HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part V): Patterns, Fear, and the Limits of Interpretation

This article is part of the HAARP and Artificial Aurora Full Series Guide, which explores science, interpretations, and public narratives surrounding HAARP.
   

  

   This is the final article in a five-part series on HAARP. For the experimental foundation begin with HAARP and the Artificial Aurora (Part I): The 2005 Alaska Experiment Explained.

On the October 11 Signs page, something interesting turns up from the previous day: Friday, October 10, 2003 - An apparently deranged woman who claimed to be "radioactive" barreled her car through a secure tarmac gate at Manchester Airport yesterday - coming within 800 feet of Air Force One, just minutes before President Bush was slated to board after wrapping up a New Hampshire trip. "She looked dazed, she didn't look right," said witness Frank Conery, a Bedford, N.H., resident who works across the street at MSC Industrial Supplies. "We couldn't believe they didn't shoot her."

   And then: A bomb exploded on Friday morning in front of a military casern in the southern French resort of Nice, injuring one person, French televisions reported. A female guardian of a school in front of the casern was also lightly hurt in the face. The blast took place at about 0600 (0400GMT) and the windows of the casern, the school and neighboring buildings were blown out, the report said.

   And this: Several thousand people were evacuated from their homes on Friday after a series of explosions ripped through a Ukrainian munitions dump at Artyomovsky in the eastern Donetsk region, the emergency ministry said. The explosions, caused by a fire, shattered the windows of several apartment blocks. It was not known what had caused the fire.

   And this: At least five Maoists and four security men were killed in clashes in Nepal as a temporary truce called by the rebels ended, officials said on Friday.

   This: A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.1 rocked northern Japan Saturday morning, the Meteorological Agency said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

   This: Tropical Storm Mindy developed this evening near the Dominican Republic, bringing heavy rain to that nation and Puerto Rico, and compelling forecasters to post warnings in other nearby islands.

   This: A 10-year-old boy was taken into custody by the Carlsbad police after making two calls Wednesday night claiming that local schools would be blown up. [...]

   This: A 28-year-old man accused of stealing a man's penis through sorcery was beaten to death in the West African country of Gambia on Thursday, police said.

This: Florida, the lightning capital of the nation, lived up to its reputation when 20 prized, pregnant cows were killed by a bolt that hit an oak tree they were huddled under at a north Florida farm, police said. Two others were euthanized.

   And this most interesting item: Yet Another Mystery Blackout - This Time Oz ... 10-10-3 THE parlous state of WA's electricity supply was highlighted again yesterday when the Collie power station crashed, cutting power to 125,000 homes and businesses in the metropolitan area and key regional centres. Late yesterday, Western Power was still unable to explain the cause of the 2½-hour blackout, which hit at 1pm and also cut traffic lights throughout the suburbs.

   Coming back to HAARP, Peter Jennings, and MPs who tell us that we are most certainly going to get hit by an asteroid in the next few years, and Condi on the march: It seems to me that people being plunged into pits of despair and depression are like Canaries in the Mine, warning us that something is "out there."
HAARP is active, and most definitely, Angels don't play it. But neither does it control weather. It acts on people's minds, and those that are susceptible, as well as those that have possibly been programmed will feel it long before the rest of humanity sees the result.

   This final chapter reflects on how fear, coincidence, and media amplification can blur the line between scientific research and public interpretation.

HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part III): Coincidences, Interpretations, and Public Reactions

    This article is part of the HAARP and Artificial Aurora Full Series Guide, which explores science, interpretations, and public narratives surrounding HAARP.

   For the scientific background behind these interpretations, see HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part II): How radio Waves Trigger Light in the Ionosphere.

   This article is Part 3 of a five-part series examining real HAARP experiments. This section focuses on the public interpretations, coincidental events. and speculative narratives, not on proven causal relationships.

   Massacre in Madrid Thursday, 11 March, 2004 - 190 dead 1247 injured. ... The blasts hit during the morning rush hour Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has vowed that those responsible for the train bomb attacks in Madrid will be hunted down and punished. Ten bombs exploded without warning on trains at three stations during the morning rush hour, killing 190 people and wounding more than 1,200.

