Artificial Aurora
February 3, 2005: The first artificial aurora created by humans
**Let's start by reproducing two successive articles published in the Figaro: **
PHYSICS: For the first time, researchers have triggered a visible phenomenon in the sky of Alaska with radio waves
The US Army creates an aurora. Two American scientists have succeeded in causing the first artificial auroras visible to the naked eye, thanks to the use of a powerful military system dedicated to the study of the ionosphere, the highest layer of the atmosphere. The Haarp instrument used for this experiment has been the subject of many controversies because some accuse it of being able to modify the climate for military purposes, or even to disrupt any form of radio communication on the planet. Cyrille Vanlerberghe [03 February 2005] The Haarp installation, near the city of Gakona in Alaska, consists of a field of radio antennas. This instrument allows the study of the ionosphere, the highest layer of the atmosphere, and should help scientists to clarify the ways in which auroras are created. (DR.)
The Haarp antenna field
The military installation Haarp in Alaska has achieved a remarkable first: creating artificial bright spots within a powerful aurora already in activity. "To my knowledge, this is the first time that radio emissions produce a luminous activity strong enough to be visible to the naked eye," explains by email Todd Pedersen, scientist from the Air Force Research Laboratory in Hanscom, Massachusetts, and co-author of the discovery (1). There have already been artificial luminous emissions of the same type created by chemical dispersions (barium, trimethylaluminium) or electron beams, but never by radio waves."
Heating the upper layers of the atmosphere has been practiced since the 1960s to study directly the behavior of electrons in this particular medium. "This activation technique allows working with a large-scale plasma laboratory," adds Wlodek Kofman, director of the planetary laboratory in Grenoble. It has long been known that electrons accelerated by the Earth's magnetic field cause auroras by entering the atmosphere in polar regions. These fast electrons occasionally collide with atoms present in the atmosphere, exciting them by removing one or more electrons in the process. When they "calm down" and return to their equilibrium state, the atoms emit green or rarely red light, so characteristic of polar auroras. The basic principle of this mechanism is well known, but the plasma medium, these gases of excited atoms and free electrons, is very complex and other secondary phenomena still escape the understanding of researchers.
As often in science, the discovery of the two American scientists was unexpected. Usually, researchers do not even try to operate the instrument when auroras illuminate the sky, as natural activity is often much stronger than the artificial disturbances caused by Haarp. But instead of just waiting for the aurora to disappear during a March 2004 night, the two scientists still turned the instrument on, aiming at a lower region of the ionosphere, around 100 km altitude, than the one usually excited. And to their great surprise, their optical telescopes clearly showed that a bright green spot appeared and disappeared quickly, following the rhythm of the radio transmitters. "We were so excited by this discovery that we stayed inside, facing our control screens and we didn't even think of going outside to see what was happening," says Todd Pedersen. "But our recordings clearly show that the phenomenon was visible to the naked eye." The researchers now understand that their radio pulses actually amplified the natural aurora. The reproduction and precise study of this particular phenomenon should help scientists better understand the ways in which auroras are created.
(1) Nature, 3 February 2005.
**Military antennas have been the subject of all kinds of fantasies for years. Is Haarp a peaceful project or a secret weapon? **
C. V. [03 February 2005]
Is Haarp (High frequency active auroral research program) a scientific tool like any other, or is it in fact a cover for an American ultra-secret military program aimed, among other things, at manipulating the climate by heating the ionosphere with radio waves? Some American activists as well as members of the Russian Parliament seriously believe it is a new type of "geophysical weapon" that could radically disrupt the planet's climate balance. Some few residents of the Alaska region accuse Haarp of all kinds of evils. One of them claims to have seen green lights above the antennas, while another says he saw caribou walking backwards.
