It's science, not mind-control!
August 24, 2016 8:22 PM   Subscribe

The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is an Alaska-based research facility that studies an energetic and active region of the upper atmosphere. It is a group of high-frequency radio transmitters that send a focused beam of radio-wave energy into the aurora zone. Last year, instead of shutting it down, the US Military sold HAARP to the University of Alaska Fairbanks . But conspiracy theories abound: for example, HAARP caused the Haiti earthquake, or controls the weather” This weekend, HAARP's new owner will hold an open house to prove the facility 'is not capable of mind control’
posted by leahwrenn (64 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Not capacable of mind control? But that's just what they want you to think!
posted by The Whelk at 8:27 PM on August 24, 2016 [31 favorites]


always unplug the radio
posted by clavdivs at 8:28 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


I find that building a simple faraday cage around your radio is a straightforward way to keep the mind control rays from affecting it.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:35 PM on August 24, 2016 [7 favorites]


Will there be a live stream or video of this? Didn't see it mentioned in the link but I may have missed it.
posted by gucci mane at 8:44 PM on August 24, 2016


Beat me to it, Whelk.
posted by pjern at 8:46 PM on August 24, 2016


FFS
posted by Belle O'Cosity at 9:00 PM on August 24, 2016


But what about causing earthquakes, it can do that, right?
posted by ckape at 9:06 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


I loved the open house. It was better than Cats. I'd see it again and again.
posted by whir at 9:06 PM on August 24, 2016 [15 favorites]


What you should really be scared of is the LOW frequencies. Like the one that did the thing with bryan cranston's eardrum and something something cranial resonant frequency something doppler effect and then his brain exploded
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 9:15 PM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]


They removed all the freaky stuff when they sold the University, naturally. That gear is obsolete now, they obviously have better stuff somewhere even more remote, maybe in orbit. Are there any conspiracy theories involving satellite-based mind/weather/earthquake control?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:27 PM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]


VHF radio waves can alter the ionization level, and thus conductivity of the upper atmosphere. The relaxation time is such that you can turn this on and off at audio frequencies. If you work your phased arrays right, you could cause the upper atmosphere to convert the solar wind from a DC source into AC power in the gigawatt levels.... what to do with it from there is beyond the scope of this comment.
posted by MikeWarot at 9:29 PM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]


The best mind control is already public, it's called Fox news. ;-)
posted by MikeWarot at 9:30 PM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]


Fitter. Happier. Less educated stupid.
posted by thelonius at 9:42 PM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


It does cause mind control, but unfortunately I can't really talk much about it, because all the chemtrails how it works.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:48 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Only a great fool would believe there's no such thing as mind control. I am not a great fool, therefore I cannot believe the claim in front of me.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:20 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]




Aw, has it been twenty years? HAARP was my first Internet Conspiracy. How time flies...
posted by RakDaddy at 10:35 PM on August 24, 2016


I have met people here in Christchurch who are convinced that HAARP was involved in our earthquakes.

The need to find someone to blame after a horrifying natural disaster is strong.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:41 PM on August 24, 2016


Did they have any theories as to why US government could possibly want to earthquake New Zealand?
posted by aubilenon at 11:26 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


To be honest I wasn't that interested in finding out more.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:37 PM on August 24, 2016 [5 favorites]


What's "an independent physicist" code for?
posted by Sonny Jim at 11:49 PM on August 24, 2016


Did they have any theories as to why US government could possibly want to earthquake New Zealand?

To be honest I wasn't that interested in finding out more.
Fortunately for all concerned, Auckland-based conspiracy-theory-theorist Matthew Dentith has this angle covered.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:00 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


Why would you organize a HAARP open house and not play to all the conspiracy theories? God, that'd be fun.

(And it's not like an honest open house will make the conspiracy theories go away.)
posted by ryanrs at 12:29 AM on August 25, 2016


I expect more such news to be unearthed in the coming few months
posted by infini at 12:32 AM on August 25, 2016


Only a great fool would believe there's no such thing as mind control. I am not a great fool, therefore I cannot believe the claim in front of me.
posted by Johnny Wallflower


That's not inconceivable.
posted by Laotic at 2:10 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Of course, all this demonstrates is how deep the conspiracy's tentacles reach!
posted by acb at 2:31 AM on August 25, 2016


What's "an independent physicist" code for?

