The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Research Program, or HAARP. Here scientists transmit a 3.6MW signal into the ionosphere so that other colleagues in white overalls can “understand… and control ionospheric processes that might alter the performance of communication and surveillance systems”. Put another way: if the nature of the ionosphere, that layer of sky which commences 30 miles (50km) above the planet’s surface, is properly understood we can all have better satellite TV and telephone signals.

A worthy aim. But maybe improved communications is not HAARP’s true purpose. HAARP is funded by the Office of Naval Research and administered by the US Navy together with the United States Air Force and the University of Alaska. Of course the military, more than most, have a vested interest in communications and navigation, but the prevalent suspicion about HAARP is that it is a weapon capable of delivering several types of mass destruction.

Suggestions that HAARP could be used for “geophysical warfare” first appeared in Angels Don’t Play This HAARP (1995) by Nick Begich and Jeanne Mannings, with the investigation continued by Jerry E. Smith in HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy (1998). HAARP’s transmitter works by heating the ionosphere above the site, leading some to claim that it is designed to alter the world’s weather systems to the advantage of the US. Even the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is said to have been caused by a HAARP firing, the proof offered being one of cui bono (“who benefits?”): the tsunami devastated the economies of America’s Asian competitors; ergo, the US was responsible. Smith also asserts that HAARP uses extremely-low-frequency (ELF) waves which can be used for remote mind control.

More plausible is the notion that HAARP’s Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI) transmitter can be used as a “death beam”. HAARP is much like the patented weapon system designed by Dr Bernard Eastlund to destroy missiles and aircraft systems by transmitting pulses of electromagnetic radiation. (Eastlund’s patent, as the Texan physicist himself acknowledges, owes much to the work on “weapons of doom” undertaken by the eccentric Croat genius Nikola Tesla, many of whose inventions are supposedly still kept under strict wraps by the US authorities even though Tesla died over 50 years ago.)

All such nefarious purposes for HAARP are denied by US officialdom, who point out that the HAARP site holds open days every summer. Since HAARP is situated in an inaccessible corner of Alaska, this offer may not be so generous as it seems. Critics also wonder why HAARP is managed by an official from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) rather than a boffin from a university science department.

HAARP is not the US’s only “ionospheric heater”; there are others at Fairbanks, Alaska, and at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico. Russia has one (Sura), near Nizhniy Novgorodlol, and the EC one at Tromso, Norway.

Even if HAARP and the other ionospheric heating projects are as innocent as they claim, is tampering with the ionosphere good for the earth? A scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute once compared HAARP to “an immersion heater in the Yukon”. Meteorologists have been less benign, pointing out that the “effects of HAARP on the climate are completely unknown”. Global warming, anybody?

HAARP is a covert weapon of doom: ALERT LEVEL 5

Further Reading

Nick Begich and Jeanne Mannings, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, 1995

Jerry E. Smith, HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, 1998.

Rudolf Hess

Scotland, the late morning of 10 May 1941. Out of the spring sky to the east a lone Me110 German fighter appears over Glasgow and circles unhurriedly as though searching for something, before its pilot bales out over the village of Eaglesham, to the south of the city. On his apprehension on the ground by local soldiers, the Luftwaffe pilot announces in English that he is Captain Alfred Horn and adds: “I wish to see the Duke of Hamilton. Will you take me to him?”

A few days later, “Captain Horn” is revealed by the British authorities to be none other than Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of Germany. Hitler, from Berlin, denounces Hess as a madman who stole an aircraft to go on a private peace mission. The British confine Hess until immediately after the war, when they too claim Hess is mad —but not too mad, sane enough to stand trial at Nuremberg for war crimes. There, despite his “sanity”, Hess is unable to recognize fellow Nazi bigwigs and betrays little recognition of events in his own life. Nevertheless he is sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau and dies, apparently by his own hand, in 1987, aged 93. British documents relating to the case are put under lock and key for 65 years.

Even in the briefest recounting, the story of Rudolf Hess overflows with questions and contradictions. How could the Deputy Fuhrer “steal”, from the very public surroundings of Augsburg Messerschmitt works, an Me110 which just happened to have been specially adapted (at his own instigation) with long-range fuel tanks? Why was Hess’s Me110 not accorded the usual Glasgow greeting given to the Luftwaffe—sirens, flak and interception by Fighter Command? Why did Hess want to meet the Duke of Hamilton? Why is there such a long time-lock on the Hess documents? And (the question of questions): was it actually Hess or a double who stood in the dock in Nuremberg?

Rudolf Hess is invariably viewed through the lens of his 1941 mission, which provides a portrait of a sincere if somewhat neurotic loner who, cast out from the inner sanctum of Nazism, wished peace in a time of total war. Hess was the Good Nazi, a status underlined by his lenient sentence at Nuremberg: the other main leaders of Nazi Germany were condemned to death or, like Goring, committed suicide. Hess was condemned to prison. In truth, Hess was an ardent anti-Semite and, along with Hitler, the founder of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1920. So close and loyal to Hitler was Hess thereafter that fellow Nazis dubbed Hess “the Fraulein”— Hitler’s wife. Foreign journalists also noted the strength of the men’s relationship: Pierre van Passen of the Canadian Evening World thought Hess to be Hitler’s “alter ego”. Time did little to diminish the closeness. There was no fall from grace for Hess; he disliked some aspects of the bloody purge of the SA, and Hitler was no fan of Hess’s “biodynamic” eating habits, modelled on the alternative philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, but otherwise the men were in complete accord. If they hadn’t been, Hitler would not have maintained Hess as his right-hand man.

So, when he flew to Scotland in 1941, Hess did not do so as a lone, powerless, out-of-favour maverick. He can only have gone as Hitler’s personal peace emissary. Hitler’s later rants against “madman” Hess were merely attempts to lay down a smokescreen over a diplomatic debacle. (Tellingly, Hitler took little or no action after 1941 against Hess’s family, as was his wont with traitors; on the contrary, he ensured that Hess’s wife remained in her villa and received a state pension.) Hitler desperately wanted peace with Britain in mid-1941 because he sought above all to turn his entire military attention to the real enemy: Bolshevik Russia. War with Britain had never been Hitler’s intention; indeed, in Mein Kampf he had saluted Britain as Germany’s “most valuable ally in the world”. His fatal miscalculation had been to presume that Britain would endlessly turn a blind eye to the Nazi appropriation of central Europe.

Hitler’s hope for reconciliation with Britain was not an unreasonable one. Although it is generally swept under the national carpet, there existed in wartime Britain a distinct vein of sentiment which, for reasons of pro- Nazism or pro-pacifism, did not want the conflict to continue. One peace proponent was Douglas Douglas- Hamilton, the Duke of Hamilton, RAF wing commander and privy councillor, and a member of the Anglo-German Club. Something of Hamilton’s sentiments regarding the war can be gauged by his letter to The Times of 6 October 1939, when the war was a month old:

Sir,

Many, like yourself, have had the opportunity of hearing a great deal of what the men and women of my generation are thinking. There is no doubt in any quarter, irrespective of any party, that this country had no choice but to accept the challenge of Hitler’s aggression against one country in Europe after another. If Hitler is right when he claims that the whole of the German nation is with him in his cruelties and treacheries, both within Germany and without, then this war must be fought to the bitter end. It may well last for many years, but the people of the British Empire will not falter in their determination to see it through.