Just outside of Tromsø, Norway is a transmitting facility that is part of EISCAT, (European Incoherent Scatter), a multi-site research institute that studies the Sun’s effect on the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere. Any researchers can rent time at Tromsø provided they don’t mind their results being shared with all of the member nations and online.

EISCAT was briefly in the public eye in 2008 when the Svalbard unit partnered with Doritos to send a chip advertisement to another solar system. The Tromsø site, though, did little to attract public attention until December 9^th, 2009, the night before Obama accepted his Nobel peace prize in Norway. For three minutes, people in the North of that country and in Northern Sweden saw this in the sky:

The next day, after initially denying it, the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed responsibility for the spiral and declared it the result of a failed missile test. Clearly, though, it was EISCAT. The spiral occurred very close to Tromsø and precisely when an experiment was scheduled, part of Project TEQUILAsunrise (Transient Effects Quantification Under Ionospheric Low Angle sunrise).

Most convincingly, though, in February 2008, a similar facility in Gakona, Alaska called HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) "managed to induce a strange bull's-eye pattern in the night sky [in which] surprising irregular luminescent bands radiated out from the centre of the bull's-eye." (Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091002/full/news.2009.975.html?s=news_rss )

So, why did EISCAT, an organization that espouses transparency and makes so much of its data freely available online, allow the Russian Ministry of Defence to take responsibility for the Norway spiral?

According to the EISCAT website, TEQUILAsunrise was designed to “look at the polar wintertime mesophere through the transient caused by (scattered) sunrise around 8 UT.  Interestingly, this happens to be the maximum occurence time of the Polar Mesosphere Winter Echoes (PMWE)” (Source: http://www.eiscat.se/raw/schedule/comment.cgi?fileName=2009121016815&Start=0700&End=1000 --just select the date) Except for the fact that there would seem to be a word missing after transient, there is nothing alarming in that description and I would not have been alarmed had EISCAT simply said, “that crazy spiral you saw? That was just us messing with the Polar Mesosphere Winter Echoes”, but they didn’t. 

So, the mesosphere is filled with echoes and the blogosphere is filled with explanations. It is a weather manipulator that can turn a category two into a category five. It is a wormhole. It is a massive mind-control device (timed for the first time in a bazillion years that a US president was in Norway). It is a holographic projector to fake an alien invasion or the second coming of Christ. It could be any of these things. It could be all of these things. The only thing I’m pretty sure it’s not is a Russian missile.

I have a request. If this interests you at all, don’t forget about it in five minutes. Even if the Norway spiral is, as I’m inclined to believe, a well-intentioned if not entirely safe ionospheric heating experiment, we were still lied to and that’s not okay.

Video collection: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g75D5cxNlk4&NR=1

 
**ERRATA and AUTHOR'S UPDATE: July 29th, 2010**
1. There was, in fact, no word missing after "transient". "Transient" can be a noun meaning "a short lived oscillation in a system caused by a sudden change of voltage or current or load."
2. I know longer think the cause of the Norway Spiral was "clearly EISCAT". The official Russian missile explanation is possible if rather dull.
3. In late childhood I vowed I'd become an atmospheric researcher one day. The more I read about EISCAT the more determined I am do fulfill that dream. Yay sky!