Fact check: Video shows 2017 water shortage protest, not HAARP being destroyed

Eleanor McCrary, USA TODAY
Updated ·3 min read

The claim: Video shows HAARP being destroyed

An April 8 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a video of people knocking electrical towers down with a crowd cheering in the background.

"Haarp destroyed," reads the post's caption. "One but it’s a start."

It was liked over 3,000 times in three days.

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Our rating: False

This video shows water restriction protests from 2017 in Brazil. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, has not been destroyed.

Video shows 2017 water restriction protest

While HAARP's ionospheric transmitter looks similar to the equipment knocked down in the post, the video does not show HAARP being destroyed.

HAARP is still operational and has not been attacked, Rod Boyce, a spokesperson for the program, said in an email to USA TODAY.

Contrary to the post's claim, HAARP has only one location: Gakona, Alaska. There are two other ionospheric heaters in the world: the Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility in Russia and the EISCAT Scientific Association in Norway, but they are not affiliated with HAARP, Boyce said.

Another version of the footage was posted on YouTube in 2017. The title is in Brazillian Portuguese and translates to, "IGARASHI farm in western Bahia residents of Correntina knock down power transformers," according to Google Translate.

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Correntina is a municipality in the Brazilian state of Bahia. On Nov. 2, 2017, hundreds of people invaded Igarashi's Rio Claro Farm in Correntina to protest water shortages they believed were caused by the farm's irrigation, according to Brazillian news organization G1, which included the same video in its report.

A peer-reviewed journal article about water policy in Brazil says, "Around 1,000 people occupied the Igarashi Farm headquarters, then destroyed the electrical equipment that pumped water for irrigation and set fire to a shed and tractors."

Images of the downed electrical equipment are also featured in an article by Notícias Agrícolas, a local news organization.

This isn't the first time the video has been misattributed. It was falsely linked to the Landless Rural Workers Movement in 2020, according to AFP Brazil.

USA TODAY has previously debunked several false claims related to the auroral research program, including the erroneous idea that it can create hurricanes and the untrue assertion that Edward Snowden exposed HAARP’s "global assassination agenda."

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the post for comment.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Viral video shows 2017 protest, not HAARP being destroyed