A Never-Ending Conspiracy Theory in Remote Alaska
The guy pouring my beer in Anchorage told me that he knew there was no truth to decades-old rumors about a research facility 200 miles to the northeast. Nobody was up there talking to aliens or controlling people’s minds. “They just do the aurora,” he said, cheerfully, while tearing up pieces of mint.
The comment didn’t surprise me. Many people who don’t believe one conspiracy theory about that station—known as the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP—believe another. A common misconception is that it can manufacture northern lights, a natural wonder typically most visible in or near the Arctic Circle. It cannot (and neither can any man-made instrument). Still, late last year, when a geomagnetic storm caused aurora sightings as far south as Texas, Facebook was studded with posts warning that these lights were not “natural” and that they were created by the scientists at HAARP for possibly sinister reasons.
I’ve been curious about HAARP for a while because of rumors such as this one. The lab has also been erroneously credited with various supernatural occurrences (backward-walking caribou) and secret contact with extraterrestrials (covered up by “men in black”). Most commonly, it’s blamed for events caused by nature. The office phone rings after hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, and typhoons, no matter where in the world they occur. A 2024 study found that HAARP was the subject of more than a million conspiracism-inflected posts on Twitter from January 2022 to March 2023, primarily about natural disasters. In early 2024, the far-right influencer Laura Loomer suggested that HAARP created a snowstorm to dampen turnout at the Iowa caucuses and thwart the Trump campaign. And when I visited HAARP this past November, calls were coming in about whether the facility had caused Hurricane Melissa, which had recently swept through Jamaica and Cuba, resulting in at least 88 fatalities and billions of dollars in damage.
[Adam Serwer: Gullible, cynical America]
All of this anxiety is focused on a unique research instrument housed at HAARP, which is owned by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and was originally built by the military for the cost of $290 million. “The array,” as the instrument is called, is a grid of 180 transmitters that each sit atop a 72-foot-tall post, arranged in a clearing and surrounded by Alaskan wilderness. You could call it the world’s highest-powered radio transmitter, but it’s more precisely its most powerful ionospheric heater (which sounds scarier). HAARP transmissions reflect off of the ionosphere—part of the upper atmosphere that starts about 30 miles above the Earth’s surface—and temporarily “heat” or excite it.
The Navy hoped to use the facility to work out new forms of long-range communication, and the Air Force wanted to study “killer” electrons that sometimes damage satellites. But their interests in these pursuits ran out, and the military turned the facility over to the university in 2015, rather than bulldoze it. David Hysell, an engineering professor at Cornell who has conducted experiments there, told me that the most succinct way to summarize what HAARP now studies is “the effects that the ionosphere has on signals, on radio-wave propagation,” which is not very exciting. The equipment looks crazy, but it can’t affect the parts of the atmosphere where the Earth’s weather is created.
Still, the calls to the lab continue. The Facebook posts go viral. The university has held open houses, posted public information pages, and produced irreverent merch, but nothing seems to tamp down suspicion. Jessica Matthews, HAARP’s director, is an Air Force veteran, and her first instinct was to deal with conspiracy theories in the style of the military: “If left to myself, I wouldn’t say anything,” she told me. “But that’s not the right answer.”
She spent close to four hours on Zoom walking me through more than 100 slides about HAARP and its history. Afterward, I accepted her invitation to Alaska to see what it looks like for her team to contort around conspiracy theories every single day. How do memes and menacing phone calls shape the lives of a bunch of regular people doing confusing science in a remote town that has not even one good place to buy a pizza?
After flying into Anchorage, I drove for four hours through snowy mountains to a tiny bed-and-breakfast about 30 miles south of HAARP (the closest hotel had burned down the week before). Matthews and I caravanned to the facility at 6:30 the next morning, when it was still pitch-black outside.
The operations center—a windowless box in the deep, dark woods—was very X-Files on the approach. But inside, it was as boring as any workplace. There was a kitchen with a coffee maker and a refrigerator with mayonnaise. A square ring of offices surrounded a conference room; in the conference room, a small group of scientists joined a Zoom call with HAARP’s space-weather consultant, Whit Reeve. During the meeting, he informed the scientists about some minor geomagnetic storms and solar winds, unlikely to affect any of the day’s experiments.
