If wildfires leave blue items unburned, does it prove directed-energy weapons were involved? No

As fires tore through Southern California’s neighborhoods, a Threads user encouraged people to pay special attention to whatever the flames left untouched.

"Hey everyonee in the area of the L.A. fires, be on the lookout for any blue items that survive the fire and take pictures of them," read the Jan. 8 post that misspelled the word "everyone." "Many of the recent fires had blue items which survived unscathed: cars, umbrellas, tarps, t-shirts, plastic bins, etc whereas even the aluminum engine parts and wheels melted to liquid. This is indicative of DEW's (Directed Energy Weapons) which, depending on the frequency, will leave items of a certain (cont'd)," with a subsequent Threads post completing the statement, saying, "... color unscathed because color is also a frequency in the light spectrum."

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(Screenshot from Threads)

The Threads post follows a trend we’ve seen before: When wildfires engulfed parts of Maui, Hawaii, in August 2023 and Texas in early 2024, some social media users claimed directed energy weapons caused the destruction; PolitiFact rated those claims False. 

Already, we’ve fact-checked a claim that footage Fox News aired Jan. 7 showed directed energy weapons starting the fires in California — that’s False.

Like those false claims, this post about the California wildfires is inaccurate in multiple ways, experts on directed energy weapons and wildfires said. 

Directed energy weapons fire concentrated energy at light speed and might include high-energy lasers and high-power microwave weapons, the federal Government Accountability Office reported.

The weapons wouldn’t spare items from destruction just because they are blue. 

Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineering sciences professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives, has repeatedly told news organizations including The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse that although high-energy lasers might interact differently with items made of different materials or colors, an item of a certain color wouldn’t be immune. 

"If there is enough energy in a laser beam to start a large fire, then it will burn through the material no matter what its color," Boyd told Agence France-Presse in 2023. 

Also, whatever items survive a wildfire — whether they’re blue or any other color — do not prove directed energy weapons figured in the catastrophe. Wildfire behavior experts told PolitiFact that when wildfires burn, they don’t leave a uniform pattern of devastation.

"It’s absolutely not surprising that there’s uneven patterns in what we call fire effects," said Maureen Kennedy, associate professor in quantitative fire ecology and forest management at the University of Washington, Tacoma. "Fires are really subject to randomness." 

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Image shows the Hollywood sign was on fire as of Jan. 8.

Janice Coen, project scientist at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that this varied destruction from wildfires is called the "fire mosaic."

"There is nothing inherently suspicious about uneven patterns of damage," Coen said. "Severely burned areas can lie next to untouched areas. One home can be destroyed while the one next to it is untouched." 

That has happened during the greater Los Angeles fires: CNN interviewed an Altadena, California, resident whose house burned down. A nearby home appeared largely unscathed, however.  

Kennedy said that’s largely because sudden wind shifts can redirect heat and determine what combusts and what doesn’t, though she added that factors including moisture differences and topography can also influence fire behavior. 

"In the urban environment, there are differences possibly simply with landscaping and building materials and the proximity to the other fuels," she said. "The lucky house — the one that survived — might have been just far enough from the ones that were burning in the moments that the wind shifted that it was the lucky one to have survived."

Kennedy expressed no suspicion about the fires being caused by directed energy weapons. 

"These fire events are pretty consistent with our understanding of how fires work in that area," she said.

The fires’ causes are so far unknown, but powerful Santa Ana winds and the abnormally dry conditions in Southern California sped the wildfire’s spread. 

A Threads post said, "blue items that survive" the California wildfires are "indicative of DEW's (Directed Energy Weapons)."

Directed energy weapons wouldn’t spare items from destruction just because they are blue, one  expert said. And when wildfires burn, they don’t leave a uniform pattern of total devastation, wildfire science experts told PolitiFact. This means that just because the fires might spare some blue items, it won’t prove that directed energy weapons were involved in the catastrophe.

We rate this claim False. 

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