No, Hurricane Milton has not been manipulated by research facility HAARP

What has happened? 

With Florida still reeling from Hurricane Helene, Milton was initially feared to make landfall in the U.S. state as a Category 5 hurricane. However, on the evening of October 9, the storm landed at Siesta Key in Florida as a Category 3 hurricane. 

Despite this, Milton brought "devastating rains and damaging winds" to central Florida, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The danger was exacerbated by the creation of tornadoes as the hurricane moved across the state to emerge into the Atlantic Ocean. 

Several deaths have been reported, as well as 3.2 million homes without power, downed power lines, fallen trees, blocked bridges, and flooding. 

What is being claimed?

False claims are being shared on social media stating that Hurricane Milton was a "modified and manipulated HAARP Hurricane." 

HAARP, or High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a research facility in Alaska tied to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which people making claims online often target.  

The claim has gone viral on Facebook (archived here), Instagram (archived here), and X, formerly Twitter (archived here), with hundreds of thousands of views. 

We found additional TikTok posts using Logically® Accelerate, a tool that enables proactive discovery of fact-check-worthy content on platforms. An example is here. 

However, there is no evidence to support the claim. HAARP cannot modify or manipulate the weather or natural disasters. This claim often resurfaces during major disasters. 

Did HAARP manipulate or modify Hurricane Milton? 

Logically Facts contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent of the National Hurricane Center, the U.S. agency that monitors hurricanes, to clarify the matter. 

Howard Diamond, Ph.D., the Director of the Atmospheric Sciences and Modeling Division at NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory, told us, "Hurricane Milton, like all hurricanes, formed on their own due to the right conditions of sea surface temperature and upper atmospheric winds. There is no technology that humans have that can either create, destroy, modify, intensify or steer hurricanes in any way, shape or form."  

According to the NHC, Hurricane Milton was upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane on October 6. On October 7, the NHC reported that Milton had grown into a category 5 hurricane, and evacuation orders had been issued across the state. 

Several hurricane experts told NBC that the storm grew in intensity due to the record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The situation was similar regarding Hurricane Helene. 

HAARP is frequently targeted by people claiming it can create or manipulate weather and climate disasters, but it holds no such power. 

The facility uses high-frequency transmissions to study the boundary between space and Earth's lower atmosphere, also known as the ionosphere. However, the transmissions do not interact with the troposphere or the stratosphere, the two lower levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth's weather. 

Since there is no interaction, there cannot be any manipulation or modification. 

"HAARP, a small National Science Foundation-funded ionospheric research facility in Fairbanks, Alaska, is not engaged in weather modification," Diamond added. "The HAARP system is basically a large radio transmitter. Radio waves interact with electrical charges and currents, and do not significantly interact with the troposphere."

Actual weather modification

Actual weather modification is possible but not as widespread as people making false claims online would like to believe.

The U.S., China, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Russia have tried to enhance rain or snowfall with varied results using cloud seeding. However, due to the nature of clouds, scientists have been unable to replicate the exact circumstances and conditions by manipulating clouds twice, making it impossible to know whether the experiment succeeded. 

Therefore, we cannot directly modify weather to create catastrophes like Hurricane Helene or Milton. 

Logically Facts has previously checked multiple false claims regarding HAARP, including the claim it can be used to "accelerate the climate agenda using weather manipulations." HAARP was also falsely blamed for the Aurora lights over the U.K. in May and for creating Hurricane Helene. 

The verdict 

Considering that neither HAARP nor any other technology can effectively influence the weather or cause climate disasters, we have marked this claim as false.