A member of the maintenance team walked me through the HAARP power plant as he turned on its five generators, labeled Angel 1, Angel 2, Angel 3, Angel 4, and Angel 5. The current staff doesn’t know who named them, but it was clearly in reference to the 1995 book Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, co-authored by Nick Begich Jr., a member of a prominent political family in Alaska. (His son, Nick Begich III, is the state’s current representative in Congress.) Among other things, the book suggested that HAARP would “boil the upper atmosphere” with radiation that would then bounce back to Earth and “penetrate our bodies, the ground and the oceans,” and its publication instigated many of the early conspiracy theories.
[Read: The truth about hurricane geoengineering]
To be clear, I realize that if there were any reason to worry about what (currently) happens at HAARP, then scheduling a visit, walking through the front door, and being led on a friendly, guided tour would not be a very good way to assess those concerns. But I have found no reason to believe that the things the facility is accused of could possibly be going on. All of the experts I spoke with agreed that the charges were scientifically impossible. They also agreed that what really happens there is hard to explain.
I was at HAARP for the start of a weeklong “research campaign”—one of a few that the facility hosts each year. A modest grant from the National Science Foundation provides most of HAARP’s operating budget; for efficiency’s sake, the center groups experiments together and runs them back-to-back in these concentrated blocks. Such experiments mostly look like nothing—opaque data on a computer monitor—and result in papers with confusing titles about “whistler mode” waves and “ionospheric turbulence.”
Once in a while, the experiments look like something (and still result in papers with confusing titles). When the bartender in Anchorage told me that HAARP “does the aurora,” that was wrong. But it can make something like the aurora, in very small spots. The array can heat a patch of the ionosphere—or excite its electrons—to the point where it creates what scientists call “airglow.” This is an extremely faint, temporary aurora, of sorts, which can flicker red or green. You’d have to really stare at it, train your eyes, and convince yourself you were seeing it, in order to be impressed. More likely, you’d be underwhelmed. “HAARP is powerful by comparison to other things that humans do, but it’s nothing compared to what nature does,” Hysell, the Cornell professor, told me. The effect of a transmission is brief; everything goes back to normal within seconds.
But while I was there, there was no airglow. Just the invisible radio waves.
Matthews had prepared a chart for me of everyone present at the facility, color coded so that I would know who had agreed to speak to me on the record and who would rather their names not appear in an Atlantic story about the 30 years of conspiracy theories surrounding their workplace. When she and I sat down to talk in the conference room, it became clear that she feels a strong sense of personal responsibility for everything that happens around her. If anybody felt annoyed or uncomfortable about my being there, that would fall on her. If a magazine story produced a burst of negative attention that inconvenienced or endangered the people who worked for her, that would fall on her, too.
Leading up to research weeks, Matthews and the university’s communications team generally won’t post on social media or issue press releases. They’ve learned that attracting attention is not worth it. In 2023, Matthews approved a press release about an upcoming HAARP experiment that would create an airglow. A local became alarmed and showed up at the gate to the facility, where they filmed employees and then followed one for some distance down the access road. “Ever since then, I’ve been extremely gun-shy about putting any press releases out,” Matthews said. (The university has continued sending out “transmission notices,” or bulletins listing what times and at what frequencies the array will be transmitting, directly to citizen-science groups.)
[Read: Who’s ready to think about blocking out the sun?]
Whereas some of the calls that Matthews fields about HAARP are a bit funny—she often hears from people asking for nice weather on their wedding day—other calls are alarming. HAARP once received a bomb threat just before dozens of college students were set to show up for a weeklong program. (The FBI investigated and found that the suspect was not in the state.) And in October 2016, two men were arrested in Georgia with thousands of rounds of ammunition and numerous guns, including AR-15s, en route to HAARP to attack it. Those men got nowhere close to HAARP (and seemingly had no good plan to cross the border into Canada). Still, HAARP’s security adviser, Sean McGee, the former head of the university police, called it “a bit of an eye-opener.”
Employees are now trained in de-escalation strategies. McGee prepares staff for uncomfortable conversations (and possible confrontations) by encouraging them not to dismiss people’s concerns. “You’ve got to take what they say seriously,” he said. He told me about an interaction he had when he was a police officer. A woman was convinced that she was being spied on through a camera hidden in her smoke detector. McGee examined the device. “I assured her that there was no camera,” he said.
The woman then wondered whether there was a spy camera inside her TV remote instead. “That was okay,” he said. “I was able to take the batteries out of that.” The point of the story, he said, was that the kind thing to do is invest a little time and answer questions as best you can. Though I heard another takeaway: The questions might not ever end.