I decided to go and have a look at our March 11 Signs of The Times page, as well as pages from subsequent days, to see if there were any other clues.

From our Signs of The Times Page of March 12th, we note that there were warnings of potential terrorist attacks as though somebody was expecting a general activation of terrorist types for some reason. Hmmmm...

We also noted that South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun was impeached in a violent - and completely out-of-character - confrontation where Korean officials actually started duking it out.

There was also a curious piece headlined: Inventor patents device for ads in space, which tells us: Global advertising could take on a whole new meaning. ... Orion, the Big Dipper and Andromeda could be joined in the heavens by ads for soft drinks and cigarettes if a Russian inventor's device catches on. [...]

Curious, indeed, in view of what the above quoted authors have to say about the HAARP experiment.

Another interesting item: Nine People Found Dead in Fresno Home ... March 13 — Police officers responding to a child custody dispute said they arrived at a home to find nine bodies stacked and intertwined in a pile of clothes, 10 coffins and a 57-year-old man they believe is responsible for the slaughter. [...] The grim scene caused even veteran officers to weep. [...]

And another: Sea Lion Grabs Fisherman Off Boat Fri Mar 12... ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A 19-year-old fisherman is recovering from an encounter with a sea lion that leaped out of the water, grabbed him as he worked on his grandfather's docked boat and pulled him into the harbor at King Cove. [...]

And: 22 Dolphin deaths in Florida bay CAPE SAN BLAS, Florida (AP) -- Scientists stepped up efforts Friday to discover what's been killing bottlenose dolphins in and near a bay in the Florida Panhandle, as the death toll climbed to at least 22 over three days. [...] The scattering of dolphin carcasses in open water as well as along the shore indicates the mammals did not strand themselves...

There was a major fire and a gas explosion in Russia, both of which were suspicious, an explosion a the Pueblo airport that may or may not have been suspicious, and millions of people turned out in Spain to protest the government that had been "in league" with the Bush Reich and its Iraq occupation; the party in power was voted out.

Geological events were not really worth mentioning: a few minor rattles in Japan, an already in process cyclone came ashore killing many people, astronomer Philip Plait went after Richard Hoagland, a decorated Fort Carson Green Beret, home from Iraq for just three weeks, committed suicide, and then this:

Confusion was sparked among shoppers at a city retail park when dozens of car alarms all went off at the same time. The 100-space car park at the Kingsway Retail Park became a scene of confusion and noise on Saturday afternoon as shoppers struggled to get into their cars. People had difficulty in using the automatic locking system on their key fobs, with many not working at all. The reason why the alarms were activated at the same time remains a mystery

              These examples illustrate how periods of intense scientific activity can coincide with heightened media attention, often encouraging  pattern seeking rather than evidence based-conclusions.

   Next in the series: Part IV addresses claims, controversies, and the scientific limits of HAARP research: HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part IV): Claims, Controversies, and Scientific Limits.

 

HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part II): How Radio Waves Trigger Light in The Ionosphere

This article is part of the HAARP and Artificial Aurora Full Series Guide, which explores science, interpretations, and public narratives surrounding HAARP.

This article continues the analysis begun in HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part I): The 2005 Alaska experiment explained.

The powerful radio transmitter array at the HAARP observatory near Gakona, Alaska, is designed to transmit a narrow beam of powerful radio signals into the sky. The response to this intervention reveals details of the chemistry and physics of the ionosphere.

One such experiment carried out in March 2004 had an unexpected outcome, inducing artificial optical emissions bright enough to be seen as small speckles by the naked eye. This occurred not in the quiet ionosphere, but in the midst of a pulsating aurora, and represents features much smaller and brighter than ever observed previously.

