I’ve been curious about HAARP for a while because of rumors such as this one. The lab has also been erroneously credited with various supernatural occurrences (backward-walking caribou) and secret contact with extraterrestrials (covered up by “men in black”). Most commonly, it’s blamed for events caused by nature. The office phone rings after hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, and typhoons, no matter where in the world they occur. A 2024 study found that HAARP was the subject of more than a million conspiracism-inflected posts on Twitter from January 2022 to March 2023, primarily about natural disasters. In early 2024, the far-right influencer Laura Loomer suggested that HAARP created a snowstorm to dampen turnout at the Iowa caucuses and thwart the Trump campaign. And when I visited HAARP this past November, calls were coming in about whether the facility had caused Hurricane Melissa, which had recently swept through Jamaica and Cuba, resulting in at least 88 fatalities and billions of dollars in damage.