What was claimed
The HAARP research facility in Alaska is behind recent appearances of the Northern Lights.
Our verdict
This isn’t right. The Northern Lights were caused by a severe geomagnetic storm produced by the sun and not by HAARP.
HAARP did not cause recent Northern Lights seen in UK
We’ve spotted social media posts implying that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) research facility in Alaska was responsible for the Northern Lights seen in many parts of the UK this week.
But as we’ve explained many times before, the Northern Lights are caused by the electromagnetic connection between the sun and Earth, and not by HAARP. The facility has previously produced a faint, artificial aurora, but only directly above its transmitter and usually not bright enough to see.
One Facebook post from an account saying it is based in the UK includes an image of the Northern Lights with the caption: “LAST NIGHT HAARP was at it again DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THE BEAUTIFUL COLOURS”.
Another shared a screenshot of a recent news article from the website Live Science with the headline “Earth hit by biggest ‘solar radiation storm’ in 23 years, triggering Northern Lights as far as southern California”. The social media user has added the caption: “#HAARP : High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Remember that!”
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While HAARP has previously successfully run experiments that produce artificial “airglow”, an FAQ page on its website explains that the energy the facility generates is not strong enough to produce the optical display seen during a natural aurora.
We have previously corroborated this with other scientists, including Dr Ciaran Beggan at the British Geological Survey, who explained: “it is simply not feasible to generate that amount of energy on the ground and transmit it into [the] atmosphere in order to cover a large fraction of the northern hemisphere”.
Dr Darren Baskill, lecturer in physics and astronomy at the University of Sussex, similarly said that the huge amount of energy required to generate the displays seen across the globe needs “a far greater amount of power [than] is available to the small HAARP project”.
The aurora seen across some parts of the UK this week was the result of a severe geomagnetic storm. We are currently in a period of high solar activity during the sun's 11-year cycle. Coronal mass ejections, or explosions of solar materials, are more common around the maximum activity part of this cycle.
We’ve written about HAARP before and how it isn’t responsible for hurricanes or peculiar clouds. Other misleading claims that have previously spread about the facility include that it caused natural disasters after being “tested on” specific countries. People have been making similarly false claims for over a decade.
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 missing context because the implied claim, that HAARP caused the Northern Lights recently witnessed in the UK, is false.