A military-funded project called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), located on remote tundra in Alaska, jumps off the horizon just past mile marker 11 on the Glenn Highway. The program's main facility sits behind a barbed wire fence that stretches as far as the eye can see. What grabs the imagination of most, though, are the couple hundred oversized antennas, described by legions of journalists and conspiracy theorists, including Noah Schactman of Wired: "180 silver poles rising from the ground, each a foot thick, 72 feet tall, and spaced precisely 80 feet apart ... Geometric patterns form and reform in every direction, Athenian in their symmetry. It looks like a bionic forest."

Those fanged metal structures have made the sleepy, rural Alaska village of Gakona, population 200, a lightning rod for controversy. Like many federally-funded projects in the Last Frontier, HAARP saw its financial peak when former Alaska U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was at the height of his power in the mid-2000s. Theories abound about what goes on inside HAARP, which was founded in 1990 to conduct research on the ionosphere, an upper level of the atmosphere interesting to scientists for its importance in shortwave radio communication and because it's a place where plasma forms naturally.

Ask the Air Force what they're doing in Gakona these days and a spokesman stationed in New Mexico will tell you to find out yourself during HAARP's open house. They usually hold those every couple years during the summer. Even though all the research is unclassified, the Air Force doesn't offer much else in the way of explaining what's going on, except to point out their noble interest in studying Earth's atmosphere to further scientific knowledge and maybe improve homeland security along the way.

On a theoretical level, the HAARP website notes that federal scientists are working to unlock the mysteries to other natural phenomena that have captivated humans for millennia. They're studying lightning, aurora borealis and the like. They've even learned how to induce both of those on a limited scale, according to a statement included on a Navy defense budget. HAARP also exists, the project's website notes, to learn more about shortwave radio communications and its application in global positioning systems, among other things. Maybe HAARP was used to search for Saddam's WMD. Maybe it's utilized to gather intel on Iran's underground nuclear facilities. Who knows?

Plenty of other theories have been explored about what exactly Uncle Sam is up to way out in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. Here are a few of the best conspiracy theories in a nutshell.

Earthquakes

Could HAARP antennas be generating earthquakes? Eric Dubay, a conspiracy blogger and American ex-pat that lives in Thailand, is part of the crowd that believes the U.S. used HAARP to cause the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked northern Japan in March 2011, leading to the devastating Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear meltdown.