Was the January 29, 2024 earthquake near the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv a result of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)? No, that's not true: The minor quake that occurred on that day near Plovdiv was registered in a highly active seismic zone. There is no evidence that HAARP was responsible for this quake or that it can cause a quake.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) that was published by @lubomirabubeto (archived here) on January 29, 2024.
The Bulgarian text shown on top, translated into English by Lead Stories staff, reads:
HAARP was striking Bulgaria today.
I warned you on January 28, 2024, and today, on January 29, 2024, after the HAARP strike, the result is an earthquake.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jan 31 08:37:23 2024 UTC)
The TikToker refers to another video, no longer available but archived here, posted on the same TikTok account on January 28, 2024, in which a brief radar interference was presented as HAARP activity. This is not the first time that a radar disturbance has led to similar beliefs. In May 2022, a radar glitch (archived here) occurred in Australia, and conspiracy theorists falsely attributed it to HAARP. However, these technical disturbances (archived here) cannot be linked to HAARP. Various types of anomalies or disturbances can occur during the operation of a weather radar, and such events (archived here) are not at all rare.
The earthquake that occurred near Plovdiv was insignificant (archived here) and had a very low magnitude of 2.6 on the Richter scale. Such small quakes are quite normal for this highly seismical region of Bulgaria (archived here).
Since the beginning of 2023, 14 earthquakes have been registered in the Plovdiv region within a 50 km (31 miles) radius from the city, one of which reached a magnitude of 4.6 on the Richter scale, and within a radius of 100 km (62 miles), the number of registered earthquakes (archived here) with a magnitude of more than 2 in the same period reaches almost 30.
The claim in the video is based on a well-known and repeatedly debunked (archived here) conspiracy theory that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program can control the weather but also exert mind control over people, cause earthquakes, or create chemtrails. Most of these claims have been refuted and debunked (archived here) on the official website of HAARP, whose aim is to study the upper parts of the Earth's atmosphere, the thermosphere, and the ionosphere.
More fact checks from Lead Stories about HAARP, including those on claims that HAARP can cause an earthquake, can be found here and here.
