HAARPing It Both Ways: Radio Wave Experiments on Trial

Gakona, Alaska. It may be the high-tech “darling” of the conspiracy set, but the military’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project has posed questions in the minds of many who aren’t conversant with its radio-wave technology and are concerned with environmental damage. While a vast extrapolation of Tesla’s electrical wave concepts, and initially assumed as studying the nature of aurora borealis, HAARP’s impressions on the ionosphere are thought to be ultimately harmful to this fragile ecosystem that supports Planet Earth. Long-time activist Nick Begich and co-author Jeanne Manning attempt a detailed explanation of the system’s dangers in their 1995 book, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. In response to these brief excerpts (in bold type), a scientist/spokesperson from the official HAARP website has interjected counterpoints (in brackets) according to the system’s planners and operators, and Begich has replied (italics).

Like so much else in our world of rapidly proliferating advanced technology, it’s incumbent on each individual to research the matter before making hard conclusions. UFO Magazine refrains from taking either side and presents both viewpoints in the public interest.

(Bolded excerpts reprinted with permission from Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, by Nick Begich & Jeanne Manning.)

“This is about people who search for the truth about the Pentagon’s project that is quietly being built at a remote outpost in Alaska.”

[Mr. Begich would have you believe that there is something secret about HAARP. Before HAARP was ever built, we had public hearings in Alaska, all of which were advertised in the paper and in the media. Where was Mr. Begich then? The HAARP website was established in February 1995.

It has been added to regularly since then and currently contains hundreds of pages. You would be hard-pressed to find a government project that is so well described in text and photographs.

We host an annual Open House at the facility. Anyone is free to come to the site, roam around, take photos, ask questions, pick up handouts, kick the antenna towers, etc. This year will be our fifth annual open house and it is scheduled for August 12-13. (Begich has never attended an Open House.)

So, uhhh...How is it that HAARP is a quiet project?]

The open house is the standard dog and pony show for the public. HAARP planners outside of the open house refused interviews with German and Japanese TV in the last several years. I have not attended the open house because I have their documents which explain the project quite well. In addition, military uses found in more recent materials are well defined. The fact is that the research at HAARP is, for the most part, not classified; however some of the research is classified.

“The $30 million project euphemistically named HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is made to beam more than 1.7 gigawatts (billion watts) of radiated power into the ionosphere, the electrically-charged layer above Earth’s atmosphere.”

[When HAARP is completed, it will have a maximum power capability of 3.6 million watts of radiated power. Currently it has a capability of 960,000 watts of radiated power. Mr. Begich is off by three orders of magnitude.]

The military announced that this device would have an “effective radiated power” of one billion watts. It is the effective radiated power which is important. This is taken from their documents.

“Put simply, the apparatus is a reversal of a radio telescope - just transmitting instead of receiving. It will ‘boil the upper atmosphere.’ After disturbing the ionosphere, the radiations will bounce back onto the earth in the form of ion waves which penetrate our bodies, the ground and the oceans.”

[Do you know that standard AM and FM radio stations and broadcast television stations produce radio waves that “penetrate our bodies, the ground and the oceans?” If you live in or near a city, such broadcast stations produce very large signals indeed - much, much greater than HAARP will ever produce. So what, exactly, is Begich’s point?]

The problem with HAARP is that the signal in certain modes of operation is pulsed. It is the pulse rate in the ELF range which creates the problems, not the radio carrier.

“These researchers learned that HAARP represents a technology which could lead to a new class of weapons that could change our world profoundly - an all-purpose military tool.”

[HAARP is not a weapon, and it is not intended to develop weapon’s technology. It is a research facility, plain and simply, and its research objective is to improve our understanding of the ionosphere’s effect on communication and navigation systems. Is the military interested in communication and navigation systems? YOU BET!!]

I think the HAARP folks need to read their own material which we quote from in order to come to our conclusions. The fact is the facility is a research facility for the purpose of developing weapon applications and for improving military systems.

“If misused, the tool could mess up the weather.”

[No, it can’t. So, in other words, can Mr. Begich simply make such odd claims and not back them up? How has he come to this conclusion? We conducted a one-year environmental-impact analysis which concluded that HAARP would not affect weather systems in any way, shape of form. Perhaps Mr. Begich has some more profound understanding of atmospheric physics.]

