HAARP Welcomes Public During Open House
Photo by Anna Somers
HAARP’s operations building and computer research station were open for public viewing at the June 14 open house.
June 19, 2025
Anna Somers - CRR Staff
On Saturday, June 14, members of the public were invited to an open house hosted by the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP).
HAARP is a research facility located on over a thousand acres of land in Gakona where scientists study the ionosphere. The HAARP website quotes NASA’s definition of the ionosphere as “the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere — where we live and breathe — and the vacuum of space.”
The open house included planetarium shows, lectures, self-guided tours of HAARP’s operations building, and a self-guided walking tour of the antenna array. This antenna area consists of 180 high-frequency antennas spread out over 33 acres that HAARP uses for its ionospheric research.
On site were dozens of scientists, most of whom were from Fairbanks and most of whom were happy to answer questions. There were also shirts and other types of merchandise for sale with the “Area 49” logo, a reference to Alaska being the 49th state and HAARP being the center of various conspiracy theories, most likely due to its origin as a government research facility.
HAARP was built in the 1990s as part of a joint project between the US Navy and Air Force. In 2015, HAARP ownership was transferred to the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It now operates as part of UAF’s Geophysical Institute.
Nettie La Belle-Hammer, the Geophysical Institute’s deputy director, told me that the institute’s mission is to “study the Earth and its physical environment at high latitudes.” HAARP is the largest of the Geophysical Institute’s nine operational facilities, La Belle-Hammer stated.
According to a lecture by retired Air Force researcher Todd Pedersen, who was directly involved in HAARP experiments in the nineties and early 2000s, the work of HAARP is important because the ionosphere tends to be too high above Earth to study by balloon but too low in the atmosphere to research by satellite.
Ionospheric disruptions can be responsible for problems with communications, air travel, navigation, satellite operations, and more, Pedersen stated in his lecture. Even banking can be influenced by what’s happening in the ionosphere, as the tools banks use to synchronize time standards can be negatively impacted by ionospheric disturbances.
Saturday’s event was HAARP’s fifth open house.
