Air Force Prepares to Dismantle HAARP

First time accepted submitter registrations_suck (1075251) writes in with news about the dismantling of the HAARP project. The U.S. Air Force gave official notice to Congress Wednesday that it intends to dismantle the $300 million High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Gakona this summer. The shutdown of HAARP, a project created by the late Sen. Ted Stevens when he wielded great control over the U.S. defense budget, will start after a final research experiment takes place in mid-June, the Air Force said in a letter to Congress Tuesday. While the University of Alaska has expressed interest in taking over the research site, which is off the Tok Cutoff, in an area where black spruce was cleared a quarter-century ago for the Air Force Backscatter radar project that was never completed. But the school has not volunteered to pay $5 million a year to run HAARP. Responding to questions from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski during a Senate hearing Wednesday, David Walker, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for Science, Technology and Engineering, said this is 'not an area that we have any need for in the future' and it would not be a good use of Air Force research funds to keep HAARP going. 'We're moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do,' he said. 'To inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it. But that work has been completed.' Comments of that sort have given rise to endless conspiracy theories, portraying HAARP as a super weapon capable of mind control or weather control, with enough juice to trigger hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes."

Truth is HAARP is no longer needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen how many cellphone towers are out there ? HAARP is no longer cost effective to manipulate human behavior. The scattered microwave signal can be broadcasted with lower power with the cell phone tower infrastructure. HAARP had many other uses. It's first test was to see if the ionosphere could be charged artificially instead of waiting for the sun to do it. They were successful but it took a lot of energy. Next test... microwave scatter radiation to manipulate human behavior. The affect was stumbled upon by accident, much in the same way the microwave oven was invented. Sometimes I wonder if some of the senseless violence we that occurs... such as Sandy Point and other shootings, is influenced by tests like this.

Re:Weather control

[jtnix]

Excellent! You've established that the ionosphere is higher than the troposphere where the weather develops and occurs.

Now, imagine think of the ionosphere as the lens between the sun and the earth and HAARP as a tool to control the focal point of this lens.

Think about that for more than a minute, you're a smart cracker!

Re: Weather control

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is rather distinct from anything on the scale of "World modification" as something as large and power hungry as HAARP only modified a tiny volume of the ionosphere. The idea wasn't to make the whole ionosphere behave in a convenient way, but to make a small patch just large enough to reflect a targeted communication or radar beam. What if they make a mistake? That is like asking what if a kid splashing at a beach on a reservoir takes out the dam that is holding back that reservoir.