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Writer's pictureJames Geis

Project West Ford: MIT's Cold War communications experiment that never ended.


From 1958 to 1963, MIT, was conducting a communications experiment in Westford, MA called Project West Ford. This came at a time when both LBJ and JFK were talking about Weather Control. The purpose of the experiment was to make the unreliable ionosphere more reliable for the military to bounce radio waves off of for communications purposes in the event that Russia had decided to sabotage the Trans-Atlantic Cable.

MIT had previously lied in 1949 about children in a "Science Club" at the Fernald School being part of a nutrition study when they were really being fed radioactive oatmeal.


In 1958 the first part of the experiment was attempted, which was to deploy 480,000,000 copper needles tuned to 8 Ghz into mid-earth orbit under Project Needles, but the needles failed to disperse as expected, so subsequent launches were made to correct this. The next step was to build the satellite dish receiver/transmitters under Project Haystack, which was completed around 1962. Wikipedia says that the experiment was a success, and that communication across the Atlantic was completed, but that satellite communications later proved to be a better way of doing this, so this technology was "shelved." I was a Radio Operator in the Marine Corps, and I bounced radio waves off of the ionosphere to talk across the Atlantic using a MRC-138 with a 32 foot whip antenna. Its frequency range is 2 Mhz to 30 Mhz, which is a lot lower than the 8 Ghz used in this experiment. We were told in the Marines that lower frequencies with longer wavelengths were needed in order to bounce radio waves off of the ionosphere, otherwise shorter wavelengths, like the 8 Ghz used by MIT, would just punch through it. It seems like an odd choice in frequencies to me, and an odd experiment in general to expect that randomly-dispersed copper needles in mid-earth orbit would correct this problem, and make radio communications more reliable.

Somewhere between 1962 and today, this communications experiment became an "observatory" that is still in use today. I haven't been able to find any information on how or when this was done. I even asked MIT Haystack about it a few years ago on their Facebook page and they said that they were creating a new website and it would answer my questions regarding this, but it doesn't mention this at all. In 2019, their "observatory" gave the world this fascinating computer-generated image of a black hole they created from data they collected, that some say resembles the lit end of a cigarette or cigar. This seems to be the only image I know of that they have ever released to the public. If you ask me, the West Ford experiment was done to try to heat the ionosphere for the purpose of Weather Control, like JFK and LBJ had been talking about in 1962, and that the idea of it being a communications-experiment-turned-observatory is just another one of MIT's lies to cover this up, like their Science Club experiment on children at the Fernald School a decade earlier. What do you think?



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