We still don't know the exact date, so we go to the original paper which tells us:

We recently produced dramatically stronger artificial optical emissions bright enough to be visible to the naked eye in an experiment targeting the ionospheric E layer created by the natural aurora. The experiment was conducted on 10 March 2004, between 6–7 UT, using the 960-kW transmitter array at the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility near Gakona, Alaska (62.4° N, 145.15° W).
The HAARP transmitter was run in a 15-s cycle alternating between 7.5 s of full power and 7.5 s off. Four filtered optical imaging systems ranging from all-sky to telescopic were operated in synchronization with the transmitter on and off intervals. Background conditions during the experiment period were characterized by aurora pulsating with apparent periods of 10 s in longitudinal bands running in the magnetic east–west direction over most of the sky, including the region within the transmitter beam. The auroral precipitation created a blanketing E layer near an altitude of 100 km with critical frequencies ranging from 4–6 MHz. [...]
For a period of approximately 10 min between about 06:40 and 06:50, a number of small speckles of enhanced green emission were observed with the HAARP telescope wide-field camera, which provided high-resolution images of the region within the transmitter beam near magnetic zenith. The speckles were present only during the image frames when the transmitter was on and were absent from exposures taken during the off periods. There is evidence of dynamic pulsations in the background aurora within this narrower field of view as well, such as the auroral bands that appear and disappear in the lower left corner of the images. The largest speckles are approximately one degree across.

 Well, they seem to be concentrating on trying to convince people that they are just experimenting with ways to sell stuff, but I don't buy it. Being the curious sort that I am, I wondered why nobody seemed to have noticed anything about this at the time. I didn't remember reading any news articles on the 11th of March about any strange lights in the sky, assuming that anybody in Alaska would have been looking up. But, just as you, dear reader, may have done, the instant I thought about March 11th, something else occurred to me: indeed, an event occurred on March 11, 2004... in Madrid.

   Next in the series: Part III examines how public interpretation and media narratives emerged arround HAARP experiments.

HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part III): Coincidences, Interpretations, and Public Reactions

HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part I): The 2005 Alaska Experiment Explained

   This article is part of the HAARP and Artificial Aurora Full Series Guide, which explores science, interpretations, and public narratives surrounding HAARP.

      The HAARP Experiment in Alaska

   2 February 2005: By shooting intense radio beams into the night sky, researchers created a modest neon light show visible from the ground. The process is not well understood, but scientists speculate it could one day be employed to light a city or generate celestial advertisements. Researchers with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) project in Alaska tickled the upper atmosphere to the extent that it glowed with green speckles. The speckles were sprinkled amid a natural display known as the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. [...]

The HAARP experiment involves acres of antennas and a 1 megawatt generator. The scientists sent radio pulses skyward every 7.5 seconds, explained team leader Todd Pederson of the Air Force Research Laboratory. "The radio waves travel up to the ionosphere, where they excite the electrons in the plasma," Pederson told LiveScience. "These electrons then collide with atmospheric gasses, which then give off light, as in a neon tube."


Pederson and his colleagues missed the show, but they snapped images. "We unfortunately were indoors watching the data on monitors during the experiment and were busy scrambling trying to make sure the effects were real and not some glitch with the equipment," he said. "We knew right away it was something extraordinary to show up in real time on the monitor against the natural aurora, but did not confirm that it would have been visible to the naked eye until a day or two later when we had a chance to calibrate the raw data."


The experiment is detailed in the Feb. 2 issue of the journal Nature. The research could improve understanding of the aurora and also help explain how the ionosphere adversely affects radio communications. It is not yet clear if the aurora must already be active before an artificial sky show can be induced, says Karl Ziemelis, chief physics editor at the journal. If no pre-existing aurora is required, Ziemelis said, "we are left with the tantalizing (some would say disconcerting) possibility that such radio- fuelled emissions could form the basis of a technology for urban lighting, celestial advertising, and more."

   This early HAARP experiment  demonstrated how controlled radio waves can interact with the ionosphere, opening new paths for atmospheric research.
    

    Next in the series:

In Part II we explore how radio waves interact with the ionosphere and how artificial optical emissions are produced.

HAARP and Artificial Aurora (Part II): How Radio Waves Trigger Light in The Ionosphere