Yet, at first glance, the Haarp installation, near the small town of Gakona in Alaska, is nothing particularly frightening. It is simply a field of radio antennas, masts and cables stretched in all directions, covering 9 hectares in the middle of a coniferous forest. Moreover, many antennas of the same type exist in the world, in Puerto Rico, Russia, Tajikistan and Norway, but none of them generate as much fantasy as Haarp. But it is true that Haarp, unlike all other equivalent scientific instruments, is a joint military installation between the US Navy and the US Air Force, funded directly by the American Department of Defense, without having to go through a review process by American researchers as is usually the case.
The recent creation of artificial auroras by Haarp's radio antennas proves, if needed, that the installation works, and that its radio emissions are indeed capable of heating the ionosphere (1). But is that enough to have an impact on the terrestrial climate, or to modify the weather at a distance? "It's nonsense!" laughs Philippe Zarka, an astronomer specializing in plasma physics at the Paris Observatory in Meudon.
Immediate remark: Philippe Zarka is not a "plasma physics specialist", he is simply an engineer, full of scientific popularization, nothing more, who once dared to criticize my book "We have lost half the universe" (Albin Michel 1997), at the request of Hervé This, deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine Pour la Science, by adding nonsense upon nonsense. My legitimate request for a right of reply has remained unanswered.
The energies injected by Haarp into the ionosphere, a few megawatts or even a few tens of megawatts, are completely negligible compared to the solar input. At the top of the atmosphere, the Sun deposits no less than 1.4 GW (1.4 billion watts) per square kilometer." Moreover, scientists have managed to illuminate a small region of the sky with Haarp, in the heart of an already active natural aurora, which, in turn, was burning half the sky due to electrons accelerated by the Earth's magnetic field lines.
**It was not the goal pursued. See further.
**
On the other hand, installations for active study of the ionosphere have existed for more than thirty years, but have never been seriously accused of messing up the climate. The anti-Haarp advocates argue that the American military installation is much more powerful, and therefore much more dangerous than the others. But its current power level, 960 kW, is comparable to that of other instruments. In 2006, with a final power of 3.6 MW, Haarp will only be three times more powerful than its predecessors, which is not a significant difference.
Beyond the fantasies about climate manipulation or the effects of waves on caribou behavior, it is clear that the American military have not invested 90 million dollars in Haarp out of pure philanthropy. The Navy and the US Air Force explain openly on the Haarp website the reasons for their interest in the ionosphere. This layer of the atmosphere is more or less charged with electrons depending on the time of night or day, or even the latitude. And these variations affect all radio signals that pass through it. The time of flight of the ionosphere is, for example, one of the most important correction parameters to improve the accuracy of the satellite positioning system GPS. In a more futuristic way, the localized and modulated heating of certain regions of the ionosphere could be used to emit very low frequency radio messages that can be received by submarines submerged. Such very low frequency transmitters are already in service, but do not have a global range.
(1) The ionosphere is a region of the atmosphere with very low density, above 100 km altitude, in which many atoms have lost their electrons and thus form a plasma.
My comment:
It is exhausting to see journalists addressing scientists who lack common sense, whose role seems to be to reassure the public. Moreover, the criticism of any technical advancement is perceived in the scientific world as a criticism ... of science itself. Very few scientists speak out to denounce these dangerous misuses. When you adopt this position, you are "recklessly alarmist". This applies to all areas. You won't have to look far to find biologists who will extol the merits of genetic manipulations or those of nuclear power. Those who raise alarms are only paranoids or grumpy people, kept away from financial resources, who are only trying to make themselves interesting through such statements.
The military therefore find powerful allies among scientists, especially because the Army has a lot of power to promote or hinder careers. The DGA (Délégation Générale à L'armement, formerly the DRET, Direction des Recherches et Etudes Techniques) is a major provider of funds in many laboratories, through the contracts it signs with them. There is practically no physics laboratory in France that does not have a DGA contract or does not benefit the students with scholarships. Therefore, you should not expect scientists to speak out against the soup, the order being:
Everything is going well in the best of all possible sciences.
