This Oct. 7, 2018, photo shows the exhaust plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as it blasts off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., carrying a communication satellite SAOCOM 1A. The plume was visible over a large part of California, Nevada and Arizona. (AP Photo/Matt Hartman)
This Oct. 7, 2018, photo shows the exhaust plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as it blasts off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., carrying a communication satellite SAOCOM 1A. The plume was visible over a large part of California, Nevada and Arizona. (AP Photo/Matt Hartman)
Last month Turkey was struck with a series of devastating earthquakes that . A video posted to Twitter claims to show waves of light in the sky above Turkey just before the earthquake struck on Feb. 6. The post says the light was caused by the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), and that these are "weather weapons being used on the populace." This is false. The video is a clip from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch in California in 2018 and HAARP is not capable of generating earthquakes.
The video has been shared by Ìý on Twitter and on , including by . Most of the posts contain the same text, saying, "The wave ring of light emitted from the frequency represents the wave motion of an underground earthquake."
Rating: False
A reverse video search shows the video was not shot hours before the series of earthquakes struck, but is in fact footage from the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, now the Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California on Oct. 7, 2018, and on Oct. 8, 2018.
The social media posts use a 40-second clip from the original, which is 10 minutes 56 seconds long. The misrepresented video has been rotated 90 degrees from the original, and earlier footage that showed the rocket lifting up into the night sky has been edited out.
The clip starts at about two minutes 20 seconds into the original video. At two minutes 38 seconds into the original, a person off-screen can be heard asking, "Sorry, what is this?" The same voice can be heard in the altered video 16 seconds into the clip.
SpaceX launch
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched on Oct. 7, 2018, at 7:21 p.m. local time, about an hour after sunset, carrying the SAOCOM 1A satellite into orbit. The launch was covered by local and was livestreamed by SpaceX, a of which is available on YouTube.
After detaching from the second stage, which carried the satellite the rest of the way into orbit, the Falcon 9’s first stage returned to land at the air force base. The misrepresented clip focuses on the first stage of the rocket as it executes a boostback burn, reorienting itself for the return trip to the ground. The SpaceX livestream offers of the Falcon 9's first stage exhaust fumes as seen from the ground in California, showing the same wave pattern that appears on the Twitter video.
HAARP and conspiracies
According to , the program to study the Earth's upper atmosphere, particularly the ionosphere, an area that spans between 60 kilometres and 500 kilometres above the Earth's surface.
Originally, the program was jointly managed by United States Air Force and United States Navy, but was handed over to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2015.
Among the instruments used by researchers is the Ionospheric Research Instrument, an array of 180 high-frequency antennas spread across 33 acres in Gakona, Alaska, that can "temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere for scientific study."
Claims that HAARP can cause earthquakes and affect the weather have dogged the research facility for years. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez falsely that a ''tectonic weapon" used by the United States caused the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. It has also been blamed for everything from landslides to hurricanes – and even . These claims have been and numerous times.
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The claim can be found on Twitter (, ), () and (), and on Facebook ()
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University of Alaska Fairbanks HAARP () and ()
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