Someone not in the pocket of Big Physics. Maybe a Larsonian, like that guy the “UN-altered DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information” guy used to go on about on USENET.
posted by acb at 2:33 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


HAARP just picked up the baton, man.
posted by Devonian at 2:47 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ah, HAARP. Beloved of the tin foil hat wearers wherever they are found.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:15 AM on August 25, 2016


Are there any conspiracy theories involving satellite-based mind/weather/earthquake control?

Oh, you sweet summer child.

The biggest, non-HAARP mind control effort is, of course, chemtrails. There is a wing of chemtrail research that thinks the trails are used to spread deadly orgone radiation that can then be activated by satellites and cellphone towers. In order to combat this, you simply need some orgonite, which is usually a bunch of marine epoxy resin mixed in a dixie cup with some metal shavings and a wire wrapped crystal. This device will help convert the toxic deadly orgone radiation (DOR) into positive (POR). If you want to attack this conspiracy more directly, it is suggested that you construct a chembuster, a variation of Wilhelm Reich's cloudbuster, out of more resin, a bigger wire-wrapped crystal, a bucket, and some copper pipes.

The normal site I'd send you to to learn more went off the deep, dark end following the Boston Marathon Bombing. The people you want to look up are Don and Carol Croft, a husband and wife pair who spent some time driving around the USA in their homemade camper van tossing dixie cups of resin, metal, and crystal (called Succor Punches or Holy Hand Grenades depending on their size and complexity) at cell towers. This page seems to have culled a lot of the Croft saga from said dark-site.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:54 AM on August 25, 2016 [11 favorites]


>HAARP's new owner will hold an open house to prove the facility 'is not capable of mind control’

The invitees should get themselves organized and all come out with glassy looks on their faces, saying THE FACILITY IS NOT CAPABLE OF MIND CONTROL in unison.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 5:20 AM on August 25, 2016 [16 favorites]


What's "an independent physicist" code for?

A layman who reads about physics, but doesn't actually know any of the math. Distinguished from a crank by being less annoying about it.
posted by ryanrs at 5:28 AM on August 25, 2016 [5 favorites]


So let's say you're a conspiracy theorist, you show up at the open house trying to keep an open mind, and you're convinced: no mind control. How do you know they're not controlling your mind?

Conversely, you show up and you're not convinced: you still think HAARP is capable of mind control. But they had you right there! If they could control your mind, they would have. Therefore, no mind control.

In conclusion, up is down.
posted by adamrice at 5:42 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


Someone should set up a popup shop outside the building during the open house and sell custom tinfoil hats.
posted by Doleful Creature at 5:43 AM on August 25, 2016


This device will help convert the toxic deadly orgone radiation (DOR) into positive (POR).

This upsets me. Why can't the opposite of positive be negative instead of deadly? You can come back from negative; deadly, not so much.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 5:44 AM on August 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


Because the negative orgone pressure jams the door to your orgone box, trapping you, and you starve to death.
posted by ryanrs at 5:53 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


I always wondered about aerological LSD.
posted by clavdivs at 5:55 AM on August 25, 2016


orgone box

Ahem. Show some respect! That's 'Orgone Accumulator' - as we all know, it can turn your eyeballs into craters.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:56 AM on August 25, 2016


Getting back to HAARP, from the story it seems as if the place has been handed over and is being kept ticking along with a $2M loan, but at present there's nobody actually using it. They're hoping that customers who want to do basic ionospheric science will turn up in the next three years.

Which is an interesting strategy. As far as I know, there's not a great deal of ionospheric science going on. I did subscribe to the Radio Science journal for a while and there's certainly a few ionospheric researchers out there, but by no means all that science has anything much to do with heating. Plus, other heaters are available.

Perhaps I'm being pessimistic. Lots of people are putting up cubesats and it can't be that expensive to book a small campaign at HAARP, so perhaps some wavefront modelling stuff might be interesting. but unless someone comes up with some really good science that needs a lot of data over time I'd be a bit worried that it'll make its money back.

