Weather warfare?

Several days ago the History Channel aired a That's Impossible segment about weather warfare. The show discussed the possibility that extremely low frequency radio transmissions could be used to alter regional weather.

The idea was that the ELF waves can heat up the ionosphere, causing it to bubble upward and pushing aside the jetstream, yielding marked changes in regional weather. Other possibilities were that such tinkering could redirect hurricanes toward or away from coastlines or that the powerful waves, that can penetrate deep sea depths, could cause human brains to malfunction. And one oil-search technologist was interviewed who claimed that ELF waves, used to probe for oil deposits, can trigger earthquakes in quake-prone zones, and that he had been with a crew that had inadvertently done just that.

Of course there's lots of misinformation and goofy speculation out there on TV and the internet; when I heard that the fantastic ELF effects derived from Nikola Tesla's research I was even more wary. Tesla's name is affiliated with all sorts of nonsense. Nevetheless, I did some checking.

A man named Nick Begich of Anchorage wrote Angels Don't Play This HAARP, an expose book about the HAARP project, a federal operation that beams ELF waves into the ionosphere. I found a summary of his book via Google Scholar which describes how he used Pentagon documents and patent filings to uncover that ELF transmissions might not only be used for long-range submarine communication or exploration of the auroras, but also could possibly be used to focus on a specific part of the ionosphere to generate a plume that affects the jetstream. As for the point that ELF (between 3 and 30 Herz) might cause people to become confused or depressed and to suffer headaches, there is already bona fide research that shows that certain wavelengths (with sufficient amplitude) can indeed have such consequences.

An ELF pulse might be used to jam communications worldwide, while itself being very hard to jam, it has been reported. Such a pulse could be used as a substitute for the method of setting off a high-altitude thermonuclear bomb to jam telecommunications, reports say. The feasibility of this is hinted at by the so-called "Russian woodpecker" ELF transmissions, which disrupted global ham radio with a persistent annoying pulsing noise during the latter Soviet era. The "woodpecker" has been said to have been part of an over-the-horizon missile warning system. (One "crazy" theories is that the woodpecker was used to force a longterm drought over the Western United States as part of a failed economic warfare scheme during the Soviet Union's last years. Another wild theory is that there was an attempt to cause free-floating anxiety in the American population, though I would wonder whether sufficient amplitudes were available.)

I glanced through a Navy document about its ELF transmitters (not the Alaska operation) and noticed that the Navy's research showed that no significant biological effects resulted from its transmissions, but one was left to wonder why the Navy felt it so important to check for biological consequences.

It should be noted that Dr. Begich is the son of a noted Alaska politician, now deceased, and that he has served as head of the Alaska teachers union. (I don't know what field his doctorate represents.)

Geoengineering may be a taboo topic ethically, but it is not so far-fetched. For example, one of a number of ideas for combating global warming is the so-called Geritol solution, whereby iron ore is dumped in the Pacific to stimulate plankton growth, which then sucks the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. One test-run of this idea is known to have been wildly successful, according to a 1995 Science News article.

Perception and reality

A search may send you to previous incarnations of the Kryptograff blog. I have had quite a bit of trouble with bugs on Blogspot, but even so I'll give Blogspot another try.

I'd like to draw your attention to my latest effort,

Toward a signal model of perception
http://www.angelfire.com/ult/znewz1/qball.html

and invite your comments and corrections.

F. David Peat has covered this ground before. However, what I do is try to go beyond a popular presentation.

Many will be more interested in the appendices on synchronicity anecdotes and experiments than in the paper, but I caution that those appendices should be read in light of the main article.