Since August 2002 I dedicated a dossier to the HAARP project. It is exhausting to see journalists ignore, or feign to ignore, the starting point of such a project. Imagine for a second that the American Army could be interested in studying the ionosphere out of pure scientific curiosity?
The initial idea was to find a way to communicate with submarines over long distances. It is known that only very low frequency radio waves (ULF: Ultra Low Frequency) can penetrate thick layers of seawater. To emit very low frequency waves, therefore very long wavelengths, you need antennas that are as large as possible. In France, for example, you will find these antennas on the plateau of Valensole. How to have antennas that extend for dozens, or even hundreds of kilometers? It seems physically impossible.
Therefore, it was imagined to use the ionosphere as an antenna. As its name suggests, this layer of the atmosphere, located around 100-120 kilometers altitude, is ionized, composed of ions and free electrons. This ionization is maintained by solar radiation and its UV radiation. Only ultraviolet radiation and beyond has enough energy to release electrons that orbit around molecules or atoms. The ionosphere is therefore a natural plasma. This plasma is sensitive to electromagnetic waves, to the hyperfrequency radiation emitted by the antennas of the Haarp installation.
An electromagnetic radiation is a wave, in which the electromagnetic field varies. It acts on charged particles. It begins by passing through the lower layers of the atmosphere that are not ionized, simply because this field acts on the electrons bound to molecules and atoms. At high altitude this field, linked to the radiation, "shakes" the free electrons, giving them energy. The ions, positively charged, are less sensitive to this solicitation due to their lower mobility, linked to their mass (a proton is 1850 times heavier than an electron). One can schematically consider a plasma as a mixture of two "species": a "gas of free electrons" and a gas of heavy species, in this case the ions. The HF radiation heats the electron gas. This gas therefore tends to expand more than the gas of "heavy" particles. This leads to a phenomenon of charge separation which I had already described on my site three years ago.
"Plasma antenna" created in the ionosphere by the HAARP device
By modulating the power injected into the ionosphere by the antennas, one can therefore create radial oscillations of the electron gas relative to the mass of the heavier ions. One can therefore use this region of the ionosphere as a radio antenna, by operating it with extremely low frequencies.
It is exhausting not to read this kind of comment in an article from Figaro-Sciences or in the mouth of our so-called plasma specialist, the engineer Philippe Zarka, from Meudon. But in this way, one understands why the military have been interested in this device. The remark regarding the fact that the HAARP system's power is a thousand times weaker than the total power sent by the sun on the earth (1400 megawatts per square kilometer) is not relevant. HAARP is not intended to deliver energy to the terrestrial atmosphere but to modify the energy input from the sun. The difference is important. In all weapons that aim to "use the forces present in nature", the triggering system has nothing to do with the energy involved in the phenomenon itself. Obviously, it is not with the energy contained in a firecracker that you will be able to lift tens of thousands of tons of snow that will constitute an avalanche, thousands of meters above a village. It is not with the energy contained in a hydrogen bomb that you will be able to create an important seismic phenomenon, and thus move the north of the island of Sumatra by 25 meters. It is not an electromagnetic wave emitter that will feed a region with thermal energy for days or, on the contrary, deprive it by creating a reflective layer. This aspect still completely escapes the reflection of scientists.
There is a second use of such a device of the HAARP type: to create small ionized areas. This is what our two scientists saw, this result being presented as "fortuitous, unexpected". In fact, these people are completely mocking you. These experiments have actually been successfully conducted for several decades. It is a scenario set up to make you believe that, wanting to "study the ionosphere", scientists (involved up to their neck in the project) suddenly had the huge surprise of realizing that they had created a "mini-aurora borealis".
It is simply a matter of beginning to get people used to this kind of "game".
