Creepy Abandoned Radio Towers and Government Mind Control Projects

Most people don't realize it, but the air around us is alive with numerous signals and transmissions that buzz about us and parvade the atmosphere. In most cases, these are the signals that make your TV run, that give you cell phone coverage and enable a GPS to know where you are, and it is all faily innocuous and helpful to society. Yet wherever you have invisible signals and towers transmitting information, you are likely to get those who think that this technology could be used to nefarious ends, and when you throw in secret government radio towers it is a perfect recipe for conspiracies dealing with using these signals to influence us and to even control our minds. 

In the 1980s, the US Air Force commissioned a nationwide network of unmanned radio relay stations in order to provide a "fail safe" mechanism to communicate with Strategic Air Command operating locations and launch control centers in the case of a nuclear explosion disrupting the ionosphere and shutting down conventional radio systems. Called GWEN (Ground Wave Emergency Network) towers, the idea was to use LF (150 - 175 kHz), which are relatively low radio frequencies that tend to hug the ground rather than radiate into the atmosphere, and therefore would not be disrupted by the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) of a nuclear explosion, unlike the military’s more traditional high frequency communication systems that depended on "sky wave" communications. Congress began questioning the project when costs soared and it was found that the normal transmission methods were likely adequate as it was, so it was quietly shut down in the early 1990s, with only 58 of the proposed 200 to 300 GWEN towers ever reaching completion, some of which were sold to the US Coast Guard to install Global Positioning Satellite antennas and to businesses that wanted to use them as cell towers, but most were decommissioned and left abandoned. 

The towers themselves are rather unremarkable, looking very similar to towers used for AM radio transmissions, about 299-500 feet in height and basically a mishmash of metal scaffolding and wires, placed 200 miles apart and surrounded by a simple chain-link fence. They are completely plain, ugly even, yet these unassuming metal towers have become a breeding ground for weeds and all manner of strange conspiracy theories over the years that say they are still secretly operated for a wide variety of reasons including controlling the weather, causing earthquakes, and perhaps the most sinister of all- making people mind-controlled zombies. The idea is that these towers are sending out radio waves that somehow influence the brain, causing a wide variety of effects such as behavior and mood control, sowing confusion, driving people insane, negative physical symptoms, and even straight up mind control for myriad nefarious purposes, either by directly affecting the brain or by activating tiny electronic mind control implants contained in ordinary vaccines. It gets even weirder. 

Most conspiracy theories on GWEN tower mind control claim that the towers are connected to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), which was a scientific research facility in Alaska designed to study the ionosphere of the Earth and its effects on communication. The project began in 1993 and ran until roughly May 2013, and at the time it was already the focus of numerous conspiracy theories claiming that it was involved with all kinds of wild secret experiments, but when it was shut down it was claimed that the government was secretly keeping it in operation in conjunction with GWEN towers to control the moods, behavior, and minds of the populace to keep them under control, and there are many cases of this supposedly happening.

One of the main things GWEN tower and HAARP conspiracy theorists latch onto is that they supposedly utilize extremely low frequency (ELF) radio waves, that is those between 3 and 30 Hz, which have been attributed to all sorts of spooky stories. In 1976 it was claimed that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was bombarded with ELF waves, causing many within to fall sick, and the same waves have blamed for a spate of U.S. diplomats in Cuba reporting all manner of physical symptoms after being allegedly hit with the waves, including headaches, nausea, muscle spasms, nosebleeds, and loss of consciousness, among others. In 1983 it was claimed by a Dr. Nassim Abd El-Aziz Neweigy, Assistant Professor of Agriculture, Moshtohor Tukh-Kalubia, Egypt, that the Russians were beaming these waves from satellites to “send voices in one's own language, interwoven into natural thoughts.” In 1988, there was allegedly an experiment with ELF’s effects on the mind and body done on inmates at Draper Prison, in Utah. One inmate would report:

I began to receive or hear, high-frequency tones in my ears. When I plugged my ears, the tones were still inside and became amplified. It’s as if they had became electrified echo chambers with the sounds coming from the inside out. I then began to hear voices, right in my inner ears and just as vividly as though I were listening to a set of stereo headphones. The end result is that I am now having my brain monitored by an omnipotent computerized mind reading or scanning machine of some sort.

