Is HAARP About To Open The Sixth Seal?, page 3

Posted this before, but warrants another explanation.

First of all, there's nothing remotely secret or even classified about HAARP. No security clearance is needed to visit and tour the site, and HAARP usually holds an open house every summer during which anyone can see everything there. During the rest of the year, research is conducted. The universities that have participated in HAARP research include University of Alaska, Stanford, Penn State, Boston College, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, MIT, Polytechnic University, UCLA, Clemson and the University of Tulsa. There are several other similar research stations around the world, namely the Sura facility in Russia, EISCAT in Norway, the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, and the HIPAS observatory near Fairbanks, operated by UCLA. If you look at HAARP on Google Earth, you can see there's not much there, and the current view shows only four cars in the small parking lot.

HAARP consists of an observatory and an adjacent 28-acre field with 180 HF (high frequency) antennas, each 72 feet tall, with a maximum transmission power of 3600 kilowatts, about 75 times the power of a commercial radio station, but only a tiny fraction of the strength of the natural solar radiation striking the same part of the ionosphere at which HAARP is aimed. Although the observatory operates continuously, the HF antenna array is activated only rarely for specific experiments, which average about once a month.

Sadly for the conspiracy theorists, HAARP has no potential to affect weather. The frequency of energy that HAARP transmits cannot be absorbed by the troposphere or the stratosphere, only by the ionosphere, many kilometers higher than the highest atmospheric weather systems.

The ionosphere is created and replenished daily by solar radiation. At night, the level of ionization drops quickly to very low levels at lower altitudes of 50 to 100 miles, but at higher altitudes over 200 miles it takes most of the night for the ionization to disperse. During the night, when the natural ionosphere is minimal, HAARP is capable of creating a weak artificial aurora that can actually be observed by sensitive cameras at the observatory, though they are far too faint for the naked eye. During the daytime, solar radiation ionizes the ionosphere so powerfully that HAARP's weak artificial effects are the proverbial drop in the bucket, and are erased almost immediately when the transmitter is turned off.

You might ask "What's the point of HAARP?" If it's not to wreak global destruction, what good is it? Communication and navigation signals are sent through the atmosphere for a broad range of civilian and military purposes. Guided missiles rely on digital transmissions which can be affected or jammed by a whole variety of natural and artificial causes. Global Positioning System and encrypted communications all need to be able to make it to their recipients in wartime, regardless of the atmospheric and electromagnetic conditions. The study of these effects is the primary reason that DARPA, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Navy contribute to HAARP's funding. In addition, by bouncing signals off the ionosphere at at altitude of 100km, HAARP has been able to create Extremely Low Frequency, or ELF, waves as low as 1 Hertz, which can potentially be used for worldwide communication including reaching submarines, though at an almost uselessly slow data rate. But before you conclude that these ELF waves might be used for creating earthquakes, note that the maximum ELF signal amplitude produced by HAARP has been measured at less than one ten-millionth of the Earth's natural background field.

So if HAARP is so anticlimactically mundane, why all the conspiracy theories? HAARP is operated by MarshCreek, LLC, an Alaska Native Corporation under contract to the Office of Naval Research. Anytime the ONR or DARPA or the military have their hand in something, paranoid types tend to come out of the woodwork and blame anything they can imagine on it. So regardless of whether HAARP is in the atmospheric research business or the rubber duckie business, they were pretty much doomed to conspiracy charges from the beginning.