This assertion comes from their own literature in addition to a study released by the European space agency specifically suggesting HAARP could be used in this way. In addition, the device when it is currently used in heating the ionosphere actually lifts the ionosphere. When this happens, the lower layers move up to fill the space and in so doing may impact local pressure systems, jet stream or other factors which directly affect weather conditions.

“It could be used against humanity in a way that would change what people think, believe and feel.”

[No it can’t. Again, the environmental study showed that HAARP would not affect plants, animals or humans. There is more danger from sitting too close to your television screen (the programs included) than from HAARP. HAARP has no such objective; there are no such side effects and no such research is planned. Period.]

There are no biologists or any other specialists associated with HAARP who have a background in electrophysiology. We researched this area and have documented it in our books.

“It could be used for good or evil, just as a harp can produce the music of Mozart or the melody of a death march. Many technological ‘notes’ could be played by HAARP-type military experiments. They can knock out electronic communications.”

[No, it cannot knock out electronic communications. However, HAARP is a powerful radio transmitter. It is possible that it may interfere with other users of the radio spectrum. If that occurs, we are required under the terms of our license to shut the transmitter off.]

The communications understanding they are seeking is to enhance our communications and control the factors which can degrade their adversaries communications. This concept appears throughout their material.

“... Change our minds and mental states.”

[This is bordering on libel. I wonder if Mr. Begich realizes how close he is to this?]

The truth is an absolute defense to libel. We make our case for this use as a side effect of the technology. Our newest book takes this issue much further in describing other systems designed for this purpose. HAARP can produce this effect as a side effect when operating in the ELF range. Our documentation is clear.

“Countless suns in other galaxies spray cosmic rays in all directions continuously. Closer to home, our own sun radiates gamma rays, X-rays and shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light. When they hit the outer layers of earth’s atmosphere, these cosmic rays are absorbed by atoms, but in the process, electrons are knocked off the atoms. Thus, there is a constant flux (flow) of electrons at this altitude, and the atoms are changed to positively-charged ions. This process gave the ionosphere its name. Although ionization happens at heights as high above the earth as 1,000 kilometers and as low as 50, the positively-charged ions and negative electrons are most dense at altitudes of 80 to 400 kilometers. In non-metric terms, the ionosphere begins at an altitude of about 30 miles and goes up about 300 miles or more.

“This natural electrically-charged shield around the earth filters harmful wavelengths of solar radiation, protecting the surface of Earth from significant bombardment.”

[Now Mr. Begich has strayed into betraying his lack of knowledge in this area. The Earth’s upper atmosphere absorbs UV radiation, acting as a shield. The electrons and ions making up the ionosphere are evidence of this shielding action. They themselves are not the shield. In fact, there would be slightly better shielding if there were no ionosphere! (More neutral atoms would be available to absorb UV radiation.)]

“Blown toward Earth on the solar wind, electrically-charged particles follow Earth’s magnetic field lines. Along such paths of least resistance, high-energy particles funnel toward the magnetic poles of Earth, squeeze into a poleward current called the electrojet, and are dumped toward the earth. Sometimes the electrojet dwindles, but at other times a solar flare floods the system with high-energy particles and the sky lights up into the dancing, shifting curtains of an auroral display. At the south pole it is called the aurora australis, and the northern lights are the aurora borealis.

“Anthony Ferraro, Ph.D., is a professor of electrical engineering at Penn State University, a school that was a pioneer in experimenting with this knowledge. In 1966, electrical engineers built a 500-kilowatt (kw) ionospheric heater at a site near the campus, with an effective radiated power of 14 megawatts. Ferraro developed a technique of beaming power with two transmitters at the same time, as a way of probing. A high-power transmitter would heat a region of the lower ionosphere while a weaker transmitter was pulsing. Thus, the experimenters could study the wave interaction. Penn State has been paid to do ionospheric modification research continuously for 30 years.

“The first large ionospheric heater in the United States was built at Plattesville, Colorado, in the 1960s. In 1983 the transmitter and antenna array were moved from Colorado to a site 40 kilometers east of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Penn State research team was among those who won contracts from the U.S. Navy to conduct experiments using the High Power Auroral Stimulation (HIPAS) facility there.”

