In alaska the rugged pristine wilderness is timeless most of it remaining just as it has for thousands of years in the midst of all this natural beauty just outside the small town of gacona stands an enormous and seemingly harmless antenna farm it is a 100 million dollar air force project known as haarp and critics of the soon to be completed facility charge it just may turn out to be the ultimate doomsday machine it’s got all the marks of dr strangelove on it

Harp is an acronym for high frequency active auroral research program according to program manager john hesher harp is a research facility designed to study the ionosphere all the military have communications surveillance navigation systems whose paths either traverse the ionosphere or reflect from it and so we need to be very careful about what we know about it and how we study it

what we’re interested in is what is the effect of a large input of energy on the ionosphere the ionosphere is the outermost layer of the earth’s atmosphere it is part of an electromagnetic field that keeps out harmful solar and cosmic radiation one visible effect of the sun’s rays hitting the ionosphere is the aurora borealis known as the northern lights the ionosphere also plays a vital role in worldwide radio communication the first transmission of radio waves across the ocean were quite a surprise when it was first done people thought there’d be no chance to transmit signals

across the ocean by wireless and uh in fact what the atmosphere does is act like a mirror and so you transmit a signal and it bounces off the ionosphere then bounces off the earth when harp is fully operational it will transmit extremely powerful blasts of

high frequency radio waves directly up into the atmosphere superheating the electrons that make up

the ionosphere this will cause them to disperse effectively punching a hole in the ionosphere but after you turn the instrument off this thing kind of moves around and it gets replenished and within a few minutes it’s back to where you can’t even detect that

there’s a hole anymore the air force says that manipulating the ionosphere and studying the effect will allow them to improve the efficiency of communications navigation and surveillance systems but researchers outside the military see harp as a high-tech weapon with global implications the way i see harp as it is right now it is a premier i mean top-notch high-energy radio physics experiment and has definite military applications journalist mark farmer lives in alaska and has written about the potential impact of harp

for both jane’s defense weekly and popular science magazine he believes that harp will be used to take giant x-rays of earth earth penetrating tomography is a technique using extremely low frequency radio waves today in geophysical probing scientists will use explosives or a machine that thumps the ground to produce these waves but harp will stimulate the auroral electrojet to make an antenna thousands of miles long that will emit these elf waves farmers research indicates that the extremely low frequency waves would be capable of penetrating several kilometers into the earth ferreting out nuclear storage facilities and other underground

military installations this is producing surveillance systems able to detect stealthy cruise missiles and aircraft these are systems that will enable us to communicate at higher data rates and at greater distances with our ballistic missile submarines while the air force insists harp is not an offensive weapon and is necessary for continuing national security alaska native nick begich

proposes a different scenario in this new book the things that we found in other air force documents one in particular was a document put together in 82 the document was called low intensity

conflict in modern technology with a forward by no none other than newton gingrich one section spoke about using radio frequency radiation transmitters for disrupting human thinking for basically debilitating troops invisibly by being able to bombard them

with radio frequency that was tuned to just the right frequency injust the right wave form so as to totally disrupt their mental process and basically debilitate those troops because of

harp’s potential to disrupt the earth’s magnetic field many observers are concerned that it will damage the biomagnetic sensors that migratory animals like salmon and birds depend upon anything that harp can do to the magnetic field is orders of magnitude smaller than the natural variations of the earth’s field so i would have to say no there’s nothing nothing we can do to affect the salmon but what generates the most concern by far is harp’s ability to tamper with

and punch holes in the ionosphere the thing that one of the air force documents points out is that they want to use this heater to create enough energy in the ionosphere to get a runaway effect up to the next stabilizing level whatever that might be it’s precisely whatever that might be that worries dr patrick flanagan a physicist who believes the ionosphere is extremely fragile the ionosphere is a chaotic system that is on the edge of instability so the trigger point for harp would be that energy and that frequency which throws the ionosphere into chaos in other words it would be that point

which throws it over the edge for example it is believed that a hole in the earth’s ozone layer has caused an increase in infrared radiation contributing to the melting of the polar ice caps

and forcing new zealand children to wear protective clothing to school flanagan and others believe the potential danger from a hole in the ionosphere is much greater it could create a change

in the ionospheric shield that protects us from cosmic radiation

uh we’re worried about the ozone layer the ozone layer is nothing compared to what harp could do you know we’re worried about ultraviolet light that’s just very harmless ray compared to some of those energy streams or particles that are coming from outer space that are being deflected by this natural shield around the earth and this is what harp wants to play with critics worry that harp has been placed in the hands of too few and that international debate is

necessary to fully explore all the potential dangers that this project may soon unleash a proposal in which the air force has shown little interest to date once we open this box and it is a veritable pandora’s box we’re not going to be able to close it and of course once you

acquire a technology you want bigger and better aspects of it and then we come to the questions of whether or not if we go big if we go better if we’re going to cause damage to our planet

proponents of harp insist the danger has been grossly exaggerated

the project continues to move forward as scheduled and will be fully operational by 1997.