The Unholy HAARP Doomsday Array

EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL Fall 1994
"Project HAARP: The Military's Plan to Alter the Ionosphere"
by Clare Zickuhr and Gar Smith

SYNOPSIS: The Pentagon's mysterious HAARP project, now under construction at an isolated Air Force facility near Gakona, Alaska, marks the first step toward creating the world's most powerful "ionospheric heater." The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP), a joint effort of the Air Force and the Navy, is the latest in a series of little-known Department of Defense (DOD) "active ionospheric experiments."

Internal HAARP documents state: "From a DOD point of view, the most exciting and challenging" part of the experiment is "its potential to control ionospheric processes" for military objectives. Scientists envision using the system's powerful 2.8-10 megahertz (MHz) beam to burn "holes" in the ionosphere and "create an artificial lens" in the sky that could focus large bursts of electromagnetic energy "to higher altitudes ...than is presently possible." The minimum area to be heated would be 31 miles in diameter.

The initial $26 million, 320 kw HAARP project will employ 360 72-foot-tall antennas spread over four acres to direct an intense beam of focused electromagnetic energy upwards to strike the ionosphere. The next stage of the project would expand HAARP's power to 1.7 gigawatts (1.7 billion watts), making it the most powerful such transmitter on Earth.

For a project whose backers hail it as a major scientific feat, HAARP has remained extremely low-profile -- almost unknown to most Alaskans, and the rest of the country. HAARP surfaced publicly in Alaska in the spring of 1993, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began advising commercial pilots on how to avoid the large amount of intentional (and some unintentional) electromagnetic radiation that HAARP would generate. Despite protests of FAA engineers and Alaska bush pilots, the final Environmental Impact Statement gave HAARP the green light.

While a November 1993 "HAARP Fact Sheet" released to the public by the Office of Naval Research stressed only the civilian and scientific aspects of the project, an earlier, 1990, Air Force- Navy document, acquired by Earth Island Review, listed only military experiments for the HAARP project.

Scientists, environmentalists, and native people are concerned that HAARP's electronic transmitters could harm people, endanger wildlife, and trigger unforeseen environmental impacts.

Inupiat tribal advisor Charles Etok Edwardsen, Jr., wrote President Clinton on behalf of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope and the Kasigluk Elders Conference expressing their concern with the prospect of altering the earth's neutral atmospheric properties.

HAARP also may violate the 1977 Environmental Modification Convention (ratified by the U.S. in 1979), which bans "military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects."

HAARP project manager John Heckscher, a scientist at the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, has called concerns about the transmitter's impact unfounded. "It's not unreasonable to expect that something three times more powerful than anything that's previously been built might have unforeseen effects," Heckscher told Microwave News. "But that's why we do environmental impact statements."

["Like poking a sleeping bear with a sharp stick" -B:.B:.]

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