Here come the conspiracy theorists.
“Is Hurricane Sandy a ‘Mitt Romney’ Enginereed Storm?” That’s a question asked, straight-faced, in the title of one video uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 30.
Christopher Greene, a conspiracy-minded “alternative” radio host, argued during his Tuesday broadcast that the storm is “perfect timing” for Romney’s campaign. “In fact,” he said, “this is kinda like winning the lottery for Mitt Romney.”
“Which makes us ask the question: Is this an engineered storm? Could it perhaps be some kind of government HAARP program that is potentially reeling this storm in? Because this literally is the best thing that could happen for a Mitt Romney campaign.”
HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a government program jointly funded by the University of Alaska and several Pentagon agencies. Its purpose is to send radio signals into the ionosphere — a layer of the earth’s atmosphere that begins at about 52 miles off the ground — and measure their effects.
Scientists in the HAARP program hope to learn how to effectively transmit radio signals over greater distances in parts of the atmosphere that are most likely to see interference from the sun.
But Greene wondered aloud if President Barack Obama’s likely inability to manage Sandy’s after-effects in the few days remaining before the Nov. 6 election would doom his re-election chances.
“So this is very pessimistic for President Obama, very pessimistic for his campaign,” he said. “And it begs the question: ‘Is this an engineered storm?'”
Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=height="202Greene isn’t the only one to say this out loud, nor was he the first. But others argue that if anyone engineered Sandy, it was the Obama administration.
Alex Jones, the Austin, Texas-based radio host whose listeners line up for tidbits about secret societies and “staged” elections, called the then still-approaching Sandy “the engineered storm of the century” on Oct. 26.
He charged during that day’s broadcast that in 1967 the federal government claimed that “with 10 aircraft,” a supervising meteorologist “could create hurricanes, he could kill hurricanes, he could strengthen hurricanes, he could weaken hurricanes.”
“It may be a natural storm,” he said. “But the fact is that because they have these weather weapon systems, we must look at this.”
Jones told his audience on Oct. 26 that the coming hurricane would “dominate the election now in the final stretch, right as Romney was coming up [in the polls],” creating an advantage for the president that Obama’s team could have created.
“You know, sometimes it takes them a week to two weeks to get all the power back on,” Jones said. “You know they’re going to try to delay the election if it knocks out the power to large cities. I mean, wow! … The police have been told [to] get ready for troops on the streets.”
“Now this storm — I’ve gotta be honest — I think it spells doom for Romney.”
Jones said he didn’t favor either of the two major presidential candidates, calling Romney a “globalist” and saying Obama is “the more extreme version of the New World Order puppet candidate.”
Is Jones serious in thinking the federal government may have created Hurricane Sandy? His website featured an article on Oct. 30 that claimed “the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been engaged in research to do just that for years.”
Meanwhile, eccentric amateur scientists congregating in small online communities continue to insist the HAARP program “created” the mega-storm. A contributor to one such group wrote Tuesday on Facebook that he had discovered a sophisticated mathematical pattern in Sandy’s shape, suggesting it was designed, not natural.
The same user also showed off a graphic that mapped high-level radio signals in the ionosphere over the East Coast of the United States, as measured by amateur weather stations. Their pattern roughly matched Sandy’s size, shape and position, implying that radio signals caused the hurricane.
But the two images, he admitted, were assembled a week apart.
“On the left image the October 22nd reading of the growing signals in the Northeast,” the Facebook member wrote. “The right image is the current [weather] satellite. That was seven days before Sandy hit and eight days before today. It does not get anymore clearer than that.”
“Those who deny the network deny a way to warn others. We can only do so much but if we use the network to warn and keep others informed we can stay alive.”
In a 2010 article for the newsletter of the nonprofit Skeptics Society — a group that focuses on debunking “fringe science, pseudoscience, and extraordinary claims” — software engineer David Naiditch explained why HAARP is “an attractive target for conspiracy theorists.”
“HAARP is a gigantic, high-energy, Pentagon-funded gizmo located in the remote Alaskan wilderness that plays around with the Earth’s ionosphere,” he wrote, “but whose purpose seems deeply mysterious to the scientifically uninformed.”