Conspiracy theorists are seizing on the recent earthquake in Venezuela and the heat waves in Europe and the U.S. as evidence that the U.S. High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is up to dirty tricks.

HAARP was originally created by the U.S. Air Force, but was handed over to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2015. It's a scientific project to study the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, using a phased array of 180 high-frequency antennas.

But, to many, it's a shadowy organization working to control the weather, and ultimately the population.

"The 'heat dome' over UK-EUrope just happens to have coincided with extensive 'testing' of HAARP. You will be familiar with this geo-engineering/geo-weapon system, operated by the US military, which has a long-standing base in Alaska and now also has sizeable arrays in Cyprus," reads one Facebook post.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/853818061985394/posts/1950599242307265/

"There must be something to it, because I was prevented from sharing the video sent to me by a good friend and colleague."

Over on TikTok, meanwhile, a French user reckoned that the heatwave was caused by "fake UV rays", in a post that received 14,500 likes.

HAARP activity is also apparently to blame for the devastating earthquakes that hit Venezuela last month, killing or injuring thousands of people.

"Seconds before the Venezuela earthquake struck, multiple laser beams scanned the ground!," reads one X post that received thousands of views. “I’m not going to HAARP about it, but our government and the elite caused this disaster to kidnap 🧒🏻👧”

The post is illustrated with a night-time video, despite the fact that the earthquake hit during the day.

This is by no means the first time that HAARP has been accused of controlling or manipulating the weather. In the past, it's been falsely linked with everything from hurricanes to floods, wildfires and alien abductions.

Its activities have been linked to natural disasters and unusual weather patterns throughout the world, from heavy rains and floods in Czechia to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan; it’s also been accused of using low-frequency radio waves for mass mind control and brainwashing.

In 2025, Laura Loomer even accused the organization of being behind a snowstorm in Iowa that, she said, was aimed at damaging Donald Trump’s presidential chances in the state.

"Is the Deep State using HAARP to rig the Iowa Caucus? she asked. "Looks like weather manipulation to me."

Such accusations happen often enough, indeed, for the issue to be addressed on HAARP's FAQs page.

The HAARP system is essentially a large radio transmitter. And radio waves in the frequency ranges that it transmits are not absorbed in—and therefore can't interact with—either the troposphere or the stratosphere: the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather.

"Further, if the ionospheric storms caused by the sun itself don’t affect the surface weather, there is no chance that HAARP can either," HAARP explained.

“Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near vacuum of the rarefied, but electrically charged, region of the atmosphere above about 60-80 km (a little over 45 miles), known as the ionosphere. The ionosphere is created and continuously replenished as the sun’s radiation interacts with the highest levels of the Earth’s atmosphere.”