When HAARP runs during the day, the naked eye or ear has little way to know that the array is transmitting. You can even walk between the poles, thanks to a protective metal net that prevents the transmissions from bouncing to the ground. On a calm, frigid afternoon, Matthews showed me the array and pointed out that the aircraft radar was on, to make sure that no errant pilot tried to fly overhead. The instrument was, in my opinion, kind of beautiful, in the way that large, confusing objects sometimes are.
The questions that people have about HAARP generally fall into two broad categories, Matthews said. Outside of Alaska, in what Alaskans call “the lower 48,” people tend to be interested in conspiracy theories involving aliens, mind control, or large-scale disasters. Locals tend to have more personal questions. For example, a woman who attended a HAARP event asked whether the array had caused her neighbor’s cancer. “That’s a difficult thing to answer,” Matthews told me. The question prompted her to commission an independent study by a Seattle engineering firm, which showed that HAARP’s radiofrequency emissions were safe. Because of her military background, Matthews also feels obligated to respond directly to phone calls from veterans who seem to be in some kind of mental or physical distress, and to try to talk them through their concerns.
People who hear about HAARP today do so in an information environment that is extremely hospitable to paranoia. Climate change is causing an increase in extreme weather events, which provoke conspiracy theories consistently; certain pockets of the internet not only believe that the government controls the weather but now insist that it has replaced the sun with an LED lamp. The Trump administration stokes paranoia all the time, in innumerable ways. Over the summer, the president’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, promised answers to “good faith” questions about the condensation trails behind planes. Currently, Republican lawmakers are calling for the passage of laws that would ban weather modification, placing all kinds of ordinary scientific experimentation under that scary-sounding heading.
On my second day at HAARP, the experiments were scheduled to run past dinnertime. Someone had brought a huge pot of chili and let it simmer on the stove in the shared kitchen, and everyone joked about that scene in The Office with the chili, and how important it had been to prevent the same catastrophe from happening here. While I spoke with Evans Callis, HAARP’s research-support-services lead, we were offered slices of a birthday cake that had just been presented to a member of the maintenance crew.
Callis had thought a lot about the conspiracy theories. He started volunteering at HAARP open houses as a college student and was hired by Matthews after he graduated. Around the time that he started the job, he was unsettled when anti-HAARP graffiti appeared on the side of his church, but it turned out to be a coincidence (he thinks). “We have this innate desire to want to control things, and there’s some things that just are beyond our control,” he told me. “We can’t control whether or not a typhoon forms in the Pacific.” We meaning a small group of Alaskans, and we meaning any of us.
When extreme weather causes mass destruction or death, he said, “it’s natural to ask, you know, Why?” If someone thinks the wrong people are controlling the weather and using their power to inflict misery, that may make them feel helpless and frustrated, he thought. But in a strange way, it may also make them feel less helpless and frustrated than if they imagined that there was no reason for anything.
With each passing year, HAARP is divorced a little further from its military past. Decades ago, the Air Force purchased the land surrounding the facility from the Ahtna people, under the threat of eminent domain, but it has recently sold it back. HAARP will soon be renamed the Subauroral Geophysical Observatory, or SAGO, matching the name of its NSF grant. “There is a side benefit that it helps us transition off of the name that drives conspiracy,” Matthews added.
Some people will likely point to the change as evidence of a cover-up. That’s probably unavoidable, given the facility’s setting. When I asked Whit Reeve, the space-weather consultant, why he thought that so many conspiracy theories about the array persisted, he guessed that the answer was obvious: “Well, one thing is it’s in the middle of nowhere and it’s got a fence around it,” he told me.
Throughout the long, true history of secretive military science, the government really did favor sparsely populated areas (and specifically Alaska) to avoid prying eyes, which has had the ironic knock-on effect of making any distant outpost seem like it’s up to something nefarious, even when nothing very interesting is going on. If HAARP were located just outside of Cleveland, maybe nobody would care about it.
Living with a conspiracy theory means thinking about this kind of thing all the time. Should the university share really cool photos of the array with aurora visible above it, or is that inviting a rash of Facebook misinformation? Should it sell merchandise featuring cartoon aliens, or is that making too much fun of people’s concerns? After dark, Matthews and I drove around the facility grounds, and she stopped in front of the array to point to the red lights at the base of each of the poles, which indicate that the transmitters are operational. They gave the entire scene an ominous glow.
“Would you post a photo of that on social media?” she asked. I considered it. It looked like something that could freak a lot of people out, I told her. It was kind of freaking me out just sitting there. No, I thought. I probably wouldn’t.