by William Thomas

Thunder shook the sky and lightning strobed across jagged peaks as Jeane Manning walked toward the College of the Canyon in Colorado Springs. Schlock movie-maker Ed Woods would have loved the corny atmospheric effects, but to Manning the display seemed appropriate prelude to a 1986 convocation of maverick engineers obsessed by a mysterious inventor's unfinished work.

The Vancouver author was interested in free energy. Manning thought that innovative hydrogen technologies, cold fusion and magnetic motors might end the nightmare of chronic fuel-burning pollution. She knew that Nikola Tesla once shared her dream of transmitting "free energy" through the Earth. The late 19th, early 20 century inventor of the alternating current which powers human society today hoped to "light up the skies" with a "magnifying transmitter" -- and might have done so if the financier J.P. Morgan had not withdrawn his financial support.

What Manning was not prepared for was how close Tesla's vision was to becoming reality. On-stage in the Armstrong Auditorium, she watched in amazement as a man sitting atop a giant Tesla Coil sent blue sparks arcing from his fingertips. A much bigger device, he claimed, could be used "for particle beam weaponry."

Manning later learned that the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio was pursuing Tesla technology for military applications. But it was an article on Tesla in the March, 1988 issue of OMNI magazine which tipped her to the construction of a Tesla-derived transmitter in Alaska. Located roughly halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks at a place called Gakona, a series of experiments dubbed the "High Altitude Auroral Research Project" was about to beam billions of watts of energy into Earth's highly-charged ionosphere in. HAARP's inventor, an MIT physicist named Dr. Bernard Eastlund, was excited about the possibilities. "You can virtually lift part of the atmosphere," Eastlund told OMNI. "You can make it move, do things to it."

Manning didn't like the sound of this. Neither did OMNI. "Because the upper atmosphere is extremely sensitive to small changes in its composition," the magazine warned, "merely testing an Eastlund Device could cause irreversible damage."

A month later, an article by Dr. Richard Williams only increased Manning's concern. A Harvard-trained physicist working at Princeton University, Williams called the HAARP tests, "irresponsible acts of global vandalism." Addressing his fellow physicists in Physics and Society, Williams warned that HAARP "might become a serious threat to the earth's atmosphere. With experiments on this scale, irreparable damage could be done in a short time." Williams was particularly worried that using HAARP to alter the temperature of the ionosphere could interfere with the chemical reactions that produce the ozone protecting this planet from ultraviolet radiation.

Manning was interested in free energy, not death rays. But as a reporter for the Kelowna Daily News, she decided to check it out. A source she refuses to name sent Manning a stack of documentation, including two Eastlund patents for HAARP. (A third patent was classified.) She next placed a call to Clare Zickhur in Alaska. After blowing the whistle on his company's project, the former ARCO accountant had formed, NO HAARP, an ad hoc group opposed to the project. Zickhur sent Manning military specifications relating to HAARP. "The wording was so similar to the Eastlund patents," Manning told the Straight, "my intuition said this is bad news."

Manning's original source continued to feed her official documentation -- and urged her to pursue the HAARP story. "I didn't feel it was my job to do that," Manning recalls. "I specialized in free energy." But she did talk with a reporter from the Anchorage Daily News, who was frustrated because his editor would not look at a story questioning the activities of one of the state's big employers. Manning asked her own managing editor to contact one of the Thompson newspaper chain's "big guns" in Ottawa to look into ARCO's activities. But nothing came of her request.

In 1994, HAARP earned the top slot among the Project Censored's "Top 10 Most Under-Reported News Stories". By then, Manning had co-authored two books on new energy - and collected a stack of HAARP documents. The latest addition was an article by an Alaskan medical doctor in the fall '94 issue of Nexus magazine. Dr. Nick Begich claimed that the project could generate magnetic fields strong enough to lead salmon and caribou astray, disturb the weather and disrupt communications over much of the planet. Other HAARP hazards, Begich warned, could be even more dire.

As a medical researcher specializing in electro-medicine, Begich knew that weak electric currents can help regenerate bones and affect other cures. But he was worried about the harmful effects of high-energy electromagnetic fields surrounding power lines, radar beams and similar high-energy devices. HAARP could soon be subjecting his fellow Alaskans and their northern British Columbia neighbors to unpredictable side-effects from the highest levels of electromagnetic radiation eve transmitted on Earth.

When Manning called Begich to thank him for writing the Nexus article, he asked her to keep in touch. But the Vancouver journalist never dreamed that she would team up with the activist-physician to produce the definitive book on HAARP. After two printings and 25,000 copies sold, Angels Don't Play This HAARP has become a hot seller from Germany to the Kootenays -- and the biggest selling Alaska-published book ever printed. Currently being translated into Greek and Japanese, the book unveils a project as secretive and potentially risky as the first atomic bomb.