(ETA, off-topic, another Holy Hand Grenade has just turned up...)
posted by Devonian at 6:25 AM on August 25, 2016


BEWARE OF THE DEMOGORGON.
posted by kcds at 6:52 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: convert the toxic deadly orgone radiation (DOR) into positive (POR)

(robocop is bleeding, dude, really now dude, you know way too much about this stuff, scary, scary)
posted by sammyo at 6:53 AM on August 25, 2016


I'd know more if the docents at the Wilhelm Reich Museum up in Maine were not so watchful. They never left me alone with the Accumulator, knowing full well I'd hop inside given the slightest chance.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:55 AM on August 25, 2016


This page seems to have culled a lot of the Croft saga from said dark-site.

Ah, whale.to. It's like the entire internet condensed into bite-sized chewy tablets.

(I dearly want someone to ask the Jill Stein campaign to comment on this.)
posted by octobersurprise at 6:56 AM on August 25, 2016


"I attended a group meditation seminar with the Major. It turned out to be the Indian rope trick. Before the session the Major told us something of the potential power in group meditation. He had seen it lift a six-hundred-pound church organ five feet in the air. I had no reason to doubt this, since he was obviously incapable of falsification. In the session, after some preliminary excercises, the Major asked us to see a column of light in the center of the room and then took us up through the light to a plateau where we met nice friendly people: the stairway to heaven in fact. I mean we were really THERE."

-William S. Burroughs interview with Jimmy Page, 1975.
posted by clavdivs at 7:18 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Did they have any theories as to why US government could possibly want to earthquake New Zealand?

There's a lot of borax there to poke.
posted by y2karl at 7:39 AM on August 25, 2016


In Netrunner, (the cyberpunk LCG by Fantasy Flight studios, contrasted from a collectible card game in that it only demands a monthly tithe instead of devouring your paycheck, children and soul if you want to play competitively) there is a corporate identity Haarpsicord Studios. It's part of NBN, which can be seen as the bastard conglomeration of News Corp, Disney and Viacom. I'm not going to get into the mechanics of the card, but it does imply a certain amount of mind control. The flavor text is Home of your imagination.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that selling it to a university shows that's there's nothing there. If there was good mind control tech there, don't you think that Rupert Murdoc would have bought it up years ago? And from what I can tell, this purchase was not subsidized by any media company.

Although if it can create earthquakes, imagine the uses in terms of fracking. I wonder if Shell or BP or one of those guys payed for it...
posted by Hactar at 7:49 AM on August 25, 2016


From Clavdivs' Crawdaddy smackheadathon:

"Previously, over two fingers of whiskey in my Franklin Street digs, I had told Page about Major Bruce MacMannaway, a healer and psychic who lives in Scotland. The Major discovered his healing abilities in World War II when his regiment was cut off without medical supplies and the Major started laying on hands…”Well Major, I think it’s a load of bollocks but I’ll try anything.” And it turns out the Major is a walking hypo. His psychic abilities were so highly regarded by the Admiralty that he was called in to locate sunken submarines, and he never once missed."

From the FPP:

"Since it opened in 2003 with funding the late Ted Stevens helped secure, HAARP hosted many scientists doing applied research for the military. One such study was using the antenna array to heat a part of the ionosphere that in turn acted as a low frequency antenna that could send an ocean-penetrating signal to a submarine. That ping could tell a submarine captain to surface in order to receive conventional radio communications."


EVARTHINH IS CONNEKT
posted by Devonian at 7:56 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Guess they're going to outsource ICBM tracking to EISCAT.
posted by enamon at 8:13 AM on August 25, 2016


Raise your hand if the first you heard of any of this stuff was Wayne Green's editorials in the ham radio magazine "73".
posted by dr_dank at 8:20 AM on August 25, 2016


I ship it with the Russian Woodpecker.
posted by mccarty.tim at 8:50 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I was on a 70s Paranoia Film kick recently, and halfway into the Parallax Vuew I thought : popular conspiracy theories used to make sense? Like they where cynical and crazy and involved way too much organization and aptitude to exist but they kind of had a logical through line? There was none of the white hot twang of swivel-eyed lunacy you get in the modern conspiracy theory currently rising damp infecting it's way uo the political discourse.
posted by The Whelk at 8:55 AM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: the white hot twang of swivel-eyed lunacy
posted by flabdablet at 8:59 AM on August 25, 2016 [4 favorites]


The Internet has happened. Not only is it far easier to create a conspiracy theory and find a community of people with whom to communicate it instantly, it's - paradoxically - far easier to find refuting facts, and one of the ways conspiracy theories work is that they feed off refuting facts.

