Debunked: HAARP has made two islands disappear


Staff member
This is an old story from Before Its News, but I saw it shared again recently and I couldn't find a debunk on here.

The claim is that HAARP has been "weaponised" and used to vaporise at least two islands, one in the Gulf of Mexico and one in the Bay of Bengal, on the borders of India and Bangladesh.


The idea that Bermeja island was "there one day and gone the next" is ludicrous. Quite likely it never existed at all, and was simply a cartographical error made centuries ago.


But what of those photographs? If it never existed, then how can BIN have photos of it?

The first image actually shows Alegranza, a small island in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of Africa:


A look on Google Earth confirms it is the same island: notice the large crater at the left-hand end.


The second image shows a much greener-looking island, lacking the crater. It's clearly not the same island, but I haven't been able to trace the original:


The second island which the article claims has been Zapped by HAARP is New Moore Island, in the Bay of Bengal. It illustrates it with this picture:


That picture is a stock image of Alidhoo, a resort island in the Maldives, from Getty Images:


The real New Moore Island was just a sandbank that formed in 1970 off the river delta of the Sundarbans.


This is an ever-changing region of shifting river channels, shoals and sand bars. The only reason this particular one became newsworthy was its location on the international border, which had implications for determining the "main channel" of the river, and thus the location of the border.


Senior Member.
This doesn't look like a real image, the way the clouds are. It looks like something out of a late 90's/early 00's video game. That hasn't helped me figure out where it's from, but just a sense.

Bermeja seems to be a legitimate phantom island, but it's disappearance wasn't modern. It was recorded at some point and just got carried over in maps until 1844, when an attempt to chart it in detail failed to find it. Actually gleaning much about it aside from the Santa Cruz map is pretty hard, since related wikipedia entries are an edit war between three factions (CTs and the two groups that already argue fictional vs. non-fictional status for phantom islands) and Google searches are contaminated by the 2008 conspiracy theory.

There are a LOT of islands like this, though, even entire archipelagos. Not just little rocks like this, Frisland was the size of Iceland, and New South Greenland was the size of the Antarctic peninsula (and in both cases probably actually *were* the thing they were the size of, calculated to be in the wrong location). This isn't even the only one in the Gulf of Mexico that would affect oil rights if it existed. Before space travel, map making was really hard, and until somebody went and tried to land and look around, all kinds of stuff got left on maps as islands.


Staff member
Yes, I had the same impression. Image search just gave lots and lots of articles about Bermeja, with the image endlessly recycled between them, but I couldn't find an original.
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