Here is Dr. Nick Begich giving an updated lecture, five years ago, concerning the HAARP project. Dr. Nick Begich comes from a political background and is an investigative reporter.
“When I started this work and they asked me what motivated me to get into this in the first place, and I come from a political family. My father was a United States Congressman, my brother Mark is currently a United States senator from Alaska. My family’s been involved in politics very long time. So, you kind get the nature of activism as a sort of a birthright. Alaska is a pretty unique place and from a very young age I was engaged in political activity. My father was lost on a plane with Hale Boggs who was the United States congressman. He was also the House Majority leader just before the Watergate. He was also in the Warren Commission which was, you’re familiar with his part of the Kennedy investigation for his death. And Boggs was an advocate for reopening that investigation. He was also a strong opponent of Jagger Hoover’s FBI and was pretty vocal about it. He believed that government at that time was pretty corrupt and he was someone that stood out and stood up and made his case known. He came to Alaska to campaign for my father’s second election to the United States Congress and they flew on a small plane from Anchorage to Juneau and the plane was lost – largest search in history in the United States and it was never recovered officially. In 1993 which was twenty years later there was evidence that came out of the FBI that said they had located the plane, two people were alive the crash site and never recovered.
For my mum that kind of got her out of politics. She left Alaska for the rest of us that became again a motivating factor for engaging in the kind of controversial work that myself and my brothers and sisters have engaged in, in our lifetimes. If it could happen to a congressman, it could happen to anyone. But the reality is that people have to step up the plate, do what you can, on the issues that are important to you and so, they asked me in the beginning of this, to at least present my motivation into getting into this work in the first place.
The other thing at the time that I started to do the research on HAARP, I was working for the Anchorage School District – had been twice elected President last confederation of teachers, although I am not a teacher and never had taught. I had an aptitude for organizing and so I was involved in that work.
The thing that I decided was that you know I’ve had this really wonderful bureaucratic job where I could make my living with my left foot as my friends used to joke. And actually, focused my creative time on other issues and outside of the workplace, science was my interest area and I always had felt and been involved in science; reading independently for most of my life and I felt the translations weren’t there. You know, being able to take complicated ideas, bringing it down in plain language so they might be useful. That became my interest and my motivation for getting into this work in the first place.
I didn’t expect to be doing it seventeen years later. Never had I been involved in work that was that long. I’ve jumped around a bit, followed my interest but technology became that HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research project. I ran into a very few, brief short, column inches of article in a publication called Nexus which I’m sure most of you are familiar with. Duncan Rhodes who I met shortly thereafter I had sent him an article I had written with the encouragement of friends to actually take some of this material that I was gathering and put it in written form. That was published a few months later and Jean Manning read it – she was a journalist who had a book in publication at the time. She approached me and we agreed to collaborate on a writing project. Initially it was going to be an article but it turned out we had way too much information. We decided to work together on a book which, I worked in government for a long time, so, we were working through this book and I said ‘Well, just come to Alaska. We’ll sit down a couple of weeks and we get this thing done. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. So, we can’t write a book in two weeks. I come from bureaucracies and I can’t write a hundred pages in a week. There’s something wrong with you. So about six months later we got the book done. We were looking for publishers. Nobody wanted to publish it because it wouldn’t sell. The book is in several languages now. It has sold, I think around one hundred thousand copies in all languages which for being a technical book, it is considered pretty good.
But it was a catalyst, really, to get this idea and get the ideas about this strong technology out there.”