In addition to target echoes, high frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) receives sea and ionospheric clutter. Among these clutters, the ionospheric clutter is dominant and significantly affects the detection performance of HFSWR, particularly when the targets are located 100 kilometers away from the radar, rendering it an unsolved problem for HFSWR. Existing studies concerning HFSWR ionospheric clutter lack empirical research on the nonlinear dynamical characteristics of the ionosphere of HFSWR as existing ionospheric suppression methods are still insufficient to adapt the project application. Therefore, the present study utilized the threshold segmentation method to eliminate the sea clutter in HFSWR Range-Doppler spectrum and extracted ionospheric signals from this spectrum by edge feature extraction. Subsequently, the chaotic invariants, such as correlation dimension and the largest Lyapunov exponent of HFSWR ionospheric clutter, were calculated by phase space reconstruction, whilst the chaotic dynamical characteristics of HFSWR ionospheric clutter were determined by the 0-1 test for chaos and other algorithms. Furthermore, the present study demonstrated, for the first time, the chaotic dynamics of the ionospheric clutter of HFSWR with a low-dimensional attractor by processing and analyzing the experimental data from the Weihai High Frequency Radar Station. The conclusion redefines HFSWR ionospheric clutter based on chaotic dynamics rather than regarding it as a stochastic process, which is conducive to efforts to explore the formation mechanism of ionospheric clutter in essence, which can ultimately improve the detection capability of HFSWR, particularly for long-distance targets.