SNOW

We are sufficiently familiar with the several claims made for HAARP by genre writers, and are not sufficiently satisfied that any have really examined the IRI itself with any clarity of understanding. Project HAARP is not a weapons program. There are unlearned and paranoid speculators who have surrounded HAARP with a ragged entourage of supposed weapons applications which, from every military and engineering viewpoint, can never possibly be fulfilled. Even after the substantial modifications which have been both planned and openly announced, HAARP will never be exercised in these speculated functions. The complete engineering details concerning the IRI are buried imder the cold white snow of a corporate megalith which, thus far, has maintained its fiigid silence.

Weapons programs absorb and confiscate patents without permission. This is how security is maintained. Industry has absorbed every patent related to the HAARP effort. Were HAARP a weapon, no such affirmation would have been permitted. One does not purchase and collect such volumes of related patents except when preparing for some future venture. When one is developing a revolutionary technology, having potential entanglements and infiinge-ments fi'om commercial and private sectors, one sweeps the patent floor. Were

Industry operating on behalf of a military weapons project, they would never have called attention to themselves in purchasing these rights. Therefore, Industry’s involvement in HAARP can only be a commercial venture. The seemingly sizeable payments paid out when acquiring potential contestants is infinitesimal when compared with the projected profits of a revolutionary new commercial technology. Raytheon is thus compelled to protect itself against potential future infiingement suits only if HAARP is indeed a business venture. This is precisely what the Industry has been doing all along.

The actual number of HAARP related patents acqirired by the Raytheon Company gready exceed those which other journalists have been able to ascertain or report. Furthermore, the often cited EasUund Patent group was but one minor acquisition among the irmumerable others which Raytheon absorbed in its prepcU'atory tour-de-force. The IRJ has been well camouflaged by the astounding variety of contradictory rumours. The mere absence of competitors indicates the degree of empowerment which Industry has been given. But for what purpose is such overwhelming authority and priority so directed?

If there were astute competitors, the IRI seems to be a new and unfamihar technology which cannot adequately be assessed. Because it remains unfamiliar and unexpected, few view it as a financial threat For this and other reasons, none think of questioning IRI development Though few suspect the IRI as a new card in the hand, there is a single potential which the IRI serves. Every new announcement compounds the indication that the IRI will serve a singular function whose venture potential can literally change the world of energy commodities and utilities. To a very few who know the history of such devices, the IRI has a very obvious purpose. Besides opening a great many debates on the obsolescence of every residual radiowave technology, we are left with a clear path through which to understand HAARP; a design which is by no means the ultimate representation of its class. Two separate ionospheric heating facihties have tested in North America. The Arecibo facifity in Puerto Rico is geophysically coupled to a natural mountain basin, some 1000 feet in diameter. The HIPAS facility near Fairbanks, Alaska was designed to focus radio energy on the ionosphere at one-quarter the rated output of HAARP, a value of some 250 Megawatts. Besides being a very poorly designed example of a large-scale influence-type transmitter, a technology which needs serious examination, the IRI does not yet exist! Its weak developmental prototype (the DP) is what has been so much discussed.

IONOSPHERIC RESEARCH INSTRUMENT

The time for extensive expenditures on new weapons projects commenced with SDI in 1983 and was discontinued by the end of the same decade. While the IRI is intended to be an expensive experimental station, whose data can be used toward the development of several distinct systems in the future, it is clearly an attempt in a singular scientific direction. The IRI has been recently hailed as a “diagnostic tool” which will soon have multiple experimental applications. But what will the chief application of the IRI be? What do our evaluations finally conclude? The one military release which attracts my attention is the least mentioned throughout the literature of hysteria. It is the one description which accurately matches the existing structure in Gakona that I am surprised so few of the more prolific researchers have focussed their more scholarly attentions thereto.

HAARP is a project whose Staff and advisement coimcil having been determined by Philhps Laboratories (Air Force) and the NRL directly. The “Ionospheric Research Instnunent” (IRI) itself has not yet been built on the Alaskan North Slope near Gakona. Its developmental prototype, the DP has been built first. The DP is what the photographs reveal. The DP, as presently estabhshed, consists of a primary HF transmitter field, an assemblage of HF antennas, and a host of sophisticated diagnostic equipment. The DP itself was constructed by Power Technologies Incorporated (APTI), managed through E-Systems, and is owned by Raytheon. It is probable that Raytheon has either leased or purchased the land on which the DP now sits. This is their business, not ours. Examination of the photographic evidence is thoroughly disappointing, truly disappointing. The HAARP site is not the monstrous multigabled structure befitting the hysterical claims. It is pitiful assemblage of frail uprights and cross wires, the whole system duplicating obsolescent Marconi HF and VHF arrays.

The first impression reminds the trained eye of a powergrid. A total of 48 towers comprise the DP. Each tower stands 72 feet high. Although the lot on which this fastidious assembly stands covers a 33 acre field, the actual DP site measures some 500 by 800 feet; very roughly 12 acres in area. It is important

For ns to understand that of the 48 towers now standing, only 18 are ever actually energized. Each tower is founded on a 12 by 15 foot rectangular base. These are each spaced 80 feet apart. So much for the physical dimensions. Tesla achieved much more with less space. No part of the otherwise standard equipment appears novel or inspired, save in the vastness and geometrically positioning of the intended IRI collection. Each of the towers support a double crossed dipole. Upper dipole sets operate from 2.8 to 7 Megacycles, lower sets operate from 7 to 10 Megacycles.

Beneath the existing vertical array is a 12 acre copper screen. This singularly curious structure, supposedly a reflective screen, is poised on insulators 15 feet above the ground. The distance of the copper screen “reflector” to the ground permits vehicle access to and from the various shelters of the facihty. Prime electric power for the DP is provided by 3 diesel driven generators, each providing 300 Kilowatts. Radio energy for the huge assembly is derived from transmitters housed in separate shelters which have been spread across the 12 acre plot. Only 3 such generating shelters now exist, each shelter containing 6 pairs of 10 Kilowatt transmitters; the total output being 360 Kilowatts HE energy.

Bombastic and ineffectual, it is stated that vertical wave radiation from this array will be phased controlled to produce net circular polarizations at the ionospheric point of contact. Contrary to the many overstatements, neither the DP nor the IRI can focus radiative energy to a tight point in various selected ionospheric strata. The point of focus realistically claimed for the IRI is a “region” which may vary from 18 kilometers to 80 kilometers in diameter. This is hardly a focal “point” at all! Concentrated radio energy from the DP is frequency directed into specified ionospheric strata. There the energy is absorbed in a layer a few hundred meters thick, a process which requires deeper examination. But more fundamental and immediate questions need be asked here. The vertical beam can be skewed and therefore aimed toward various compass headings, a process which diminishes the effective energetic cross-section at the aerial target site.