Project HAARP: The Pentagon's provocative plan to superheat the earth's ionosphere

In an Arctic compound 200 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska, the Pentagon has erected a powerful transmitter designed to beam more than a gigawatt of energy into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Known as Project HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the $30 million experiment involves the world's largest "ionospheric heater," a prototype device designed to zap the skies hundreds of miles above the earth with high-frequency radio waves.

Why irradiate the charged particles of the ionosphere (which when energized by natural processes make up the lovely and famous phenomenon known as the Northern Lights)?

According to the U.S. Navy and Air Force, co-sponsors of the project, "to observe the complex natural variations of Alaska's ionosphere." That, says the Pentagon, and also to develop new forms of communications and surveillance technologies that will enable the military to send signals to nuclear submarines and to peer deep underground.

The HAARP complex is situated within a 23-acre lot in a relatively isolated region near the town of Gakona. When the final phase of the project is completed in 1997, the military will have erected 180 towers, 72 feet in height, forming a "high-power, high frequency phased array radio transmitter" capable of beaming in the 2.5-10 megahertz frequency range, at more than 3 gigawatts of power (3 billion watts).
.
According to the Navy and Air Force, HAARP "will be used to introduce a small, known amount of energy into a specific ionospheric layer" anywhere from several miles to several tens of miles in radius. Not surprisingly, Navy and Air Force PR (posted on the official HAARP World Wide Web Internet site, an effort to combat the bad press the project has generated), downplays both the environmental impacts of the project and purported offensive uses of the technology.

However, a series of patents owned by the defense contractor managing the HAARP project suggests that the Pentagon might indeed have more ambitious designs. In fact, one of those patents was classified by the Navy for several years during the 1980s. The key document in the bunch is U.S. Patent number 4,686,605, considered by HAARP critics to be the "smoking raygun," so to speak. Held by ARCO Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), the ARCO subsidiary contracted to build HAARP, this patent describes an ionospheric heater very similar to the HAARP heater invented by Bernard J. Eastlund, a Texas physicist. In the patent--subsequently published on the Internet by foes of HAARP--Eastlund describes a fantastic offensive and defensive weapon that would do any megalomaniacal James Bond super villain proud.

According to the patent, Eastlund's invention would heat plumes of charged particles in the ionosphere, making it possible to, for starters, selectively "disrupt microwave transmissions of satellites" and "cause interference with or even total disruption of communications over a large portion of the earth." But like his hopped up ions, Eastlund was just warming up. Per the patent text, the physicist's "method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth's atmosphere" would also:

"cause confusion of or interference with or even complete disruption of guidance systems employed by even the most sophisticated of airplanes and missiles";

"not only... interfere with third-party communications, but [also] take advantage of one or more such beams to carry out a communications network at the same time. Put another way, what is used to disrupt another's communications can be employed by one knowledgeable of this invention as a communications network at the same time";

"pick up communication signals of others for intelligence purposes";

facilitate "missile or aircraft destruction, deflection, or confusion" by lifting large regions of the atmosphere "to an unexpectedly high altitude so that missiles encounter unexpected and unplanned drag forces with resultant destruction or deflection of same."

If Eastlund's brainchild sounds like a recipe for that onetime Cold War panacea, the Strategic Defense Initiative (AKA "Star Wars"), it's probably no coincidence. The APTI/Eastlund patent was filed during the final days of the Reagan administration, when plans for high-tech missile defense systems were still all the rage. But Eastlund's blue-sky vision went far beyond the usual Star Wars prescriptions of the day and suggested even more unusual uses for his patented ionospheric heater.

"Weather modification," the patent states, "is possible by... altering upper atmospheric wind patterns or altering solar absorption patterns by constructing one or more plumes of particles which will act as a lens or focusing device." As a result, an artificially heated could focus a "vast amount of sunlight on selected portions of the earth."

HAARPHyperlinks
Warm, Fuzzy HAARP The U.S. Navy's soothing, feel-good PR Web site devoted to HAARP reassures us that the project is entirely benign.

Angels Don't Play This HAARP Excerpts from the book that posits a connection between the work of suppressed scientist Nikola Tesla and Project HAARP.

Alternative HAARP Page Overview of facts and speculation swirling around the Gakona, Alaska, project.

The Eastlund-ARCO Patent Outlines Eastlund's vision for a HAARP-like project drawing upon the inspiration of Nikola Tesla.

Tesla A brief biography of the enigmatic scientist