Chemtrails
The last decade has seen a dramatic rise in the number of planes in our skies. No-frills airlines, cheap seats and the lure of ever more exotic destinations have put more jumbos over our cities and countryside. To some people, though, there’s something a lot more sinister behind the streams of white cloud subdividing our aerial space than the obvious concerns about increased global warming and the widening of carbon footprints.
“Contrail” is the name given to the white plume of cloud which can be seen following a jet plane through the sky. For a contrail to form, the plane must be flying above 33,000 feet (10,000m), at which altitude the hot engine exhaust condenses into ice crystals to form a pencil-thin vapour trail that (relatively) quickly vanishes. Chemtrails, observers claim, are very evidently different. These appear much thicker and extend across the sky, often in criss-cross patterns, grids or parallel lines. The trails do not dissipate quickly but persist, expanding slowly into feathers and mares’ tails until they form wispy white veils or “fake cirrus-type” clouds that last for hours.
Reports of chemtrails have come from many, mostly highly developed countries, including France, Britain, Canada, Germany and New Zealand, but the most activity appears to be centred on the United States. One video produced by seasoned chemtrail campaigner Clifford Carnicom warns people to make the most of blue skies now—blue skies, he believes, will become a thing of the past once chemtrails have become so prevalent they obscure the sun permanently from view.
The real question, though, is: what’s in those chemtrails that makes them behave so differently from the innocent contrail?
The answer is that no one really knows for sure. Concerned activists say they cannot raise enough funds to hire a plane at short notice to fly up to high altitudes and capture some of the chemtrail vapour to conduct a proper analysis, nor do they believe they would be given flight clearance to do so. Some claim to have collected solid matter fallen from a chemtrail-filled sky which reputedly contains high bacterial numbers, but other samples have been mysteriously mislaid, or their existence has been denied following their arrival at official government laboratories.
One amazed Californian says he noted no more than the usual amount of chemtrails over his property one morning but this was followed several hours later by skeins of white, waxy material falling on to trees, pavements and so on, where it slowly dissolved. He collected some of the strange material and placed it in a sealed jar, but within 24 hours over half of it had disappeared. He sealed the jar more closely, but when he opened it some days later he was, he said, overwhelmed by a noxious gas that stung his throat and burned his lips. Somehow he managed to preserve some of the material. Under the microscope it appeared fibrous and sticky, but it has remained unidentified. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reportedly no longer accepts any such samples for testing even though its stated remit is to protect the American people from possible sources of contamination.
Just what the purpose is behind chemtrails and (according to the theorists) other covert tinkering with the atmosphere is unclear, but the US government, backed up by its “shadowy” masters, seems top of the list of perpetrators. In typical conspiracy mode, leading chemtrail researcher Clifford Carnicom maintains that the subject “is a managed and controlled topic of discussion in the United States. It must be assumed now in this country that communication on this topic is monitored.”
The most probable constituent of the chemtrails would seem to be aluminium. Documented aerial tests have been carried out to test a theory perpetrated by Dr Edward Teller (one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb) that aluminium particles seeded into the atmosphere would reflect sunlight back out into space and reduce the effects of global warming. There is no indication how much aluminium it would actually take to affect global warming rates and what proportion of the world’s atmosphere would have to be treated. Naturally human health and the natural environment could be threatened by the dispersion of large quantities of aluminium (Alzheimer’s, here we come!), making it a rather heavy-handed solution, but the US government has recently publicly stated its intention to research physical methods of reducing warming rather than relying wholly on the reduction of carbon emissions to halt a rise in worldwide temperatures.
If clouds of aluminium were not bad enough there are yet more terrifying alternatives. Conspiracy theorists claim that biological weapons are being used by supporters of the New World Order to reduce the global population. The American authors of the http://educate-yourself.org website claim the US government is under the control of the Illuminati (architects of the New World Order). This group’s goal to reduce the world population from 6 billion to 4 billion by 2050 is openly stated, the authors say, in the Global 2000 report assembled by the Carter administration in the late 1970s.
Obviously, genocide on this scale would require some exceptionally devious means, not just to reach enough of the population but to be carried out without anyone noticing. This method might also have to be more subtle than just poisoning whole populations. To which end, what better than to spray us all with a biohazardous pathogen which will slowly attack the immune systems of vulnerable groups such as the elderly, the young and the sick, particularly those already suffering such auto-immune disorders as AIDS, allowing them to succumb fatally to a barrage of influenza-type illnesses, which, as everybody knows, are notoriously difficult to contain or treat, there being so many different strains? Telltale symptoms to look out for next time there’s a jumbo jet in your area are: hacking coughs, upper respiratory and intestinal distress, pneumonia, extreme fatigue, lethargy, dizziness, disorientation, headaches, aching joints and muscles, depression, loss of bladder control, nervous tics.
Barium salt mixtures have been identified as carriers for a whole host of pathogens or chemicals which could contaminate the people living beneath the chemtrails, breaking down their immune systems and poisoning them slowly and undetectably. To support their argument, chemtrail researchers point to recent rises in the incidence of “flu-type” epidemics across the Western world, along with an increase in mystery illnesses, allergies and respiratory disorders.
Other theorists, by contrast, suggest that chemtrails are being used not to kill people but to inoculate them secretly against the biological weapons that might be unleashed by enemy states, and that it is the reaction to this inoculation process which causes the flu-like symptoms.
The fact that its supporters appear to be singing from different hymn sheets rather dents the credibility of the chemtrail theory. While one camp maintains chemtrails are intended to reduce world population by 85 per cent, China is apparently exempt because it is viewed as such a perfect example of the New World Order in action that it is being groomed to replace the US as the next superpower. Other camps state, however, that bird flu is one of the organisms that has been spread by chemtrail; if so, that would seem to scupper the Chinese-immunity theory, as bird flu was first identified there—not to mention the fact that, as holder of 20 per cent of the global population, China would have to bear a stupendous death rate in order for the world’s population as a whole to achieve that 85 per cent reduction. Might there be only the Chinese left? Not much fun being a superpower with no one left to lord it over, is it?
But this particular conspiracy theory is undermined by a much simpler flaw. It is a question not so much of what might be in the chemtrails but of how they are delivered in the first place. If as theorists claim these trails are dispensed by special units attached or hidden in the fuselage of both military and commercial jets, that would imply that every airline pilot and every maintenance-crew member was party to the conspiracy, and that not one of all these people has let the secret slip out. Even claims that rogue chemicals are being added directly to jet fuel seem highly implausible: what pathogen could survive ignition in a jumbo jet engine?
Official sources in the American military and scientific community remain adamant that what people are noticing are not chemtrails but ordinary contrails. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station observed the absence of contrails on the days following 9/11. “I’ll tell you one thing that’s really strange. Normally when we go over the US, the sky is like a spider web of contrails,” outpost commander Frank Culbertson told flight controllers at NASA’s Mission Control Centre in Houston. “There are no contrails in the sky. It’s very, very weird.”
A prominent meteorologist quoted on the wonderfully named New Mexicans for Science and Reason website (www.nmsr.org) cites atmospheric differences as the cause of persistent contrails, saying that, if relative humidity is high, especially at the subzero temperatures of the upper atmosphere, the addition of even a tiny amount of water vapour acts as a catalyst, causing the thin cirrus-type clouds to form.
However reasoned and scientific the debunkers of the chemtrails theory may be, they will always have an
