They blame HAARP for everything: the cases, the physics and the fact-checks

Every big disaster brings the same suspect. In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene hit Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 storm. Two weeks later, Hurricane Milton came ashore near Sarasota. Within hours, viral posts said that a research site in Alaska had made them. The name was HAARP.

This is not a story about who is stupid. Suspicion after a disaster is human. It is a story about what HAARP is, what it can physically do, and what the people who checked each claim found.

What HAARP is

HAARP stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It sits near Gakona, Alaska. According to the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), it is a phased array of 180 antennas spread across 33 acres, with a transmitter of about 3.6 megawatts. It points radio waves upward to study the ionosphere, which UAF says starts at roughly 60 to 80 kilometers (more than 35 miles) up.

Its origins are military: it was built in the 1990s with funding from the Air Force, the Navy and DARPA. Since August 2015, UAF has run it, and it holds public open houses (for example on August 27, 2022 and on June 14, 2025). It is a working science instrument, not a secret one.

The cases

Hurricanes Helene and Milton (2024). Posts claimed HAARP created the storms. FactCheck.org notes that some of the posts cited HAARP and calls it a basic science research program that has nothing to do with weather modification. In one case, a video of grey clouds labeled “HAARP created Hurricane Milton” was traced by Full Fact to an older cloud formation over Florida. President Biden called the weather-control claims “beyond ridiculous”. NOAA wrote that no technology exists that can create, destroy, modify, strengthen or steer hurricanes. One detail that fuels suspicion is real: the US government did try to modify hurricanes with Project Stormfury, from 1962 to 1983, and it did not work.

Turkey and Syria earthquakes (February 6, 2023). After the magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes, a video and social posts blamed HAARP or an attack. HAARP’s program manager told fact-checkers that the research equipment cannot create or amplify natural disasters, and a USGS geophysicist said there was no evidence the quake was man-made. Lead Stories also reported that HAARP was not running a campaign at the time. PolitiFact and Logically Facts reached the same conclusion.

Morocco earthquake (2023). The same claim, sometimes mixed with “Blue Beam” stories, spread on TikTok and other platforms. VOA and Lead Stories checked it and found nothing connecting the quake to HAARP.

Valencia floods (October 2024). In Spain, a claim said a ship off Valencia with high-frequency transmitters had triggered the rain. Euronews reports that the footage used came from a promotional video, and that AFP found the ship had been stationed off Ghana since 2019. Maldita.es documented how many disinformation narratives circulated after the floods. More than 220 people died.

Myanmar earthquake (March 28, 2025). HAARP was blamed again. The British Geological Survey said there was no reason to believe it was anything other than a natural event, and a UCL researcher pointed out that the quake occurred on the Sagaing Fault, a plate boundary. Full Fact and Factchecker.gr covered the claim.

The physics: why the numbers do not work

Two facts make the claim hard to sustain.

First, location. UAF’s FAQ says HAARP’s radio waves interact with the ionosphere, far above where weather forms. Its own words: “Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather.” Hurricanes live in the lowest few miles of the atmosphere.

Second, energy. NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division estimates that an average hurricane releases heat by condensation at about 6.0 x 10^14 watts, roughly 600 trillion watts. PBS NOVA repeats the figure. HAARP’s transmitter is 3.6 megawatts, or 3.6 x 10^6 watts. Dividing one by the other gives about 167 million. That is our own arithmetic, not a figure from any agency: a hurricane releases heat at a rate around 167 million times HAARP’s transmitter power.

Earthquakes show the same gap. USGS gives an energy relation of log10 E = 1.5 M + 4.8, with E in joules. For a magnitude 7.8 quake, like Turkey’s, that is about 3 x 10^16 joules. HAARP at full power for a year delivers about 1.1 x 10^14 joules. Matching one such quake would take on the order of 250 or more years of continuous full-power operation. Again, this is our calculation from the published formulas, and HAARP actually runs in short campaigns. A seismologist quoted by PolitiFact said that energy in the ionosphere cannot cause earthquakes or affect faults.

Why the rumor sticks

There are understandable reasons.

• Military money. HAARP began with Air Force, Navy and DARPA funding, and it was run by the military until 2015.
• A spooky name and a spooky book. The name includes “Active Auroral Research”, and a 1995 book, “Angels Don’t Play This HAARP”, said it could trigger earthquakes.
• Real weather modification exists. Cloud seeding is real and can modestly increase local rainfall. It is a different technology from a radio transmitter, and nobody has shown it can create or steer a hurricane. As one British Geological Survey scientist put it to Full Fact, HAARP is just a radio transmitter that points up rather than horizontally.
• Disasters demand a reason. A natural cause can feel too small for the scale of the loss.

A fair summary: the suspicion is human, the history gives it some fuel, and the evidence does not support it. If you want to see the site yourself, UAF has opened it to the public on open-house days.

What would change your mind?

Fact-checkers cannot read minds, so we will end with the question we asked in the reel: what evidence would change yours? Posts quoted in the video are paraphrased, and the comments on its end card are illustrative.

Photos and satellite footage in the reel come from Wikimedia Commons and public-domain sources (NOAA, NASA, UAF, US Air Force, VOA). The narration is an AI-generated voice.