HAARP: High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program

HAARP is a research project into properties of the ionosphere, with an emphasis on developing communications and surveillance systems for civilian and military use. Many commentators focus on the military aspects, and clearly this is where much funding, direction and development has been placed. We shall leave you to your own investigations of the motivations and outcomes for this project, because our concerns are more to do with the environmental impact of such high energy experiments. HAARP covers both active and passive experiments, observing natural solar effects on the ionosphere, but also stimulating or heating the ionosphere to produce similar effects. There are several active sites, and several passive observation sites, since the communications aspect is intented for steerable global communications reach.

What is the concern?

After the second world war, a lot of experiments were done with nuclear explosive devices. In ignorance, the results were atmospheric fallout that remains to this day. Not intended, but long-lasting and an irretrievable hazard to life. We may never know the consequences. Here we have another experiment with global reach, premised on the assumption that electric and magnetic fields have no influence on living systems. Ignorant or dismissive of knowledge that organisms are electromagnetically ordered at very subtle levels and to specific frequencies or patterns, the big experiment envelopes all life in its range. It may have useful outcomes in terms of understanding the ionosphere, and it may be useful to understand radio communications better, and we may well be concerned about military applications. But fundamentally there is an immediate and unassessed hazard in the way that the experiments are being done. HAARP may produce a similar ionospheric outcome to natural lightning, but not by the same means, and the greatest hazard may well be in this means.

HAARP is a big and unassailable experiment, protected by defence (ie military) interests, with a global reach and potentially very damaging consequences, simply by interfering with natural geomagnetic and electromagnetic fields and producing unnatural resonances. If the analogy were sound (and indeed there is a very close parallel in oceanic acoustics disturbing marine life and large mammals in particular) and our world was filled by strange and ghostly echoes, or frequencies that disturbed animals and people, we would all know about it. For example, a phenomenon, or group of phenomena, termed ‘the Hum’ distresses a great number of people in many places all over the world, with source or sources unknown, perhaps man-made. This is more openly discussed and investigated, because people talk about it and display recognisable responses, and can describe it. What is most disturbing for many who hear it, is the inescapability, the unvarying nature of the sound, and that it is incessant.

However, HAARP, for all its massive power, is invisible to our normal senses. What if, as some think to be the case in digital communications systems, the chief danger lies in rigid patterns, as much as in energy, power, carrier frequencies etc.? We all drift off to sleep to the peaceful random dripping of rain on the window sill. Yet we are all driven to distraction by a tap dripping regularly into a pan in the sink! Why is water torture, torture? Living organisms are acutely capable of pattern recognition, from faces to sounds to contrasts, to molecular pattern recognition in odours and flavours. And we maintain homeostasis much as a bicycle stays upright when moving – by a constant wobble around a normal position. Rigid patterns and frequencies are not natural, and are harmful to this state of affairs. Protective responses can cease, as feedback systems lose proper corrective stimulus. What HAARP perhaps introduces in a massive way, is a global rigid pattern that can mask natural rhythms and patterns and impose a recognisable but completely uninformative electromagnetic environment. And it is this disturbance that, if for example, it disrupts even the navigation of bees or birds, threatens the whole web of life.

Find out more about HAARP

From here you will get the gist of the controversies, which reach to conspiracy theories, intentions for weather modification and weaponisation. The important thing is to examine the actual likely environmental impact of a massive-energy, global atmospheric experiment (bearing in mind that the purpose of most experiments is to observe outcomes from a standpoint of uncertainty).

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