Even more recently is a report from November of 2019, when it was claimed that residents in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland were being attacked by a HAARP or GWEN tower signal. The claim comes from a conspiracy forum member called Tetragrammaton, who claimed that the signal was being used to cause “headaches, insomnia, unusual and bizarre behavior,” and they wrote:

Just to give a heads up, the HAARP frequency has returned to Edinburgh with a vengeance. There is a heavy hum around North and Central Edinburgh for the last week. The frequency is so strong you can actually hear it on the street whilst traffic passes. Usual symptoms have returned; headaches, insomnia, unusual and bizarre behaviour. Also laptops and smartphones haven’t been getting a working signal in Edinburgh. the frequency is extremely strong around the Leith Docks and Newhaven areas. So the transmission is pushing down from the north, into a southernly direction. I strongly suspect that the Craigkelly TV transmitter in Fife is being used to carry the HAARP signal. If my hunch is correct there could be extreme or disturbing violence in Edinburgh over the next week. Please avoid the city.

The remark was accompanied by an embedded YouTube video of the supposed GWEN tower in Fife, which immediately got a comment from an American commenter saying:

This, right here, is a bona fide GWEN tower. All of the information about it is misleading, the maps are mislabeled, I think that in and of itself is pretty interesting. Over here is the stuff that operates it with all the keep out signs. All the research that I've done on these is that there's a great concern that people have for mind control with these towers, and that the justification for building them is skimpy, to say the least.

What was going on here? Another, more tragic case occurred in 2013, when 34 year-old Aaron Alexis went on a shooting spree with a shotgun at the Washington Navy Yard, leaving 12 dead. Police found “My ELF weapon” carved into the handle of the weapon, and an examination of Alexis's thumb drives, phones and computers turned up the message, "Ultra low frequency attack is what I've been subject to for the last 3 months, and to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this." Family and friends would also claim that Alexis had complained of hearing voices, and that “some sort of microwave machine” was sending vibrations into his body to prevent him from sleeping. Was ELF really used to incite this man to kill, or was he just nuts? Who knows?

The problem with all of this is that there is no evidence at all that ELF can effect a person’s brain in the ways described, and certainly none that show full mind control is a possibility, let alone all of the other magical powers it is attributed with, such as controlling the weather or summoning earthquakes. There has been some evidence that show it might cause disorientation or physical symptoms in very strong doses, and even that it could maybe cause hallucinations, but none that suggest mind control or targeted behavior modification is possible in the slightest sense. Even if ELF could affect the human mind in this way, GWEN towers are not capable of generating enough power to put out a particularly strong signal that would achieve the desired effect. They operated on 2,000 and 3,200 watts, which is actually a pretty low power level for a radio station, and less than many other radio stations in the U.S. that are in operation and which we use every day. The former GWEN towers were also of a specific size in order to transmit in the LF (Low Frequency) range of 150 to 175 kHz, and were not nearly large enough to generate ELF in the first place, so they would be a poor candidate for transmitting ELF even if it did work as described by conspiracy theorists. HAARP did indeed operate at ELF frequencies, but at ground level it was fairly weak, and only concentrated at a specific point in the ionosphere, about 62 miles up in the sky. The conspiracists also tend to overlook the fact that there are actually many similar facilities around the world, yet those are never brought up when discussing mind manipulation. The site RationalWiki succinctly puts it:

HAARP and GWEN towers are a popular target for conspiracy theorists who believe that extremely low frequencies (ELFs) can be used for mind control and weather control — it's even been blamed for the 2008 Chinese, 2010 Haitian, March 2011 Japanese earthquakes and 2014 southeast Europe floods. Its attraction to conspiracy theorists, its overextended budget and its sweeping scope make HAARP crankery similar to that generated — more recently — about the Large Hadron Collider. Despite the GWEN conspiracy hype, there is no technology that enables ordinary broadcast radio or mobile phone antennas to transmit thoughts directly into your mind or trigger earthquakes and tornadoes. We're sorry to spoil conspiracy theorists’ fun, but many things around us give off ELF waves, one of the most common being power lines. And all studies into ELF waves have shown that (despite what someone told you on Facebook) they do not affect the human mind. HAARP is not even unique: there are several other similar radar systems, such as KAIRA in Finland, LOFAR in the Netherlands, the EISCAT network with 4 facilities in Sweden, Norway and Finland, and the SuperDARN network, which consists of 35 radars all around the world, yet nobody seems to give a fuck about them.

It should also be pointed out that there is absolutely no evidence that the decommissioned HAARP facility or GWEN towers are still in operation, and they seem to be exactly what the government says they are, rusted out weed-choked hulks. Nevertheless, the conspiracy lives on, with GWEN discussion, debate, and hysteria plastered all over the net, and in recent years it has expanded to regular cell phone signals as well, further driving panic among those who believe it all. Is there anything to this at all, or is it a bunch of woo woo nonsense? Whatever you may think, those towers are still out there, looming over the horizon and either influencing your mind or just collecting rust.