When it comes to controversial science projects, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Programme
(or, HAARP) is right up there with the moon landings and the chemtrails on the conspiracy hitlist.
But once you get past the wilder theories and claims, the basis of the science and its aims is no less intriguing.
So just what is HAARP and why is it so controversial?
[theme tune plays]
Some of the many reasons why HAARP attracts so much attention comes from the claims
of scientifically uninformed theorists, who say it can control the weather,
set off earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, bring down missiles and planes,
disrupt worldwide communications and influence people's minds and moods.
If that were true then it would be one of, if not the most, powerful pieces of technology on the planet,
and hidden behind government and military secrecy.
Yet, HAARP is unclassified, though it was funded and jointly managed by
the US Air Force, US Navy and DARPA.
But due to budget cuts in 2014,
the ownership of the site and all the equipment
was transferred to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks
who now also run it.
So, what is the purpose of HAARP?
Well, its basic remit is to study the ionosphere,
its interaction with space weather and how it affects radio communications here on Earth,
as well as the generation of VLF (very low frequency), and ELF (extremely low frequency) radio waves,
which can travel around the world and penetrate deep under the sea
for communications with submarines, and into the ground to reveal underground structures.
HAARP deals with some complex science and how it operates is equally complex,
but the basic principle is to try and replicate how the sun affects the upper atmosphere
to create the ionosphere and how it then goes on to affect it.
But to do this in a controlled and repeatable way and, of course, in a much much smaller scale.
Now, in order to understand HAARP we need to know a little about the ionosphere.
This is a constantly changing area of the Earth's upper atmosphere
that reaches from about 60k to 1000km in altitude,
where it's thin enough so that the sun's ultraviolet and x-rays can reach it
but thick enough so that it can absorb these rays and ionise the gases there.
It's also well above the area called the troposphere, where we live.
Ionisation is the process where high-energy radiation
strips away an electron from a neutral atom or molecule
and creates a negatively-charged electron and a positively-charged ion.
That's an atom with a missing electron.
This process creates a shell of these charged particles
around the Earth, which we call the ionosphere.
This stripping of the electrons also releases energy in the form of heat and light.
This light is called "airglow",
and is similar to how the auroral lights are formed in the polar regions,
but it also makes the night sky everywhere glow, very slightly.
And you can see this on a dark, clear night with a sensitive camera, and sometimes by eye.
Normally, in the dense atmosphere near the surface of the Earth,
the negative electrons and positive ions would recombine very quickly.
But because the gas in the upper atmosphere is much less dense
the particles are much farther apart, and remain separated for much longer.
With all these free electrons floating around,
the high atmosphere becomes conductive.
Starting at around 60km,
peaking intensity at 300km,
and then by the time it gets to 1,000km, it's dropped almost to nothing,
where the atmosphere becomes too thin and then the vacuum of space takes over.
In fact, the ionosphere separates into three layers,
called the D, E, and F layer,
with D being at the lowest altitude rising up to F at the highest altitude,
Because these layers are conductive,
they interact with electromagnetic waves like radio broadcasts from the surface.
Depending on their frequency, some radio waves will be absorbed,
some will bounce off the electron layer and be reflected,
and some will pass right through with little resistance.
As these layers are created by the sun's energy,
they can change dramatically from day to night, summer to winter.
And, in fact, the lowest D layer only exists in the daytime and completely disappears at night.
They're also affected by high solar activity and solar flares
and thus affect radio transmissions similarly.
HAARP uses up to 3.6MW of high-frequency radio signals in the 2-10MHz range
to excite the gas molecules in a small area of the ionosphere directly above the facility.
It does this with the main instrument, the IRI, or the Ionospheric Research Instrument.
This is the "heater".
It's a phased array radio transmitter with 180 antennae
in a grid covering about 100,000 sq.m, or about 24 acres.
This array works like one large transmitter,
but it can electronically "steer" the beam over about a 30 degree angle.
By the time the signal has reached the ionosphere,
it's spread out to a size of between 60-100km across
depending upon its frequency and configuration.
By rapidly steering the beam around a small patch of sky, it can modulate the heating process
to create signals like VLF and ELF waves.
Among the many misconceptions about HAARP,
probably the biggest is its power output,
as this is seen as undeniable proof
that it is capable of doing all the wild things claimed of it.
Its stated maximum power is 3.6MW
but this is often mistaken for another, much larger figure,
its "ERP" output,
and that can be up to 5.8GW.
So why are there two wildly different figures for the same facility?
Well, HAARP's output is 3.6MW
but in the broadcast industry there is another figure called "ERP",
or Effective Radiated Power,
and here is where people get confused between actual power and ERP
because they don't understand what ERP represents.