So you don't have to gird something about with lots of quasi-logic and wonky research to bulk it up enough to survive through the difficult business of pre-digital dissemination. It needs far less incubation, and has far easier host access for infection and nutrition. Every man his own AM radio station.
posted by Devonian at 9:06 AM on August 25, 2016


A VT alumnus was chief RF engineer on HAARP for a while:
In spite of its name, HAARP is not supposed to be musical. However, in 1998 when the facility first started at 48 transmitters, the maintenance staff would ask Floyd why they were hearing tones when we were transmitting. They should not have been hearing anything. That meant there was arcing going on in the antenna system. We found there were missing wire connection welds from an antenna contractor. The team waited until the dark of night, then transmitted a 1,000 Hz amplitude modulated tone. Listeners would indicate where the tone was loudest in the antenna wiring. They would spot a blue flame and then repair each defective connection.
posted by introp at 9:11 AM on August 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


Seriously, though, this is all calling out for some kind of Alaska-based music and literary festival. UAF Fairbanks should be all over this. Kate Bush can perform Cloudbusting, Hawkwind can play Orgone Accumulator, Patti Smith can headline with Birdland, while Peter Reich reads from The Book of Dreams and Joanna Newsom plays the haarp.
posted by Sonny Jim at 9:26 AM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


"I have a feeling we will see this kind of technology operationally deployed very soon... problem is, we might not remember it... "

The Control of Candy Jones.

That's the thing, why pay all that money for a remote place to conduct your remote mind control experiments when it's easier to hire three people part-time.
posted by clavdivs at 9:28 AM on August 25, 2016


"At first, I was hesitant to go to the open house, but then I thought, all that free will has ever gotten me is anxiety and dread, and there are still months to go before the election, what the hell. anyway, ★★★★★, would recommend, my wallet is empty but my mind is clear, plus they beamed in a hologram of Bowie, he and Prince are finally working on that album that they'd talked about for decades."
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:35 AM on August 25, 2016


Gonna take a lot of tinfoil to cope with that.
posted by theora55 at 10:25 AM on August 25, 2016


There was none of the white hot twang of swivel-eyed lunacy you get in the modern conspiracy theory currently rising damp infecting it's way uo the political discourse.

Imagine if you will, that it is 1967 and a little known Michigan politican is going to run for president.


So you don't have to gird something about with lots of quasi-logic and wonky research to bulk it up enough to survive through the difficult business of pre-digital dissemination

"When I came back from Viet Nam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get."

-George Romney.
posted by clavdivs at 10:57 AM on August 25, 2016


I have met people here in Christchurch who are convinced that HAARP was involved in our earthquakes.

The need to find someone to blame after a horrifying natural disaster is strong.


HAARP shows up quite frequently in Turkish earthquake conspiracy theories (of which there are many) too. And not only on random websites with multiple bad fonts and social media posts and chain emails, but also in print--I found a book titled HAARP: Kiyamet Teknolojisi (HAARP: The Doomsday Technology) during my research, and may still have photocopies of it someplace.

I'm still trying to figure out how to write about the conspiracy theories--you're right that it's partly about the need to locate blame, but I've also come to see them as also a sort of covert acknowledgment of the unnaturalness of natural disasters--because the hazard may be natural, but it's things like corruption and poverty and shitty building codes and inadequate oversight that turn them into disasters. But those are difficult problems to solve, and unsatisfying things to blame, and so people get fixated on stories that feature simpler and more direct kinds of human agency.
posted by karayel at 1:31 PM on August 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


"I'm still trying to figure out how to write about the conspiracy theories--"

Well, I think you answered the how to some degree in your thesis concerning real human issues being coaxed in CT. Hard to pin down one example but Libra by DeLilio is apt.
posted by clavdivs at 4:25 PM on August 25, 2016


Show some respect! That's 'Orgone Accumulator'

Kerouac called it a "mystical outhouse."
posted by ryanrs at 4:40 PM on August 25, 2016


What's "an independent physicist" code for?

Twenty dollars, same as in town.
posted by spitbull at 7:50 PM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


the exchange rate at CERN may vary.
posted by clavdivs at 11:06 PM on August 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


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