[Yep - this is all true. The radio research results that have come from these facilities is enormous. Results have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals like “Radio Science,” “Geophysical Letters,” and “Proceedings of the IEEE,” among many others. Active ionospheric research is a mature science with numerous scientists around the world conducting important and meaningful studies of the radio characteristics of the ionosphere.]

“Why make an artificial aurora borealis?”

[None of these facilities has ever created, nor will HAARP ever be able to create, an artificial aurora borealis. It is possible to detect visible emissions using very sensitive CCD cameras and telescopes, but the level is much too faint to see with the naked eye.]

“Ferraro replied that the plasma physicists wanted to control the northern lights to learn more about the physics which created them.”

[I doubt Tony Ferraro would have made such an erroneous statement. Rather, I suspect he has been misquoted.]

“Ferraro instead came in and used the facility to modulate the electrojet. ‘These currents can be modulated by high-power transmitters so that they could be made to act as little antennas.’ Ferraro explained that in their natural state the ionospheric currents are direct current (DC), as is the electricity from a battery. ‘By modulating that atmospheric region from these high-power transmitters we can convert (the electrojet current), in a small volume, into alternating currents. Alternating current flowing in a wire is an antenna. Now, these are not flowing in wires; they’re flowing in space. But it’s the same principle. We can create a little antenna.’

“The experimenters wanted to generate Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves from that antenna in the upper sky, because VLF and ELF waves can travel almost around the world with very little loss. They generated the waves...but not strong enough to be of practical interest...That led to the Navy and Air Force funding an even larger ionospheric modifier - HAARP. ‘HAARP is not only meant for generating the low frequencies that would occur with a strong electrojet,’ Ferraro said. ‘It has a wide, diverse utilization.’ ”

[This is correct. One of the research areas for HAARP is to learn if it may be possible to improve the generation of ELF/VLF radio communication signals in the ionosphere instead of on the ground as is typical of a wide variety of commercial, government and military radio stations. Currently, the ionospheric technique runs about a thousand times less efficient than existing radio stations on the ground. There is some hope that this efficiency might be improved, but that has yet to be demonstrated. ELF /VLF radio signals are used for the broadcast of communication messages in the same way that AM radio stations broadcast talk radio and FM signals broadcast rock music. Ham radio operators broadcast Morse Code messages using HF radio waves. The ELF/VLF signals that could be generated by HAARP are so weak compared to some of these top-40 radio station signals, that it’s almost embarrassing to admit.]

It does not require high energy. Energy at 1/50th of the Earth’s natural energy levels are enough to affect living things. This was demonstrated at Yale university and is referenced in our work.

“The operators sitting at HAARP’s instrument control/monitoring console indeed have a versatile tool at their fingertips. It includes a waveform generator capable of sending a wide variety of modulated signals to the antenna array. Then the operators can whip the narrow beam of radio frequency (RF) energy around in the sky at will.”

[A waveform generator is the same thing as a trumpet, a singer’s voice, or a piano tuner’s tool. A modulated signal is the exact same thing as the signal transmitted from an AM talk-radio station during the time the host is speaking. When the speaker is silent, the signal is said to be “unmodulated.”]

“ ‘A point to remember is that the ionosphere is an active electrical shield protecting the planet from the constant bombardment of high-energy particles from space. This conducting plasma, along with Earth’s magnetic field, traps the electrical plasma of space and holds it back from going directly to the earth’s surface,’ says Charles Yost of Dynamic Systems, Leicester, North Carolina. HAARP zaps the ionosphere where it is relatively unstable.

“‘If the ionosphere is greatly disturbed,’ says Yost, ‘the atmosphere below is subsequently disturbed.’ ”

Angels Don’t Play This Haarp: Advances in Tesla Technology, is available for $14.95, and Earth Rising: The Revolution, is available for $17.95. Add $3.00 for shipping and handling. Earthpulse Press Inc., P.O. Box 201393, Anchorage, Alaska 99520, or call toll-free at 888-690-1277.

The HAARP scientist objecting to some of Begich’s assertions asked to be identified only as the webmaster for the HAARP site, http://w3.nrl.navy. mil/haarp.html; e-mail address, [email protected].

“It is the purpose of this e-mail account to answer technical questions about the HAARP program, and we have been doing so since 1995,” the scientist writes. “My background is in both engineering and physics with degrees up to the master’s level. I have worked on the HAARP program since its inception in 1991.”