But one thing's for sure.
You can't put in 3.6MW and get out 5.8GW as some claim.
It's just physically impossible.
In fact, you can't get out a single µW more than you put in.
If you did then, a)
you've just solved all the world's energy needs
by creating a machine that makes more energy than it uses, and b)
you've just broken the laws of physics and, in particular, the law of conservation of energy.
HAARP has to focus its 3.6MW onto a small area of sky
hundreds of kilometres above using its antenna array
like a torch focusses its light into a tight beam.
That 5.8GW ERP is a fictional figure used by engineers in the broadcast industry
to indicate how powerful the transmitter would have to be
if there was no focussing and the whole sky was covered
to the same power intensity at the target distance,
which in this case is a small patch of sky 300km above HAARP.
That ERP figure can change dramatically from tens of MW to GW
depending on how efficient the antenna is deemed to be
at focussing the radio transmissions.
The tighter, more focussed the beam, the higher the ERP figure will be.
The more spread out, the lower the ERP figure will be.
But at the end of the day, the most HAARP can transmit is 3.6MW
With the inefficiencies in the system,
the divergence of the beam and the absorption of the atmosphere,
by the time it gets to the ionosphere
it's down to 36mW, or 36 thousandths of a watt
per square metre of sky in the target zone.
The amount of energy from the sun falling on the same square metre of sky, by comparison,
is 1,367 watts
about 37,000 times more energy than HAARP.
As one scientist put it,
it's like trying to heat the Yukon River with a domestic immersion heater.
But in case you think I'm just making it all up, consider this:
if that 5.8GW was real, where does the power come from?
5.8GW of electricity is far more than the whole of Alaska generates,
and is enough to supply 4.6 million US households
assuming each house is using an average of 1.26kW
as stated by the US Energy Information Administration.
That's the equivalent of New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas combined.
The biggest non-hydro electric power station in the US
is the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant in Arizona, at 3.9GW.
That would still be short by nearly 2GW.
So, where is the massive power station near HAARP
and the transmission infrastructure
required to supply this fictional 5.8GW?
It doesn't exist.
In fact, HAARP's power actually comes from
five 2.5MW diesel generators on the site.
So if the power output is one of the biggest misconception about HAARP,
the other comes from its history
and, in particular, a patent filed by the physicist Bernard J Eastlund
To find out why you have to go back to an area of Alaska
before HAARP was constructed
and the oil and gas company Atlantic Richfield,
also known as ARCO, and Bernard Eastlund.
ARCO had the rights to the huge natural gas fields in Alaska's North Slope region
but they were far from their main customers
and the cost of liquefying and transporting the gas was prohibitive.
What they needed was a customer that would be nearby.
Bernard Eastlund was an MIT-trained physicist
who worked at the US Atomic Energy Commission during the 1960-70s.
He specialised in plasma physics and co-developed a fusion torch
a method of using high-temperature plasma
of a nuclear fusion reactor to convert waste materials into reusable elements.
In the 1980s, Eastlund was working for ARCO
and became the president of ARCO's Production Technologies International company in Houston.
He suggested that ARCO could use the natural gas reserves
to power a huge antenna complex
to focus high-energy radio beams into the ionosphere.
This would heat up the gas atoms to create artificial plasma layers in the ionosphere
but in a way which could be controlled,
moved, and shaped by equipment on the ground.
Alaska would be in a good position because the Earth's magnetic field lines
go up almost vertically in that area.
Each antenna would create a circularly-polarised radio beam
that would spin the particles around the magnetic field lines
at the resonant frequency of the ions
in the same way that a cyclotron works to accelerate particles.
This would heat up the plasma and allow it to move along the magnetic field lines to higher altitudes.
Eastlund was granted a US patent, number 4,686,605,
for the invention titled,
"Method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth's atmosphere, ionosphere, and/or magnetosphere",
on August the 11th, 1987.
Now, whilst Eastlund filed the patent he did so while working for ARCO,
and as such ARCO owned the patent.
Some time afterward, Eastlund disassociated himself from it and ARCO,
and set up his own research company.
Eastlund's patent makes for some very interesting, if not technical, reading,
and some extraordinary claims.
Some of the claims conclude that it could disrupt communications
both around the Earth but also to and from satellites, missiles, and air and sea craft
by randomly modulating areas of the ionosphere
which are relied upon to propagate radio signals around the Earth.
Thus, effectively, scramble the signals.
Now, back in the late 1950s and early 60s
the US and Soviets exploded nuclear weapons
in the magnetosphere high above the earth.
We also have a video on that, if you want to see it.
This created large amounts of charged particles
which were found to travel along the magnetic field lines in a spiral motion
and bounce back and forth between the mirror points at their ends at very high speed.
