Adepts of conspiracy theories might well take a deep breath: the HAARP program could be dismantled as soon as this summer, so from now on a tornado destroying your house will be a mere whirlwind, not a DARPA prank.
Weather control conspiracy theories: scientifically unjustifiable
Major disasters attract major attention. Whenever a plane crashes or a hurricane makes landfall, the event draws international news coverage and countless internet postings. Most of the time, people take experts at face value when they try to explain the science behind why a certain event happened, but for a small and vocal segment of society, the “truth” is hardly that at all. Enter the conspiracy theorists.
The purpose of HAARP was to determine how the ionosphere, or the upper layers of the atmosphere, affects radio signals, with the ultimate goal of helping to develop more advanced radio communication technology. The project accomplished this by transmitting “a 3.6 MW signal, in the 2.8–10 MHz region of the HF (high-frequency) band, into the ionosphere,” which was then studied by various instruments on the ground to see how the ionosphere affected these radio communications.
Conspiracy theorists beg to differ. A quick Google search (which returns over 7,000,000 hits) shows that HAARP has been blamed for pretty much everything bad that’s happened since the mid-1990s – terrorist attack, car accidents, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, nightmares, toothaches, bad dates, you name it – but the project is most popularly associated with its alleged “weather control” capabilities.
