Tales from Area 51*:

 Project Harpo 

Gallery Article by Alvis 3.1

Silly Week 2006

 

This all begins with the successful Apollo missions of the late 1960s. With the apparent demise of the Soviet attempt to land men on the moon, NASA was looking for another role, and turned it's attention to our own planet. Using the onboard sensors of the Apollo CSMs, NASA not only used them to map the moon but also take readings on our own planet and made a terrifying discovery: Our ozone layer was deteriorating rapidly! 
Reacting swiftly, they investigated the cause of this, and discovered a prime cause was the refrigerants and coolants used by western industry in massive quantities. An immediate solution was to discontinue usage, but this would create a massive economic and manufacturing shock, so an alternate plan was devised by Nixon's Whitehouse appointed science panel: High altitude replacement of the ozone until a gradual phase out of CFC type materials could be achieved. This program was given the name HARPO: High Altitude Replacement of Protective Ozone. 
However, should this program be discovered, the public outcry would be enormous, as the environmental movement was still maturing, and a major story like this would give them a huge public relations advantage. Since the program was to financed by the very chemical industries who would be harmed if CFCs were immediately banned, the financial trail was easy enough to bury...but what about the planes themselves? The early 1970s was a time of recession, and a lot of airliners were available for low prices, so th majority of the planes used for the high altitude ozone replacement were low time and fairly new airliners. Nixon's government, never one to shy away from secrecy and counter espionage work, came up with a brilliant plan: Plant false stories with fringe groups about a "secret government weather changing scheme", known as "Chem-Trails", and give it the name of HARP. The story would spread in the underground press and eventually, should somebody spot an actual HARPO plane,and attempt to reveal its' real agenda, they would be lumped in with the "nut cases" who believed in HARP! It was a perfect double blind cover, and worked until the conclusion of the program in 2004. 

Click on images below to see larger images

Seen here is a late model Boeing 747-400 as the main fleet command plane for the HARPO program. Earlier planes included DC-8s, DC-10s, Boeing 707s, 747s and 757s as well as one BAC Condorde leased for 2 years. All were done up in standard airline-type schemes, with HARPO being applied only to the command plane. The "spray" bars atop the wings are a misnomer: You cannot actually spray liquids at 500 knots and 30,000 feet! They are actually known as "Electro-Inductive Ozonal Generation Arrays" and are a type of static electricity dispensers. The large discharges of electricity from these would generate ozone at a sufficiently high enough altitude to interfere with the CFC chemicals rise and also replace some of the destroyed ozone. An added side effect was loud booming noises that often were reported as sonic booms or UFOs, and the massive light display from the discharges also added to UFO sightings over the years. Repeated government "coverups" of the UFO story also guaranteed the whole HARPO project could operate in the clear, with no fear of being detected by any credible source.

*Area 51 is a Top Secret US Air Force facility that handles all the Secret, Top Secret, Ultra Top Secret and Real Super Ultra Uber Top Secret paperwork. It does not in any way actually test or contain aircraft of terrestrial or extra terrestrial origin. That stuff is at Area 42.

The Model:
This is an atrocious kit! It is the 1/144 scale Kepuyuan Boeing 747-400, and frankly, even though it was cheap..it wasn't cheap enough! It was like a kit from the 60s as far as detail goes, and the fit wasn't great either. Anyhow, enough complaining! I merely assembled it, painted it overall white with grey wings, added the "Spray bars" made from plastic rod, and added the home-made custom decals.

Alvis 3.1

Photos and text © by Alvis 3.1