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Dennis view more articlesThose theories cover the gambit from weather modification to earthquake generation. (1) However, none of these conspiracy theories have been definitively proven true. Nevertheless, it has been reported in previous years that HAARP was going to be shut down, leaving many conspiracy theorists to not believe the report when it came out.
The biggest news that the theorists jumped on was the claim by Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Science, Technology and Engineering that HAARP was being dismantled because the Air Force can now control the ionosphere.
During a Senate hearing, David Walker, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Science, Technology and Engineering, stated, “We’re moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do. To inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it. But that work has been completed.” (2)
Of course, people heard this quote as an admission of the program’s success giving the U.S. Air Force the ability to control the ionosphere and in turn controlling a wide variety of weather phenomena such as tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes and tsunami’s. However, is that what he meant when Walker stated, “…that work has been completed”?
HAARP and the Ionosphere
It is definitely no secret that the main purpose of HAARP was to study the ionosphere. On the program’s website (which is no longer active), HAARP was described as “a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.” (1)
In other words, how the ionosphere affects radio signals…radio signals that the Department of Defense relies very heavily on. The basic idea was to beam high-frequency radio waves into the ionosphere. This excess energy would excite a small area of the ionosphere allowing scientists to study the physical effects.
For example, the Stanford VLF Group studied how low-frequency waves, instead of the high-frequency ones, interacted with particles trapped in the magnetosphere. (3) However, with all of this research into the ionosphere, is it possible that the USAF truly discovered how to manipulate this portion of the earth’s atmosphere?
Most mainstream scientists say no. Weather writer, Dennis Mersereau, contends:
“While the frequencies are high powered, it doesn’t have nearly enough energy to do anything over the Lower 48, let alone specifically target communities for destruction like one would see in a science fiction movie.” (4)
The size of the area within the ionosphere is minuscule when compared to the ionosphere as a whole. The Alaskan Dispatch News compared it to “controlling the Pacific Ocean by tossing a rock into it”. (2)
If the USAF has not achieved control over the ionosphere, what exactly did Walker mean by stating that the work of HAARP was completed?
Has HAARP Completed Its Mission?
The simplest answer would be that HAARP has completed what was stated as its overall mission: determining the ionosphere’s affect on radio waves.
If this is the case, then it would imply that the USAF cannot necessarily control the ionosphere for the purposes of weather modification, but rather understand how radio waves behave in the atmospheric layer.
Moreover, if the USAF understands how the ionosphere affects radio waves, researchers may have determined what steps need to be taken to provide the best methods of transmitting radio waves through the ionosphere for communications and/or surveillance.
The only thing that is for certain, if the simplest answer is the correct answer, the conspiracy theorists will not be satisfied with such a conclusion.
References & Image Credits:
(1) TSW: A Sane Look at the HAARP Conspiracy
(2) ADN
(3) Stanford
(4) Washington Post
(5) NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center via Compfight cc
