Haarp:

SPS: Solar Power Satellite Project (1968)

In 1968 the US military proposed Solar Powered Satellites in geostationary orbit some 40,000 km above the earth, which would intercept solar radiation using solar cells on satellites and transmit it via a microwave beam to receiving antennas, called rectennas, on earth. The US Congress mandated the Department of Energy and NASA to prepare an Environmental Impact Assessment on this project, to be completed by June 1980, and costing $25 Million. This project was designed to construct 60 Solar Powered Satellites over a thirty year period at a cost between $500 and $800 thousand million (in 1968 dollars), providing 100 percent of the US energy needs in the year 2025 at a cost of $3000 per kW. At that time, the project cost was two to three times larger than the whole Department of Energy budget, and the projected cost of the electricity was well above the cost of most conventional energy sources. The rectenna sites on earth were expected to take up to 145 square kilometers of land, and would preclude habitation by any humans, animals or even vegetation. Each Satellite was to be the size of Manhattan Island.

Saturn V Rocket (1975)

Due to a malfunction, the Saturn V Rocket burned unusually high in the atmosphere, above 300 km. This burn produced "a large ionospheric hole" (Mendillo, M. Et al., Science p. 187, 343, 1975). The disturbance reduced the total electron content more than 60% over an area 1,000 km in radius, and lasted for several hours. It prevented all telecommunications over a large area of the Atlantic Ocean. The phenomenon was apparently caused by a reaction between the exhaust gases and ionospheric oxygen ions. The reaction emitted a 6300 A airglow. Between 1975 and 1981 NASA and the US Military began to design ways to test this new phenomena through deliberate experimentation with the ionosphere.

SPS Military Implications (1978)

Early review of the Solar Powered Satellite Project began in around 1978, and I was on the review panel. Although this was proposed as an energy program, it had significant military implications. One of the most significant, first pointed out by Michael J. Ozeroff, was the possibility of developing a satellite-borne beam weapon for anti-ballistic missile (ABM) use. The satellites were to be in geosynchronous orbits, each providing an excellent vantage point from which an entire hemisphere can be surveyed continuously. It was speculated that a high-energy laser beam could function as a thermal weapon to disable or destroy enemy missiles. There was some discussion of electron weapon beams, through the use of a laser beam to preheat a path for the following electron beam.
The SPS was also described as a psychological and anti- personnel weapon, which could be directed toward an enemy. If the main microwave beam was redirected away from its rectenna, toward enemy personnel, it could use an infrared radiation wave- length (invisible) as an anti-personnel weapon. It might also be possible to transmit high enough energy to ignite combustible materials. Laser beam power relays could be made from the SPS satellite to other satellites or platforms, for example aircraft, for military purposes. One application might be a laser powered turbofan engine which would receive the laser beam directly in its combustion chamber, producing the required high temperature gas for its cruising operation. This would allow unlimited on-station cruise time. As a psychological weapon, the SPS was capable of causing general panic
The SPS would be able to transmit power to remote military operations anywhere needed on earth. The manned platform of the SPS would provide surveillance and early warning capability, and ELF linkage to submarines. It would also provide the capability of jamming enemy communications. The potential for jamming and creating communications is significant. The SPS was also capable of causing physical changes in the ionosphere
President Carter approved the SPS Project and gave it a go- ahead, in spite of the reservation which many reviewers, myself included, expressed. Fortunately, it was so expensive, exceeding the entire Department of Energy budget, that funding was denied by the Congress. I approached the United Nations Committee on Disarmament on this project, but was told that as long as the program was called Solar Energy by the United States, it could not be considered a weapons project. The same project resurfaced in the US under President Reagan. He moved it to the much larger budget of the Department of Defense and called it Star Wars. Since this is more recent history, I will not discuss the debate which raged over this phase of the plan.
By 1978, it was apparent to the US Military that communications in a nuclear hostile environment would not be possible using traditional methods of radio and television technology (Jane's Military Communications 1978). By 1982, GTE Sylvania (Needham Heights, Massachusetts) had developed a command control electronic sub-system for the US Air Force's Ground Launch Cruise Missiles (GLCM) that would enable military commanders to monitor and control the missile prior to launch both in hostile and non-hostile environments. The system contains six radio subsystems, created with visible light using a dark beam (not visible) and is resistant to the disruptions experienced by radio and television. Dark beams contribute to the formation of energetic plasma in the atmosphere. This plasma can become visible as smog or fog. Some has a different charge than the sun's energy, and accumulates in places where the sun's energy is absent, like the polar regions in the winter. When the polar spring occurs, the sun appears and repels this plasma, contributing to holes in the ozone layer. This military system is called: Ground Wave Emergency Network (GWEN). (See The SECOMII Communication System, by Wayne Olsen, SAND 78- 0391,Sandia Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 1978.) This innovative emergency radio system was apparently never implemented in Europe, and exists only in North America.

Orbit Maneuvering System (1981)

Part of the plan to build the SPS space platforms was the demand for reusable space shuttles, since they could not afford to keep discarding rockets. The NASA Spacelab 3 Mission of the Space Shuttle made, in 1981, "a series of passes over a network of five ground based observatories" in order to study what happened to the ionosphere when the Shuttle injected gases into it from the Orbit Maneuvering System (OMS). They discovered that they could "induce ionospheric holes" and began to experiment with holes made in the daytime, or at night over Millstone, Connecticut, and Arecibo, Puerto Rico. They experimented with the effects of "artificially induced ionospheric depletions on very low frequency wave lengths, on equatorial plasma instabilities, and on low frequency radio astronomical observations over Roberval, Quebec, Kwajelein, in the Marshall Islands and Hobart, Tasmania" (Advanced Space Research, Vo1.8, No. 1, 1988).

