The two main weather control conspiracy theories revolve around the thought that the United States government controls the weather through a technology called HAARP, as well as airplane-produced “chemtrails.”
HAARP, an acronym for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a large array of high frequency radio antennas located in Gakona, Alaska. The program and all associated antenna equipment, which was forced to shut down and go on hiatus this past May due to sequestration, was funded by the Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the University of Alaska.
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.
Several popular for-profit websites claim that they have hardware that can detect HAARP-generated energy across the contiguous United States and that severe weather will occur where these “hot spots” show up on their detectors. I’ve made a point of clicking over to these HAARP weather websites near several predicted severe weather outbreaks this year, and found that the so-called HAARP activity maps always show up a few hours after the weather models are run and the Storm Prediction Center releases their latest forecasts. Funny, that.
Before the project was suspended due to lack of funds, the University of Alaska ran HAARP’s official website, but the website no longer works as of early August. The site had the array’s exact address (Google Maps even shows that the array is located off of “H.A.A.R.P. Access Road”), pictures, information, and even several 24/7 webcams focused on the arrays with a beautiful view of the mountains in the background. The large amount of openness surrounding HAARP takes the wind out the argument that the government conducted this project in secret, like many HAARP theorists assert.
HAARP does not and cannot control the weather. 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. Both common sense and a basic understanding of meteorology debunk the conspiracy theory surrounding HAARP’s alleged ability to control the weather. But what about something closer to home; say, right above us?
Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/08/16/weather-conspiracy-theories-scientifically-unjustifiable/
Topic: Weather control conspiracy theories: scientifically unjustifiable (Read 1432 times)