Commercial radio stations commonly broadcast in all directions at 50,000 watts -- no one can predict exactly what will happen as scheduled HAARP tests begin radiating two, four or 10 billion watts of power. But previous electromagnetic experiments in the ionosphere have been accompanied by a displaced jet-stream and erratic weather often enough to rule out pure coincidence. Some critics caution that HAARP's powerfully-focused beam could burn a hole in Earth's electromagnetic shielding. As every Trekkie knows, if that force-field ruptures, solar radiation will come pouring into Spaceship Earth, zapping all life-forms pinned in its roving glare.

Manning didn't think this risk was worth taking just so "the big boys could play with their big toys." Without the ionosphere's electrical shielding, her research told her, our own sun would fry us with gamma radiation, X-rays and shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light. "We think that the holes in the ozone layer letting in some UV rays is bad," Manning told the Straight. "Wait'll we've got cosmic rays coming through at killing wavelengths."

Just what is the ionosphere, anyway? As she paged through her notes, Manning visualized an electrically-active region of the upper-atmosphere extending from 35 to 500 miles out from the Earth. Unlike the atmosphere around us, which carries no electrical charge, the ionosphere flows with the fluctuations of charged particles bombarding Earth from countless suns.

Electrons stripped from the atoms in these cosmic rays turn those atoms into positively- charged ions, which remain in the ionosphere. The pared electrons continue inbound along Earth's magnetic field lines, funneling toward the magnetic poles in a tornado-like spout called the electrojet. Our planetary dynamo -- which resembles a north-south bar magnet spinning within an "ion-o-sphere" -- becomes visible when solar flares flood polar regions with high-energy particles and the sky lights up with the eerie, shape-shifting curtains of an auroral display. (Note to Martin: that's why it's the "electro(n) jet")

Though her degree was in sociology, Manning was getting a clear picture of a few people messing with a huge, dynamic system. Someone is going to be experimenting on the planet's ionosphere, she thought, and everyone is blithely unaware." Even the official US Air Force HAARP FACT SHEET admitted that "ionospheric disturbances at high latitudes also can act to induce large currents in electric power grids." As HAARP sends intense pulses of energy sweeping through the ionosphere, Manning saw regional power grids becoming overloaded, blacking-out cities like Fairbanks and Anchorage. She worried that as bigger transmitters and more antennas are added to this modular facility, communities in BC will increasingly come into range of HAARP.

There were other demonstrable dangers. Significantly, the first group of professional group to publicly protest HAARP were Alaskan pilots. The fliers feared that HAARP would interfere with electronic navigation aids and communications, leaving them blind and mute over remote and rugged terrain. Even worse, HAARP might override electronic control systems, causing jetliners to dive into the ground. After a series of crashes linked to electrical interference the US Air Force had launched a three-year Joint Electromagnetic Interference investigation in 1991. Official JEMI findings showed that "radio waves at certain frequencies can bring down an aircraft by putting it into an uncommanded turn or dive, or by turning off its fuel supply."

* * *

A cold Alaska wind was blowing snow in their faces when Jeane Manning and Nick Begich approached the HAARP site in February, 1995. "It wasn't very scary," Manning recalls. "A very large building stood between the road and the antenna farm. There wasn't much to see."

Even from the top of a nearby water tower, the remote installation didn't look like a death-ray machine. It was hardly worth a photograph. To complement the deceptive decor, HAARP's managers later removed the "National Security" warnings from the chain-link fence surrounding the site.

But visitors today should not stand too close. Remotely controlled Phase 1 tests are already radiating one billion watts (one gigawatt) of closely-focused power. And this is just the warm-up. Sometime in 1997, Phase 2 tests will heat a small region of the upper atmosphere with four billion watts of highly-concentrated power. Even the scientists in charge of the project don't know what will happen next. But they hope that a 30-mile wide plume of super-heated atmospheric particles will bulge outward into space like the skin of a poked balloon.

Using high-speed computers and newly developed software to pulse powerful radio waves, HAARP's antennas will be fired sequentially to steer this ionospheric bulge like an artificial lens. The Air Force hopes to fry incoming warheads from any enemy suicidal enough to fire ballistic missiles which can be tracked back to their own cities. It also looks forward to using HAARP to peer deep underground, while the project's US Navy partner wants to talk to its submarines running deeply submerged 12,000 miles away.

Though the military denies interest in other applications, HAARP's commercial patent claims the ability to achieve "total disruption of communications over a large portion of the earth". Other offensive capabilities listed in the patent include "altering the upper atmosphere wind patterns using plumes of atmospheric particles as a lens or focusing device" to disturb weather thousands of miles away.

