What is common to a reportedly controversial “weapon” being developed by the United States government and crop yields of major crops in India
On Monday, the opening day of the Monsoon Session, environment minister Anil Madhav Dave said in Rajya Sabha that electromagnetic beams emitted by the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme (HAARP) added to global warming which in turn caused low yields of crops like wheat, maize, mustard, potato and sorghum in India.
“The US has developed a type of weapon called HAARP (which) strikes the upper atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam,” Mr Dave said in his written reply.
He was replying to a question on whether the government was aware of HAARP, which was allegedly capable of having a devastating impact on global climate resulting in destabilisation of agricultural and ecological systems.
Acknowledging that the government was aware of what was going on, Mr Dave said: “HAARP is an advanced model of a super powerful Ionospheric heater which may cause the earth to warm and have a global warming effect.”
For quite a few years, conspiracy theorists have been associating the HAARP radio facility near the town of Gakona in Alaska with manipulating climate changes, causing earthquakes, floods and tsunamis, disrupting global communications systems and even controlling human minds.
The facility consists of 360 radio transmitters and 180 antennas that generate radio waves to heat up the ionosphere for scientists to conduct experiments. Last year, the operational control of much of the secretive facility was handed over to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks by the US defence forces, although much of what goes on is still out of public domain.
It had started as an Ionospheric research program jointly funded by the US defence forces including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and was built by BAE Advanced Technologies, a defence major.
