Last month, I ran down some of the rumors about HAARP that emerged after the Haiti earthquake and posted about them on Boing Boing and on my own blog .
A joint civilian/military project, HAARP (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is an array of antennas, receivers, and transmitters in Gakona, Alaska. Its aim is to study the ionosphere, with a particular emphasis on its properties as a medium of communication and surveillance. The facility has long been a subject of conspiracist conjecture. Jesse Ventura paid it a visit on his cable TV show Conspiracy Theory not too long ago.
Theoretically, HAARP could bounce ultra-low frequency pulses off the ionosphere and onto seismically sensitive terrain; the energy would resonate as a properly pitched voice does with a wineglass or a Tesla earthquake machine purportedly does with a steel girder, ultimately causing the tectonic plates to break or move (around 1912, Nikola Tesla told a reporter from the Hearst tabloid The World Today how he had almost destroyed a half-built, steel-framed building with such a device, and how, "with the same vibrator he could have dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in less than an hour." The machine was never publicly demonstrated or patented).
Add to that this quote from a keynote address that the then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen delivered at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction in 1997 in support of the Nunn Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act:
"There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.
So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important."
That was enough to feed the conspiracist meme that the US has and is using tectonic weaponry. It reached its apogee when Vladimir Acostas, writing on an official government website in Venezuela, declared that "we have the worrisome suspicion that this earthquake may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate."
It didn't take the rumor machine long to gear up after this weekend's catastrophe, even though Chile was the site of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded (a 9.5 in 1960 -- long before HAARP went on line) and has endured 13 events of magnitude 7 or greater since 1973. "The CIA has been trying to undermine the freedom-loving Chilean regime, who took-over from the 'fascist' decades-long regime of General Pinochet," a poster on a Holocaust denialist website comments. "This earthquake could be just the ticket for the opposition to seize power." On the other side of the political spectrum, vaccine denialist Deborah Dupre suggests that HAARP, "a weapon of mass destruction," could have been involved in Chile's monumental 8.8 earthquake," noting "its geoengineering capacity to trigger 'natural disasters' for imperialist political gain." Click here to read her whole post.
In 1963, in his epochal essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" Richard Hofstadter observed how conspiracists personalize and hyperbolize their enemy. "He is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman -- sinister, ubiquitous, powerful....Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional)." And now he has an earthquake machine -- like something out of James Bond, or a steam punk super villain in an old episode of The Wild, Wild West.
As the world's powers lurch from crisis to crisis -- broke; enmired in costly, endless wars; choking on the poisons that they can't stop spewing into the air -- it must be comforting for them to know that there are still a few people out there who believe they wield god-like powers.
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Because we know that the right wingers in Defense are capable of thinking up plans like Operation Northwoods. It doesn't matter that it wasn't carried out, the outrage is that it could even cross their minds for a moment to have our military kill our citizens so that they could make it look like Cuba did it so that they would have an excuse to invade. I'll repeat, it crossed their minds to kill the very American citizens they supposedly are supposed to protect. Forever after, the burden of proof is on the government to show that they aren't involved.
My "favorite" conspiracy theory is the notion that Mossad or US Government were behind 9/11 or even that pre-planted explosives brought down the towers. To me this is almost a back-handed racism: Them Ay-rabs from backward Third World countries could never have figured out how to do this on their own, so it had to be some schmahrt white guys who done it.
We're all human and all born with more or less the same gene set, and there are plenty of capable guys "over there" who are smart enough to cook our chickens in all sorts of ways. Just look how they've learned to fight our invasions so successfully!
And secret power for the CIA here at home where we have no clue where they roam!!!
The U.N. represents Peace, freedom and future properity for all, in the new global order.
Earthquakes are caused by tectonic plates shifting. Stresses build to the point friction is overcome at which point the plate shifts. These plates are huge chunks of the earth's crust and constantly moving slow though it is. IF this HAARP did trigger the earthquake, it would be a good thing because the stresses would have continued to build and the quake would have been even larger later on. Heck if it really can trigger an earthquake build more. More weaker earthquakes are better than fewer stronger ones.
99% of people I talk to have never even heard of it.
It is interesting that these Quakes always happen in the poorest areas of the world or places the U.N. is having political trouble with.
and whats up with Venesuala.
"Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."
I guess someone needs to interview him as what he was talking about, before dismissing anything. There maybe a mad scientist somewhere trying to perfect his concoction.
You set up several individuals, and then dismiss them as being paranoid. As far as I can tell from that woman's post, she was only producing several quotes about HAARP in the same space, many of which suggested that HAARP could be used to create earthquakes. You have provided zero quotes that suggest that HAARP could not be used to create tectonic effects, and the quote you do have is only used to write off anyone even considering that Chile could have been HAARPed, lumping them in with all "conspiracy theorists," and even labeling Deborah Dupre a "vaccine denialist," for what amounts to quite possibly very relevant questions about vaccine ingredients.
So was Chile HAARPed?
It's just a question. We don't know very much about this thing called HAARP. Maybe we should.
These guys are "surprisingly" creating ionospheres or plasma artificially and "trying" to better understand what they are doing. Really? Forget earthquakes for a minute and just consider what this Alaska based HAARP system is doing. They are firing some serious wattage (as in billions) into the atmosphere in order to do "experiments".
Here we are worried about climate change and the likes while scientists are "experimenting" with the atmosphere on a global scale. I for one have a problem with that and especially the casual approach as heard in the audio of the interview http://www.dodlive.mil/index.php/tag/haarp/.
The people of this world need better understand the pros and cons of HAARP and what the long-term objective is. Because, HAARP is a DoD program - 100%. The "joint" is between Air Force and Navy. "Civilians" being employed does not change who owns and manages the system. There needs to be Congressional hearings and oversight on the program.
As powerful as HAARP is, it emits less than 3 microwatts per cm2, tens of thousands of times less than the Sun's natural electromagnetic radiation reaching the earth and hundreds of times less than even the normal random variations in intensity of the Sun's natural ultraviolet (UV) energy. Granted, this information comes from HAARP's website so I suppose it can be taken with a grain of salt. But so can most of the arguments for existing, fully-functional "earthquake machines."