor right under the wing. Vapor in the tank was ignited by an electrical spark, but the exact source of the spark could not be determined. Conspiracy theorists often interpret this to mean that there was no possible source, thus leaving the door open for some outside influence. But all it means is that of the many possible sources, no one could be proven to be the one responsible. It could have been any one of many. The NTSB described the most probable as:
a short circuit outside of the CWT (center wing fuel tank) that allowed excessive voltage to enter it through electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system.
They were also able to rule out the following alternate causes:
A lightning or meteorite strike; a missile fragment; a small explosive charge placed on the CWT; auto ignition or hot surface ignition, resulting from elevated temperatures produced by sources external to the CWT; a fire migrating to the CWT from another fuel tank via the vent (stringer) system; an uncontained engine failure or a turbine burst in the air conditioning packs beneath the CWT; a malfunctioning CWT jettison/override pump; a malfunctioning CWT scavenge pump; and static electricity.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
The reconstructed 93-foot section of Flight 800’s fuselage is now a permanent teaching tool at the NTSB training center in Ashburn, Virginia, helping tomorrow’s investigators prevent future air disasters.
The explosion blew the nose off the aircraft. Suddenly tail-heavy, the plane pulled sharply upward. Burning heavily, it rose in the darkening sky (this was about seven minutes after sunset) and could have looked very much like an ascending missile. Its wings then broke up, releasing much more fuel that bloomed in a massive fireball, and the plane made its final dive into the ocean.
Theorists claim that the witness accounts tell a very different story. This is part of a typical account (from Witness 73), as included in the NTSB report:
While keeping her eyes on the aircraft, she observed a “red streak” moving up from the ground toward the aircraft at an approximately 45-degree angle. The “red streak” was leaving a light gray colored smoke trail . . . . At the instant the smoke trail ended at the aircraft’s right wing, she heard a loud sharp noise which sounded like a firecracker had just exploded at her feet.
The reason we know that what she saw and heard could not have been a missile going up and striking the plane has to do with physics: the speed of sound, in this case. The plane was about 9 miles out to sea and about 2.5 miles up when the center fuel tank exploded, as proven by the flight data recorder. This placed the aircraft just about one minute away from the nearest eyewitnesses on the coast, measured by the speed of sound. When this witness saw a red streak going up and then terminating with a boom, physics tells us that the boom happened a minute before the red streak went up.
Other witnesses at various distances described turning to look only after hearing the explosion, and saw a red streak ascend and terminate in a fireball. Many of them interpreted this to be a missile, but the time and distance make their observations consistent with the already-halved airplane ascending and then the fireball when the severed wing tanks burned.
Although these eyewitness reports were the only evidence that a missile had been fired, the FBI still followed up on all the possible leads. Shoulder-fired missiles were dismissed, because there are none in the world with anything remotely like the range needed. There were a few military assets that had been in the area, including a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft and a US Coast Guard cutter, but neither had any missile-firing capabilities.
Malaysia Airlines MH370
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Date: March 8, 2014
Location: Indian Ocean
The Conspirators: Various
The Victims: 239 passengers and crew on board the plane
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The Theory
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, disappeared on March 8, 2014. Conspiracy theories range from a suicide by the pilot to a Russian state operation to an abduction by time-traveling aliens.
The Truth
We have no idea what happened to MH370, but we have no reason to believe it was anything more extraordinary than a typical mechanical failure.
The Backstory
Taking off just after midnight on the morning of March 8, 2014, Flight MH370 began normally, leaving Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. About forty minutes after takeoff, they were over the South China Sea, about halfway between Malaysia and Vietnam. Leaving the Malaysian air traffic control area, the pilots signed off with a “good night” message, and stopped their transponder from squawking, as is normally done. At this point they were no longer inside radar coverage, and the only ongoing contact with the outside world was the ACARS system, which periodically used the plane’s satellite data connection to send maintenance information back to the airline.
What ha
ppened thereafter remains unknown, but very shortly after signing off, the plane made a U-turn to head back toward Malaysia. This is known only by sporadic military and secondary radar contacts. The plane overflew Malaysia and turned right, heading west over the Andaman Sea, west of Thailand. Their last known maneuver was to turn south onto a heading that the plane appears to have followed until it ran out of fuel. Near the end of that path, a satellite made a brief handshake connection to the aircraft but no data was transmitted or received. Inmarsat, the company that operated the satellite, was able to derive a particular arc over the Indian Ocean, somewhere along which the plane was when their satellite made that brief handshake. And then, there was no more contact.
The lack of any radio communication throughout these obviously controlled movements aroused suspicion immediately among conspiracy theorists; questions persisted. Perhaps the plane had been hijacked, but then where did it go? Perhaps it was a suicide plan by the pilot, but then why the elaborate maneuvers?
Serious investigation first focused on the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah. There were claims that he was distraught over separating from his wife, and that he had no future appointments written in his calendar. This line of inquiry was eventually dropped when it became clear that there was no evidence of suicidal thoughts or tendencies. He also had a number of unusual routes on the flight simulator on his home computer, which the press made much of, but they were not substantially different from funky flight paths that many pilots fly when they’re relaxing on their computer.
Conspiracies Declassified Page 20