If this is starting to read like an X-Files script, the military brass -- and their scientific advisers -- are convinced that this device can alter the ionosphere in "useful" ways. When a skeptical US patent examiner told MIT physicist Bernard Eastlund that his "ionospheric heater" sounded like science fiction, Eastlund simply replied that the technology was already available. "These things are all on the backs of very stable technologies," Eastlund later told the Straight. "When you get past the gee whiz, there's a lot of real science there."

The calculations and drawings Eastlund presented included references to Nikola Tesla. But HAARP is the culmination of four decades' ionospheric tinkering, using ever-more powerful transmitters to create instabilities in order -- as one engineer told Manning at the Colorado conference -- "to see what will happen."

The Soviet Union and the United States have been interested in the ionosphere since the 1950s, when it was discovered that high-power radio transmissions change the temperature and density of electrons there. Seeking military advantage, the US has employed at least one atomic detonation, clouds of copper needles and beryllium released from rockets and space shuttles to map and perturb this dynamic zone.

Transmitting at one-gigawatt or less power, seven smaller ionospheric "heaters" belonging to the US, the USSR and Germany have caused avalanches of energy to cascade through Earth's atmosphere. But these earlier ionospheric heaters aimed energy straight up in an expanding cone; their effective radiated power dissipates rapidly.

But HAARP directs its energy in an inverted cone. By focusing its beam on a very small area of the ionosphere, there is, in effect, an enormous increase in power. As the six-page HAARP Fact Sheet issued in November, 1993 by the Office of Naval Research and US Air Force Geophysical Laboratory explains, no other heater has "the combination of frequency capability and beam steering agility required to perform the experiments planned for HAARP."

US patent #4,686,605 was issued on August 11, 1987. The first of three HAARP patents awarded to Eastlund describes his Method and Apparatus for Altering A Region of the Earth's Atmosphere, Ionosphere and/or Magnetosphere. "The name of the game is, can you accelerate electrons?" Eastlund said in an interview with the Straight. "That was what my patents were on and that was one of the purposes stated in the original HAARP document."

By the time Eastlund's first patent was issued, he had worked for three years as a consultant, helping the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) set up their Applied Technologies division. When the giant energy transnational wanted to know what to do with 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas it had discovered on Alaska's North Slope, Eastlund recommended burning it on-site to power his ionospheric heater.

ARCO bought the idea, and the patent -- and turfed Eastlund. "I had been sort of ushered out four weeks before the first patent issue," the inventor recalled -- possibly because he was not interested in pursuing offensive uses for HAARP. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb was also, according to Eastlund, a strong supporter of President Reagans' space-based defence system called Star Wars, "Teller came to visit them one weekend," Eastland recalls, "and in about two weeks I was a goner."

The physicist remains proud of his invention. "It was really quite something to see it actually start to be built. I'm the inventor and they can't take that away from me." But he quickly added, "any uses of this all belong to ARCO..."

ARCO's enthusiasm for HAARP was matched by the military. A "Plans and Activities" report jointly issued by the US Air Force Geophysics Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research in February, 1990 heralded the "exciting and challenging aspect of ionospheric enhancement." Though the Air Force refers to HAARP as "pure research," this restricted-circulation document declared that the program will go "beyond basic research to "controlling ionospheric processes." (Emphasis in report RFP N00014-91-R-0001.)

Calling this "a revolutionary concept," the paper's sponsors hope that HAARP will spark "new ionospheric processes and phenomena" which can be exploited by the US military. These uses, the report explains, include long range, over-the-horizon surveillance of radio traffic, and detection of cruise missiles by "significantly altering" regions of the ionosphere at a range of 1,613 km or more. "What is clear," the study notes, "is that at one gigawatt and above effective radiated power...a variety of instability processes are triggered" in the ionosphere.

Put another way: the electrons hitting your TV screen are moving at 25,000 electron-volts. At current Phase 1 settings, HAARP is moving electrons in the ionosphere at one to three-million volts -- fast enough to make the air glow. If pulsed correctly, these HAARP-excited electrons will begin resonating with the ionosphere's own electrical energy. Just as pushing a swing will cause the swing to move through an ever-greater arc between regular inputs, so too can a targeted patch of ionosphere be made to oscillate with timed impulses from HAARP until these joined energies create a cascade of escalating effects.

The problem is that amplifying energy in the highly-energetic ionosphere is unpredictable; the swing can twist out of control. In their report RFP N00014-91-R-0001, the Air Force eagerly anticipates how "plasma processes will `runaway' until the next limiting process is reached."

What lies beyond the next atmospheric threshold, Manning wondered? "It's insane," she told the Straight. "I have three children and a grandchild -- and that's why I've gone out in areas of research beyond the journalistic herd."