This created a lot of radio noise that could blind radar systems,
and, it was thought at the time, could cause the electronics of nuclear missiles to fail.
One of the patent claims was that plasma layer could be created
and used to trap some of the plasma particles
which would then oscillate between the new layer and the mirror points on the magnetic field lines
to create interference that would have a similar effect
to the nuclear tests, but without having to detonate a nuclear device in space.
Other uses include heating large areas of the ionosphere to move them to much higher altitudes
to create unexpected and unplanned drag forces on missiles and satellites
and cause them to become unstable in their travel.
Also, weather modification.
By affecting the upper atmospheric wind patterns,
by the stacking of different-shaped plumes of particles,
to create a lens effect; and in concentrating solar energy over an area
or altering the course of the jetstream to move adverse weather, like hurricanes,
or denying rain to drought-prone areas.
It was also claimed to make a wave reflector in the sky
to steer ELF signals to a depth of a kilometre or more.
The reflections would then have been picked up by satellite
and, after processing, could reveal hidden structures;
a bit like a CAT scan of the Earth.
Another reason to use ELF waves is that the frequency of brain waves in humans
lies in the 3-12Hz range, very similar to that of the ELF signals.
It was suggested that directing such a frequency at an enemy
might have a detrimental effect on their mood, and ability to operate.
But it wasn't all destructive.
Eastlund suggested that it could be used to modify the molecular make-up of the upper atmosphere,
increasing the levels of ozone to fill the ozone hole,
and to break up various chemical entities, such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides.
Even though the claims in the patent seemed extraordinary,
and were probably somewhere over the top,
ARCO still passed the idea of the ionospheric heater
and its possible uses to Simon Ramo,
who had led the development of microwave and missile technology,
and was instrumental in the creation of the ICBMs.
He passed it to the Defence Department
who then gave it to the Pentagon's advanced research arm, DARPA.
The big claims may well have raised a few eyebrows in the military,
and its electonic beam steering and reflection technology would have been of great interest to them.
But the overall size of the proposed project would have been MASSIVE.
For Eastlund's patent to create the effects it claimed were possible,
it would call for a site with a maximum output of 100GW of true power,
not the fictional ERP figure.
That's some 27,700 times more powerful than HAARP's 3.6MW.
If Eastlund's design used the same 20kW antennae and layout dimensions as at HAARP,
it would need five million antennae, which would take up an area measuring 51x51km
Big enough to cover the city of Houston in Texas.
This is why Eastlund and ARCO suggested the power should come from the huge natural gas reserves
of Alaska's North Slope.
It would have been a massive cash cow to ARCO to supply the gas.
To put this 100GW requirement into context,
it's 9% of the US's total electrical power capacity of 1100GW.
The biggest gas-fired power stations in the world are in Russia
and can generate 5.5GW of power each.
Eastlund's array would need 18 of these working at full power to supply the 100GW.
Eastlund's idea was just too grandiose,
but the scientists saw the opportunity to build a much smaller facility
that would allow them to test ideas and gain a much greater understanding of the ionosphere.
So, with the help of the Alaskan senator Ted Stevens
$10 million of funding was provided, and paid to ARCO to build a prototype HAARP research facility
at the site of a USAF Over the Horizon radar, which had been cancelled before completion at Gakona, Alaska.
Because of the location of HAARP, it would be able to tap into the auroral electrojet,
an electric current that circulates in the polar regions of the ionosphere.
By modulating the auroral electrojet with an ELF wave,
it would act like an incredibly long virtual antenna, high in the sky, to transmit these VLF and ELF signals,
something that the US Navy were particularly interested in.
So now we can see where we get this conflation of ideas between the HAARP research facility,
and Eastlund's original patent.
But the two are not the same.
HAARP operates sporadically throughout the year for short periods of time,
and does not use microwaves to energise the atmospheric gases as some people think,
so it's not like a giant microwave oven.
Its operating frequency of 2-10MHz is 2,000 times lower than the 2.45GHz used in a microwave oven.
And you know when HAARP is working because you can hear its characteristic tones in the short wave band,
up to many thousands of kilometres away.
[chirping at various frequencies]
HAARP is not the only site like this; there are other, smaller ones, in Russia and Norway,
but HAARP is the most powerful and has been able to create controlled effects
in the ionosphere, such as faint airglow, ELF and VLF signals.
It's detected previously unknown ionospheric effects,
which have advanced our understanding of the ionosphere greatly
and some say that it's proof of concept that Eastlund's ideas could work.
So, what are your views on HAARP? Should we do this research considering its origins,
or leave well alone. Let me know in the comments.
So, thanks for watching, and don't forget to check out some of our other videos, if you get the time
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