No, HAARP Didn’t Cause Europe’s Heatwaves

The HAARP antenna array near Gakona, Alaska. Photo: Michael Kleiman, US Air Force, 2010, public domain.

What happened

As Europe sweltered through repeated heatwaves in late June and July 2026, posts on Facebook and Instagram blamed the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a radio research station near Gakona, Alaska. The UK fact-checking charity Full Fact rated the claim false on 10 July. Euronews’s fact-checking team published its own check on 15 July, and AFP Fact Check ran a longer piece on “weather warfare” claims during the same weeks.

There is no video evidence in this case. The evidence is a set of social posts, which we quote below only through the fact-checkers that archived them. We do not name the private accounts that posted them.

Timeline

• 11 August 1987: US patent 4,686,605 is issued to physicist Bernard Eastlund for a method of altering a region of the upper atmosphere. Later books and websites tie this patent to HAARP, which seeded the weather-weapon theory in the 1990s.
• 1990–2014: HAARP is built and run jointly by the US Air Force and US Navy to study the ionosphere, according to the station’s own FAQ.
• 11 August 2015: Responsibility for the HAARP facilities and equipment formally transfers from the military to the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF).
• Late August 2025: French TV presenter Anne-Claire Coudray presents a news report on geoengineering research. Clips of it later circulate as supposed proof of weather control.
• Late June – early July 2026: A heat dome sets records across Europe, trapping hot air from North Africa over Iberia before spreading as far as the UK, AFP reports.
• 1 July 2026: HAARP director Jessica Matthews tells AFP the facility cannot create or amplify weather.
• 3 July 2026: Full Fact publishes another HAARP check, one of a run of checks on the station listed on its HAARP topic page.
• 10 July 2026: Full Fact rates the heatwave claim false.
• 15 July 2026: Euronews publishes its check and our original short item runs the same day.
• 4 November 2026: This rewrite re-checks every source.

What believers claim

According to Full Fact, posts shared on Facebook and Instagram claimed that “the HAARP Weather Weapon […is] what’s made it crazy hot at the moment”. Others asked whether it was a “coincidence” that there was a “heat dome over Europe” while “the HAARP antennas in Alaska are ‘quietly testing’ the ionosphere”.

Euronews found a second strand. Accounts shared clips of journalists, scientists and public figures talking about geoengineering and presented them as proof that the heat was deliberate. The best known was Coudray’s 2025 report.

The core belief is that HAARP’s radio beams heat or push the atmosphere enough to steer weather systems, and that its Alaska location and military origins prove it is a weapon.

What the research found

1. HAARP’s operator says its signals never reach the weather layers. The station’s FAQ, published by UAF, states: “Radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits are not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere—the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather. Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather.” Full Fact quoted the same passage.