Innovative Shuttle Experiments (1985)

An innovative use of the Space Shuttle to perform space physics experiments in earth orbit was launched, using the OMS injections of gases to "cause a sudden depletion in the local plasma concentration, the creation of a so called ionospheric hole." This artificially induced plasma depletion can then be used to investigate other space phenomena, such as the growth of the plasma instabilities or the modification of radio propagation paths. The 47 second OMS burn of July 29, 1985, produced the largest and most long-lived ionospheric hole to date, dumping some 830 kg of exhaust into the ionosphere at sunset. A 6 second, 68 km OMS release above Connecticut in August 1985, produced an airglow which covered over 400,000 square km.
During the 1980's, rocket launches globally numbered about 500 to 600 a year, peaking at 1500 in 1989. There were many more during the Gulf War. The Shuttle is the largest of the solid fuel rockets, with twin 45 meter boosters. All solid fuel rockets release large amounts of hydrochloric acid in their exhaust, each Shuttle flight injecting about 75 tons of ozone destroying chlorine into the stratosphere. Those launched since 1992 inject even more ozone-destroying chlorine, about 187 tons, into the stratosphere (which contains the ozone layer).

Mighty Oaks (1986)

In April 1986, just before the Chernobyl disaster, the US had a failed hydrogen test at the Nevada Test Site called Mighty Oaks. This test, conducted far underground, consisted of a hydrogen bomb explosion in one chamber, with a leaded steel door to the chamber, two meters thick, closing within milliseconds of the blast. The door was to allow only the first radioactive beam to escape into the "control room" in which expensive instrumentation was located. The radiation was to be captured as a weapon beam. The door failed to close as quickly as planned, causing the radioactive gases and debris to fill the control room, destroying millions of dollars worth of equipment. The experiment was part of a program to develop X-ray and particle beam weapons. The radioactive releases from Mighty Oaks were vented, under a "licensed venting" and were likely responsible for many of the North American nuclear fallout reports in May 1986, which were attributed to the Chernobyl disaster.

Desert Storm (1991)

According to Defense News, April 13 - 19, 1992, the US deployed an electromagnetic pulse weapon (EMP) in Desert Storm, designed to mimic the flash of electricity from a nuclear bomb. The Sandia National Laboratory had built a 23,000 square meter laboratory on the Kirkland Air Force Base, 1989, to house the Hermes II electron beam generator capable of producing 20 Trillion Watt pulses lasting 20 billionths to 25 billionths of a second. This X-ray simulator is called a Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator. A stream of electrons hitting a metal plate can produce a pulsed X-ray or gamma ray. Hermes II had produced electron beams since 1974. These devises were apparently tested during the Gulf War, although detailed information on them is sparse.

High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP (1993)

The HAARP Program is jointly managed by the US Air Force and the US Navy, and is based in Gakona, Alaska. It is designed to "understand, simulate and control ionospheric processes that might alter the performance of communication and surveillance systems." The HAARP system intends to beam 3.6 Gigawatts of effective radiated power of high frequency radio energy into the ionosphere in order to:

• Generate extremely low frequency (ELF) waves for communicating with submerged submarines
• Conduct geophysical probes to identify and characterize natural ionospheric processes so that techniques can be developed to mitigate or control them
• Generate ionospheric lenses to focus large amounts of high frequency energy, thus providing a means of triggering ionospheric processes that potentially could be exploited for Department of Defense purposes,
• Electron acceleration for infrared (IR) and other optical emissions which could be used to control radio wave propagation properties
• Generate geomagnetic field aligned ionization to control the reflection/scattering properties of radio waves,
• Use oblique heating to produce effects on radio wave propagation, thus broadening the potential military applications of ionospheric enhancement technology.

Poker Flat Rocket Launch (1968 to Present)

The Poker Flat Research Range is located about 50 km North of Fairbanks, Alaska, and it was established in 1968. It is operated by the Geophysical Institute with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, under NASA contract. About 250 major rocket launches have taken place from this site, and in 1994, a 16 meter long rocket was launched to help NASA "understand chemical reactions in the atmosphere associated with global climate change." Similar experiments, but using Chemical Release Modules (CRM), have been launched from Churchill, Manitoba. In 1980, Brian Whelan's "Project Waterhole" disrupted an aurora borealis, bringing it to a temporary halt. In February 1983, the chemical released into the ionosphere caused an aurora borealis over Churchill. In March 1989, two Black Brant X's and two Nike Orion rockets were launched over Canada, releasing barium at high altitudes and creating artificial clouds. These Churchill artificial clouds were observed from as far away as Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The US Navy has also been carrying on High Power Auroral Stimulation (HIPAS) research in Alaska. Through a series of wires and a 15 meter antenna, they have beamed high intensity signals into the upper atmosphere, generating a controlled disturbance in the ionosphere. As early as 1992, the Navy talked of creating 10 kilometer long antennas in the sky to generate extremely low frequency (ELF) waves needed for communicating with submarines. Another purpose of these experiments is to study the Aurora Borealis, called by some an outdoor plasma lab for studying the principles of fusion. Shuttle flights are now able to generate auroras with an electron beam. On November 10, 1991, and aurora borealis appeared in the Texas sky for the first time ever recorded, and it was seen by people as far away as Ohio and Utah, Nebraska and Missouri. The sky contained "Christmas colors" and various scientists were quick to blame it on solar activity. However, when pressed most would admit that the ionosphere must have been weakened at the time, so that the electrically charged particle hitting the earth's atmosphere created the highly visible light called airglow. These charged particles are normally pulled northwards by the earth's magnetic forces, to the magnetic north pole. The Northern Lights, as the aurora borealis is called, normally occurs in the vortex at the pole where the energetic particles, directed by the magnetic force lines, are directed.