Physics and Fraud

Wiired:

Wong was an early proponent of HAARP, who used the facility in his studies of the ionosphere, the electrically-charged portion of the atmosphere. He also was something of a serial con man, according to a federal plea agreement provided to Danger Room. (.pdf) On Thursday, Wong agreed to pay nearly $1.7 million in damages for falsely billing Darpa and the Interior Department. He also plead guilty to a host of fraud charges.
HAARP was originally pitched back in the Cold War as a way for plasma physicists to study the ionosphere by blasting it with radio frequency emissions. If you build this series of RF antennas in remote Alaska, the scientists told the Pentagon, HAARP wound not only advance our understanding of this crucial field. It could also be used to fry incoming Soviet missiles and spy on underground bunkers. One physicist working for the Arco oil-and-gas conglomerate even suggested that HAARP could be used to weaponize hurricanes — that is, if Arco’s natural gas fields were used to power the thing.
But the Pentagon was only partially interested. So instead the scientists — including a UCLA physics professor Alfred Wong — sought out Ted Stevens, an Alaska senator with a legendary soft spot for pet projects. “He provided some congressional money, some pork money,” one of the scientists later told me for a 2009 WIRED magazine story. “It was much less than the bridge to nowhere.”
With Stevens’ help, HAARP was eventually built, and physicists began doing some rather fascinating research there.  But when those early ideas about HAARP’s potential military uses came out — hoo boy, the tinfoil hat crowd went berserk, and stayed that way for a very long time.

There are a lot of weird claims in the post.  Like Ted Stevens saying the project might harness the northern lights to provide free, unlimited power.