Imagine your main database cluster goes dark at 3:00 AM. Transactions stall, alerts start screaming, and the engineering Slack channel devolves into a panic. As a platform architect, I’ve spent a lot of time running post-mortems for these kinds of system crashes. There is a classic human reflex when the logs start bleeding red: look outward. Before checking a bad query index or profiling memory leaks, someone inevitably suggests that the cloud provider had a network blip. It’s a DNS issue, they'll swear. Or AWS had a routing hiccup.
We route the blame to an external dependency because it keeps the heat off our own code. It’s deflective debugging.
On February 6, 2023, southern Türkiye suffered a systemic failure on a tragic, planetary scale. Two massive earthquakes struck hours apart, leveling cities and taking more than 50,000 lives. It wasn't just a natural disaster; it was a massive infrastructural collapse. Decades of substandard construction, lax building inspections, and state-sanctioned building amnesties came crashing down all at once. The internal systems of regulatory oversight had completely failed.
But before the first responders could even clear the rubble, a strange telemetry signal surfaced on Turkish social media. The earthquakes, the rumors claimed, weren't natural. They were an intentional attack by a secret American weapon called HAARP.
HAARP—the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program—is a real, boring atmospheric research facility in Gakona, Alaska. In the conspiratorial imagination, it became a global earthquake machine. Some viral posts even claimed the weapon was deployed from foreign navy ships cruising in the Bosphorus Strait. For anyone who knows how physics or geology works, it’s absolute nonsense. Yet the story didn’t just linger in the shady corners of the web; it dominated mainstream discourse.
The Myth of the Consolation Prize
For decades, the standard psychological playbook held a neat explanation for this kind of behavior. Academics and political commentators pitched conspiracy theories as the "consolation of the powerless." In their 2014 book, American Conspiracy Theories, political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent put it bluntly: "conspiracy theories are for losers." The thinking goes that if you lose an election, or if you feel crushed by social forces you can't control, you invent an invisible monster to explain your pain. It’s a coping mechanism. If a shadowy cabal is pulling the strings, then your failure isn't your own fault. More importantly, the universe isn't random.
That theory has plenty of real-world telemetry behind it. A global study led by Roland Imhoff in 2022 looked at conspiracy beliefs across 26 countries and found a consistent trend. People who feel politically marginalized or shut out from the levers of power are far more likely to buy into conspiracy narratives. It’s a protective shield for the ego. When the system locks you out, you build a story to explain why the game is rigged—an organizational pattern not unlike how business leaders cling to outdated triumphs rather than face structural market realities.
But the HAARP theory in the wake of the Turkish earthquakes breaks this model.
If conspiracy beliefs are just the solace of the powerless, the Turkish opposition should have been the ones screaming about HAARP. They were the ones shut out of executive power for two decades. Instead, the updates showed the exact opposite. The people pushing the foreign-weapon theory were supporters of the incumbent administration. Their party was in charge. They held every lever of state power, and they had for over twenty years. They weren't the losers; they were the ones running the system.
The Telemetry: Analyzing 38,000 Tweets and a Nationwide Poll
A study published in Political Psychology by researchers Sinan Alper, Onur Varol, and Onurcan Yilmaz (2025) dug into the data to trace this anomaly. They didn't just guess at the patterns; they pulled two major datasets to see how the blame was flowing.
First, they collected a dataset of social media updates: 38,884 tweets from 26,992 users in the days immediately following the earthquakes. They mapped these accounts according to their political alignments—specifically, who they followed. The logs didn't lie. Followers of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were disproportionately responsible for creating and distributing the HAARP theory. Opposition followers generally stayed away.
To confirm this wasn’t just a social media echo chamber quirk, the researchers ran a second, more rigorous test. They set up a preregistered, face-to-face poll of 3,568 people across the country. Preregistering the study is key here—it means they locked in their hypotheses and methods before looking at the data, preventing any stats-massaging or post-hoc reasoning. The interviews were conducted right before the critical May 2023 election.
The survey asked how much they blamed various actors for the devastation, including foreign entities using secret tech. The correlation was stark: believing in the HAARP weapon predicted a 35% higher likelihood of planning to vote for the incumbent government.
Even after controlling for age, income, education, and whether the respondent had personally lost a loved one or a home in the disaster, the effect held strong. Adding education to the model didn't wipe it out. This wasn't simply a case of less-informed citizens falling for fake news. The conspiracy belief was serving a distinct political function.
Deflective Routing: Why System Architects Shift Blame
To understand why this happens, you have to look at the architecture of blame.
When a database crashes, the default path points to the DBA or the developer who wrote the query. But if you can convince the VP of Engineering that a malicious actor DDOS'd the system, you shift the diagnosis from "we have bad code" to "we are under attack." Suddenly, the conversation changes. The developers aren't incompetent; they are victims.
The Turkish state was facing a massive threat of political accountability. The public knew about the construction amnesty laws that allowed builders to bypass safety inspections for a fee. They knew building codes had been ignored for years. Under normal blame-routing, this is a terminal bug for an incumbent administration. This refusal to confront deep infrastructural vulnerabilities is a political version of the success paradox, where a history of successful execution shields system architects from the flaws of their own methods.
But if you introduce the HAARP theory, you redirect the entire routing table.
Now, the disaster isn't a failure of state building inspections. It’s an act of foreign aggression. The government isn't a negligent landlord; it’s the defender of the nation against an imperial power. By pointing the finger at Gakona, Alaska, the conspiracy theory did something very useful: it turned a local regulatory scandal into a national security issue.
This fits a framework that social scientists like Kovas Nera and colleagues (2021) have mapped out. While most conspiracy theories are "upward" (targeting local elites), some are aimed "downward" or "outward." These outward theories protect the people in power by finding a convenient external enemy. The HAARP story is technically upward because it targets a global superpower like the US, but functionally, it works downward by protecting the domestic status quo.
The Universal Design Pattern of Blame Defection
This isn’t just a Turkish anomaly. It’s a design pattern we see all over the world.
Think about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. As public anger grew over administration missteps and supply chain bottlenecks, political rhetoric quickly shifted to theories about foreign labs and engineered viruses. Just like the HAARP narrative, focusing on an external antagonist redirected the public post-mortem away from local operational failures.
We see this pattern globally. A study of 56 countries by Agnieszka Sternisko and colleagues (2023) showed that national narcissism—defensive collective pride—strongly predicts the belief in and spread of conspiracy theories during major crises. When our group image is threatened, our cognitive firewalls go up. We generate explanations that protect our team, demonstrating a group-level form of belief stickiness where individuals refuse to update their mental models even when confronted with contradictory real-world data.
Let’s be clear: the Alper, Varol, and Yilmaz study is correlational. It does not prove that government officials sat in a conference room and drafted the HAARP rumor as a piece of deliberate, top-down propaganda. The internet is far too chaotic for that. In a crisis, networks generate their own noise. And the opposition has its own biases; researchers like Nefes and Aksoy (2024) have documented how political alignment shapes different conspiracy beliefs across the entire Turkish spectrum. Both sides grab whatever tools fit their narrative.
But the real takeaway here changes the way we should diagnose these situations. When a bizarre conspiracy theory takes off after a disaster, the default reaction is to ask: How can people be this dumb?
We focus on the credentials, the education, or the cognitive slips of the believers. But that’s the wrong metric. The more useful diagnostic is simple: Who does this narrative protect?
Often, it isn’t the helpless citizen looking for a sense of control. It is the architect of the system, hoping you keep looking at the sky instead of the foundation under your feet.