Turkey-Syria earthquake was made in Alaska, say conspiracists
In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, a disinformation narrative is spreading on Twitter that the earthquake is the fault of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska, conceived over 30 years ago. It’s a project that investigates the ionosphere — the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and the vacuum of space.
The program pulses a signal into the ionosphere which is then studied. But for years now, conspiracy theorists have believed the Research Program can trigger earthquakes and extreme weather events — oh, and be used for mind control, of course.
Every time there’s an earthquake or tsunami, conspiracy theorists make the same old claims that this obscure facility in deepest Alaska is behind the devastation. In 2016, two men from Douglas, Georgia loaded a vehicle with assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition and bulletproof vests and planned to blow up the place. There was a machine in the complex that they believed was “trapping human souls.” Luckily, police thwarted them before they even managed to leave Georgia.
But conspiracies about HAARP are not limited to the outreaches of obscure fringe groups. In 2010, the then-president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the UN that he believed floods in Pakistan were the fault of the HAARP program. The same year, Hugo Chávez, the former president of Venezuela, also blamed the Chilean and Haiti earthquakes on the program.