HAARP: scientific program or climate weapon? What institutions admit

Its name resembles that of a musical instrument. Its official role is to study the ionosphere. But for thirty years, the HAARP program has fascinated, worried, and divided people - and not just in conspiracy circles. Even in the European Parliament, voices have been raised to demand accountability.

HAARP — High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program — is an American research observatory dedicated to the study of the ionosphere. It was originally a military project funded by DARPA, the US Navy, and the US Air Force, aimed at studying the impact of the ionosphere on long-distance radio communications. Its main instrument is a powerful high-frequency radio transmitter using a network of 180 phased antennas.

Officially, nothing but science. But the European Parliament itself, in a 1999 report on the environment, security and foreign policy, noted that HAARP "allows control of gigantic energies" and that "the manipulation of the electrical characteristics of the atmosphere, used for military purposes against an enemy, can have terrible consequences." This is not an anonymous blog. It is an official resolution of the European Parliament.

According to specialized analysts, HAARP relies on several American patents concerning the modification of the ionosphere, the generation of high-frequency waves, and the influence on the weather. Some believe that raw power matters less than the phenomenon of resonance: a targeted emission at the right time could amplify an atmospheric instability and indirectly cause a natural disaster in an undetectable manner.

In 2015, the U.S. military stopped operating the program and transferred it to the University of Alaska. Sincere abandonment of a program that has become useless? Or civil transfer of a technology that the army deemed preferable to make less visible? The question deserves to be asked - without hysteria, but without naivett either. States do not spend billions on secret military installations out of pure love of science.