HAARP ran from 1993 to 2014, funded by the Air Force, Navy, DARPA, and the University of Alaska, built by BAE, roughly $250 million over its life, studying ionospheric physics with a 40-acre antenna grid at Gakona. The Air Force announced closure in 2014 and transferred the facility to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in August 2015, where it still runs NSF-funded research campaigns with public tours.
The claims are also documented, as claims: Nick Begich's Angels Don't Play This HAARP (1995) founded the genre, calling it the most incredible weapon yet devised; Hugo Chavez blamed it for the 2010 Haiti earthquake; the European Parliament's 1999 resolution called for examination of its legal and ethical implications based on two testimonies, Begich and Rosalie Bertell. Ionosphere physicists' rebuttal is arithmetic: the facility works above 60 miles altitude, its signals are 100 times weaker than a phone's at ground level, and weather lives in the troposphere far below.
The conspiracy's one real root: ARCO subsidiary APTI, HAARP's first contractor, held Bernard Eastlund's patents for an ionospheric heater that did claim missile-defense and weather-modification potential, and Eastlund told NPR a secret project had studied his work. HAARP officials denied any link, and the patents' grandest functions were never demonstrated anywhere. The archive's pattern again: a real patent's wildest paragraph, inherited as a facility's secret purpose.
When a research station has an open house and a visitors' log, what exactly is it hiding?