But it's far from a game. I explain again, for the nth time:
Ionized gas mirror
Three sources of electromagnetic radiation will be used, located on the ground (or in space). The first two emit in frequencies N1 and N2. We make sure that, in the targeted atmospheric layer (30-70 km), the frequencies are too high to ionize the air. Indeed, for a given air density, there is a resonance frequency. In the air, there will always be some free electrons. If you "shake" them with a variable electromagnetic field (an electromagnetic wave), these electrons will bounce back and forth between neighboring atoms and molecules. Imagine that you hold a hammer between two bells and make the hammer bounce from one bell to the other. You can imagine that you will encounter a resonance frequency when you can exploit the ability of the hammer to bounce between the two bells. In doing so, you can go as far as ... breaking them.
You will find a similar phenomenon in a gas, in the air. The resonance frequency depends on its pressure (in fact, its density). The time it takes for a free electron to bounce from one atom to another, from one molecule to another, will be called mean free path time. The inverse of this time will be called the electron collision frequency in the gas, at this pressure and temperature. For air at a pressure lower than a millimeter of mercury (in a "vacuum bell"), this frequency is on the order of one million hertz. You will then easily ionize this medium with the electromagnetic wave emitted by a simple Rhumkorff coil, under a megahertz. In air at atmospheric pressure, more dense, where the mean free path is shorter, where the collision frequency is higher, you will have to use frequencies on the order of gigahertz (a thousand megahertz), which are typically emitted by radar klystrons, but also by the antenna of your microwave oven.
Back to our ionizing system. The two sources N1 and N2 have frequencies that differ from the resonance frequencies of the low layers they pass through. But if you cross the beams, a "beat" phenomenon appears. We make sure that the difference of frequencies: (N1 - N2) is close to the resonance frequency at the altitude where the two beams cross. Then we will ionize there and nowhere else. This was the manipulation our two researchers were doing, but they weren't going to tell you about it. It was simply a matter of beginning to get people in the region (and the public) used to the idea that you could "accidentally" create artificial mini-auroras.
Well, of course...
What is it for?
We sweep the space with these two beams, creating at will a thin ionized layer, which can be given any shape, including that of a concave mirror capable of reflecting the radiation emitted by a third source and redirecting it over a great distance. This mirror will only be visible at night. For more discretion, it is preferable to operate during the day. The ionized layer, emitting little light, will then be practically undetectable.
It is exhausting to see scientists or so-called ones say that the Haarp system has a negligible impact on the upper atmosphere. It is not about creating large volumes of ionized gas. That, the Sun takes care of, albeit only using a very small part of the energy it sends us. The rest feeds photosynthesis, heats the Earth's surface.
It is about locally modifying the transparency of the upper atmosphere, either by "opening a window" or by creating a reflective surface. This is how HAARP takes value as a climate weapon. Several systems are then combined to perform a sophisticated manipulation of the Earth's atmosphere. Chemical substances can be spread at altitude by airplanes to create reflective layers. If you allow a mass of warm air to form in a region and a mass of cold air to settle in another, hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away, you will inevitably reach a point of instability where the pressure balance will pass through a phenomenon that can be extremely brutal, violent and destructive, with winds of 200 kilometers per hour, or even more. A phenomenon that can be completely unusual in the affected region, as people are not at all used to seeing cyclones ravage their cities, forests and crops.
