Edward Snowden has revealed that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is engaged in weather manipulation, assassination and mind control.
This isn’t the case. The source of the claims is a satirical article published in 2013. These were not real comments by Edward Snowden, and the HAARP research facility is not able to do any of this.
Posts claiming that whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed the “sinister agenda” of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) are being widely shared online—despite the source being a satirical article.
Many of the posts, which have been circulating on Facebook, state that Mr Snowden confirmed that the HAARP research station in Gakona, Alaska can control minds and cause deaths that appear to be natural, such as strokes and heart attacks.
Some of the posts also state that he has “taken refuge in a Faraday cage” (an enclosure used to block some electromagnetic fields) to shield himself from the “global mind-control weapon”.
But none of the claims made in the posts are genuine. The source for the claims is a satirical article, published by a website called Internet Chronicle in 2013 (an archived version of which is available here).
The website’s “about” page (archived here) does not use the term satire, but it does state that it is “not of this earth”, with the “alien husks” of its editors having crash landed to Earth via an asteroid in 1976.
The same article was previously fact checked in 2023, when a video of the article on a screen was being shared on social media by users who appeared to believe the story was genuine.
But the editor of the Internet Chronicle confirmed to Reuters and USA Today that the site’s content was satirical.
He also wrote about creating the website which “laughed about the news” and took “nothing seriously”, in an article in 2015 where he was credited as a satirist.
Edward Snowden was a contractor for the US National Security Agency, but fled to Russia in 2013 after leaking details to the media about internet and phone surveillance carried out by American intelligence. He remains in exile in Russia and became a Russian citizen in 2022.
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We have previously fact checked several misleading claims about the HAARP research project, including ones claiming it causes the Northern Lights and was responsible for Hurricane Milton in the US.
HAARP is a high-frequency transmitter, which is used to study the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere and the thermosphere, starting at an altitude of around 60 km.
It is used for experiments investigating how the sun and solar wind interact with Earth’s atmosphere to cause the Northern Lights.
Experts have previously told Full Fact that HAARP would not be able to create weather events, such as hurricanes.
Dr Ciaran Beggan at the British Geological Survey told us: “HAARP is just a radio transmitter that points up rather than horizontally.”
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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as satire because the source of the claim is a satirical article, not a genuine piece by Edward Snowden.
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