We noticed multiple posts across X and Facebook, some drawing between 30,000 and 50,000 views, claiming or insinuating that HAARP, a US atmospheric research facility, caused the catastrophic landslide and flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border on 26 August 2026, which killed over 1,300 people and left thousands missing. Some posts state it outright that HAARP caused the landslide, while others are less direct, pairing footage or news headlines related to the disaster with the HAARP hashtag or a suggestive question implying a connection.

 

What is HAARP, and what actually caused the disaster?

HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a research facility in Alaska, U.S., operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks since 2015, after approximately 25 years under joint U.S. Air Force and Navy management. It studies the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere roughly 80 to 640 kilometres above Earth’s surface, using a high-power transmitter called the Ionospheric Research Instrument, which sends radio waves into the ionosphere. HAARP’s researchers state that these radio waves do not interact with the troposphere or stratosphere, the lower layers of the atmosphere that actually produce weather, and that any artificial effects the programme creates are “quickly obliterated” with no lasting impact.

The broad cause of the flood has been established as a glacier collapse high in the Himalayas. The precise mechanism behind the glacier’s collapse is still being investigated by scientists. However, experts have stated that there is no possible mechanism by which HAARP or weather control could have caused this event. HAARP is not capable of controlling or influencing the weather or natural disasters.

HAARP’s long paper trail of being blamed for disasters

We have fact-checked HAARP conspiracy claims several times before, and this is a well-worn pattern, especially so for natural disasters.

In 2023, we debunked a claim that HAARP had caused the Turkey-Syria earthquake, and in 2024, we debunked a claim that HAARP had caused Hurricane Milton, tracing the “ominous clouds” video used as evidence to a real but unrelated 2021 cloud formation filmed in Florida. In 2025, HAARP surfaced again as one of several speculative explanations for a video claiming to show unusual “square waves” in the sea near Turkey, a video we assessed was most likely AI-generated. Beyond our own fact-checks, HAARP has also been blamed at various points for other natural disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami.

Even in the HAARP claims that followed the Nepal-Tibet disaster, what is telling about how these might be inaccurate is how inconsistent these variations are with one another. One account claimed China had used HAARP “to cause underground disturbances,” framing it as cover for China to then rebuild regional infrastructure “out of generosity.” Another blamed the European Space Agency (ESA), despite HAARP being a US facility with no connection to ESA. These claims cannot all be true at once, since they blame different, unrelated culprits for the same event using the same invoked technology.

Part of why these contradictions happen may come down to what makes HAARP such a useful stand-in for this kind of blame game. As it was originally funded and run by the US military, this association and its supposed secrecy have aroused suspicion and mistrust about the programme, well before the University of Alaska Fairbanks took over in 2015, when the military decided it no longer needed the site and moved to wind down operations. Additionally, as the focus of HAARP’s research, the ionosphere, is an obscure area of the atmosphere, this has led to widespread misunderstandings about the facility’s actual purpose, leaving it vague enough to be stretched to explain almost any kind of natural disaster. That same vagueness could also extend to who is supposedly behind HAARP. For instance, neither claim above engages with the fact that HAARP is American-run, simply asserting that China or the ESA was secretly using it, which may be what allows the same technology to be reassigned to whichever culprit a given audience already distrusts.

Hence, we rate the claim that HAARP caused the Nepal-Tibet landslide as false. The disaster’s broad natural cause has been established as a glacier collapse, and the conflicting versions of the HAARP claim itself are a further sign that none of them are reliable.

HAARP has now been blamed for earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and a Himalayan glacier collapse, disasters with entirely different causes, over more than a decade. Real disasters often move fast, and verified explanations take time. HAARP conspiracies tend to fill that gap, not because they are usually right, but because HAARP is always available as an explanation, which readers should be wary of.