In such cases, if a system similar to HAARP contributed to creating the phenomenon **it is not it that provides the destructive energy but the Sun! **
What is deadly, as for the seismic weapons, is that scientists systematically confuse the destructive energy involved in the phenomenon and that which served as a trigger. It seems that the message of the scientific community is:
*- Be without worry, dear people. Continue to sleep soundly. Those who are trying to worry you are mistaken. Nothing of all this exists. The military only aim for peaceful studies of the Earth's environment, its ionosphere. The intensification of destructive phenomena, tornadoes or cyclones, including in Europe, is due only to the ... atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect. The military are not responsible. Do not believe either that they are responsible for the stranding of cetaceans on our coasts. It is probably an unidentified virus that attacks their inner ear and not the effect of the sonars of submarines and ships. Genetic manipulations are safe. Moreover, when you want to study a genetically modified plant in the wild, you put a fence around it. When the bees see the fence, they understand and turn back. There is therefore no risk of seed dissemination. There are also no hypersonic airplanes flying at ten thousand kilometers per hour above your heads as some try to make you believe. All this corresponds to a "technological delirium". The Americans are far from being at this stage. See these tests they report to us, corresponding to the X-43A. Observe the modest size of this device. These studies are still in their infancy. We are far from a large machine. If these devices existed, we would know, come on! The idea that the tsunami that devastated Indonesia could have been created by humans is simply delirious. Consider the fact that the American base in Diego Garcia, where strategic bombers are based, was spared thanks to the providential presence of a 5000-meter deep ocean trench, as due to mere chance. Same thing for the overflight by an American altimetric satellite, just at the moment when the phenomenon could be best studied. Same for the presence of large American military forces not far away, on December 26th. You shouldn't see the evil everywhere, as some are trying to do. * ---
**In insert, a strange image taken in Canada in August 2002 **:
Natural phenomenon, or artificial? It is difficult to say, as the auroras can take very strange shapes, with sort of drapes, vaguely striped.
**This one is definitely natural, with drapes and stripes. Same colors (the colors depend on the altitude of formation). ** ---
Finally, last clarification, let's put an end once and for all to this annoying UFO phenomenon which is just a rumor, a simple sociological phenomenon. Pravda published a photo of a supposed craft that flew over Iranian nuclear sites. It is a bad joke, or a manipulation, and we can only be surprised that this Russian daily has agreed to such a joke, even though April 1st is still far away. *Everyone now knows that UFOs are weather balloons, or correspond to a misinterpretation of observations of natural phenomena, or to lamentable pranks. But maybe the Russians and the Iranians need to invoke such an excuse to justify the strengthening of their cooperation in space matters. *
The article published in Pravda on January 27, 2005
Its translation:
**Russia and Iran join forces against a possible UFO invasion:
If they appeared in the Iranian sky, they would be immediately shot down by an air defense system. **
Unidentified flying objects continue to cause fear in the Middle East. No one really knows what to do with these objects, although it seems obvious that one cannot remain inactive. Russia and Iran have decided to join forces to study this strange phenomenon. This news may seem ridiculous at first glance, but a link emerges between these appearances and the development of Iran's nuclear potential. "Ufomania" is now prevalent in Iran. The Iranian air force high command recently ordered to shoot down any suspicious object entering the country's airspace, using all available air defense means.
Iranian media increasingly emphasize the threat that these objects could represent for the country's nuclear installations. The newspaper Resalat reported that the country has been increasingly frequently overflown by these unidentified crafts. According to this newspaper, unusual bright objects have been seen above Busher and Natanza, where there are nuclear installations. One of the witnesses said that one of the objects "exploded in the sky".
The Iranian defense department is trying to calm the population's anxiety about this phenomenon. General Qarim Gavani explained that measures had been taken to protect the country's nuclear installations and that the Iranian air force would do its duty in case of aggression. Interest in the UFO subject has rapidly developed in Iran over the past year. Press agencies have reported dozens of cases where people claimed to have seen UFOs flying over their heads. The state television presented a sequence showing a bright disk flying over Tehran. In eight cities across the country, many people came out of their houses to look at very bright lights against the clouds. The INRA reported observations of colorful objects emitting green, red and violet rays around Tabriz and Ardabil, as well as above the Golestan province, near the Caspian Sea.
Russia assured Iran that it would provide assistance if it had to fight UFOs. The Russians put an end to this problem, this anomaly, at the beginning of the 1990s, when the entire population of the Soviet Union began to panic about these strange objects. Iran and Russia emphasized the establishment of a bilateral collaboration, especially for space exploration and the deployment of satellites. In addition to the Russo-Iranian agreements made in the context of these UFO problems, the two countries collaborate on the launch of the Zohreh satellite.
Number of consultations since February 4, 2005: