What’s crazier? That some people actually believe the United States government is purposely spraying caustic chemicals into the air? Or that those people have evidence to back up their claims?
THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES
In May 2000, an anonymous letter started making the rounds on the Internet. Here’s an excerpt:
I work for an airline in upper management levels. I will not say which airline. I wish I could document everything, but to do so would result in possible physical harm to me. Airline companies in America have been participating in something called “Project Cloverleaf” for a few years now. They told us that the government was going to pay our airline, along with others, to release special chemicals from commercial aircraft. When asked what the chemicals were, they told us that information was given on a need-to-know basis and we weren’t cleared for it. They told us the chemicals were harmless, but the program was of such importance that it needed to be done at any cost. The public doesn’t need to know what’s going on, but that this program is in their best interests.
The writer went on to say that Project Cloverleaf made use of a “Powder Contrail Generation Apparatus,” which was attached to the planes.
By the time the letter appeared, discussion of “chemtrails” had already become a fixture on late night talk radio shows, in alternative magazines, and online. Dozens of conspiracy Web sites reported (and still report) that, far from being harmless, chemtrails are something to be very afraid of. But what are they?
If you look up when a jet plane passes overhead, you’ll often see a white plume that looks like a chalk mark in the sky. That’s called a contrail, short for “condensation trail.” A contrail forms when water vapor around the exhaust from a jet plane flying above 30,000 feet freezes. Sometimes, though, planes leave behind trails that are thicker, longer, and longer-lasting. These, according to conspiracy theorists, are “chemical trails,” or chemtrails. Here’s how they say you can tell the difference:
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3 Contrails are visible about one wingspan’s distance behind a jet plane. Chemtrails are directly behind a plane, with no gap between the plane and the trail.
3 Contrails form straight lines. Chemtrails crisscross the sky in zigzag patterns that often form a large grid.
3 Contrails last for moments and then dissipate. Chemtrails last for hours and leave behind a hazy stain in the sky.
Contrails are basically just water vapor—an incidental byproduct of regular aircraft. But chemtrails, say the conspiracies, contain a mixture of pesticides and heavy metals, such as barium and aluminum. They’re dispensed by either passenger jets or unmarked planes that fly repeatedly over the same area, at lower-than-normal altitudes. Once in the sky, chemtrails are supposedly heated by super-powerful radar or microwaves, creating chemical fibers known as “angel hair” that fall to the ground in a toxic mist.
So why are these dastardly doses of death being dumped on us? There are several theories.
Population control: It’s a part of the Illuminati’s “New World Order Depopulation Agenda,” the aim of which is to kill off masses of undesirable people, or at least render them sterile so they can’t multiply. (This is occurring in North America and Western Europe—but not China because that nation, according to the theory, “is being groomed by the NWO to replace the United States as the leading nation of the world, both economically and militarily.”
Urban unrest: Some conspiracy theorists claim that spraying chemtrails over low-income inner-city neighborhoods has resulted in increased outbreaks of violence and crime, causing unrest in the cities, which will eventually lead to chaos. (No word on what kind of outcome that chaos is supposed to lead to.)
Weapons testing: The military is using chemtrails to test out various forms of biological warfare…and U.S. citizens are the guinea pigs.
Weather control: Imagine one country threatening another country with, “Surrender—or you won’t see any rain for 20 years!” Chemtrails may be the means to achieve this.
Environmental aid: Another theory is far less grim. Chemtrails were designed to stop global warming by increasing what’s called “global dimming.” Believers point to physicist Dr. Edward Teller, known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb” and also the father of the “Star Wars” missile defense program. In 1997 Teller wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the same chemicals used in topical sunscreen could be used to block the harmful atmospheric rays that cause global warming and that passenger jets are perfectly suited to disperse them into the atmosphere. Interestingly, chemtrails started appearing in much greater numbers shortly after Teller’s article was published.
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At the heart of the chemtrails controversy is the U.S. Air Force project HAARP (High Frequency Active Aural Research Project) in Alaska. According to its Web site, HAARP is an unclassified research project that studies the ionosphere and radio science. Conspiracy theorists, however, say this is a ruse. They claim the classified mission of HAARP is to establish a massive radar grid that combines electromagnetic waves with chemtrails in order to spread the chemicals across the world’s atmosphere, giving the American military-industrial complex control over everything from the weather, to enhanced surveillance, to mind control.
To back up their claims, they exhibit a 1996 research study published by the USAF called “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” The unclassified report was produced by students, faculty, and scientists from academic branches of the Air Force. They were challenged to imagine a set of fictional scenarios set 30 years in the future and what possible responses the military might have. These scenarios describe using weather modification to achieve “battlespace dominance” by enhancing precipitation (making rain), inducing drought, generating cloud cover, and disrupting satellite communications and radar.
Government control of the weather is not a new concept. During World War II, attempts were made to combine chemical agents with cloud seeding, and during the Vietnam War covert cloud-seeding operations tried to make enough rain to muddy jungle trails and hinder the movements of enemy soldiers. These operations were exposed in the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s the U.S. Senate called for an international treaty against weather manipulation. They got one: the United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Any Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Technique, which was ratified by the U.S. and 30 other nations, and entered into effect in 1978.
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But just because something is illegal, does that mean the government won’t do it? Carolyn Williams Palit, a Texas woman in her 50s, believes that not only is the government continuing to spread chemicals in the atmosphere, but that they’re actually weapons:
It involves the combination of chemtrails for creating an atmosphere that will support electromagnetic waves, ground-based electromagnetic field oscillators called “gyrotrons,” and ionospheric heaters. They spray barium powders and let it photoionize from the ultraviolet light of the sun. Then they make an aluminum-plasma generated by “zapping” the metal cations that are in the spray with either electromagnetics from HAARP, the gyrotron system on the ground [the Ground Wave Emergency Network], or space-based lasers. The barium makes the aluminum-plasma more particulate dense. This means they can make a denser plasma than they normally could from just ionizing the atmosphere or the air. More density [more particles] means that these particles are colliding into each other and will become more charged. What they are ultimately trying to do up there is create charged-particle, plasma beam weapons.
Palit believes we are victims of “state-sponsored torture” and that Congress is knowingly using American tax dollars to fund it.
In response to Palit, her many followers, and all the other conspiracy theorists, NASA, the USAF, the EPA, and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) have all released rebuttals, explaining that chemtrails are nothing more than really big contrails, caused by various atmospheric, weather, and air traffic conditions.
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In their “Aircraft Contrails Factsheet,” the agencies explained the difference between short-lived contrails and persistent contrails—the ones most likely to be mistaken for chemtrails. The photographs in the pamphlet show the crisscrossing patterns and grids that chemtrail believers so often point to as proof that the lines are not contrails. In 2005 the USAF released their own “Contrails Facts,” a long, exhaustive document that goes into infinite detail about contrails, and debunks chemtrails, calling them a “hoax.”
Unfortunately, the Air Force didn’t do themselves any favors by using the word “hoax”; that just stoked the conspiratorial fires, as people started picking apart every word in the Air Force’s explanation as proof of just the opposite. “The latest line of attack would earn approval from George Orwell himself,” wrote one Web site. “Chemtrails are now counted by our children in staged ‘educational’ events. These events serve the purpose of indoctrination into an Orwellian world that declares the operations to be ‘normal.’ It is a world in which there is no need to question this authority.”
So if you believe the government, then you have nothing to worry about. But if you don’t believe the government, is there anything you can do? One option is to construct your own “Chembuster”—a device that will “absorb bad energy and release good energy.” To build one (you can find directions online), combine aluminum shavings, magnets, crystals, and copper pipes with epoxy or polyester resin in a large bucket. Use a dowsing rod to find a good spot to place your bucket, apply “psychic insights,” and voilà, the chemtrails will no longer affect you because the Chembuster is “transmuting the atmospheric orgone energy envelope from a polarity that allows chemtrails to persist, to another orgone polarity, which will cause chemtrails to disperse.”
There. Now you can breathe easy!
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“I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo…in morse code.”
—Emo Phillips
Worldwide, 56 near misses between planes and UFOs have been reported. (No accidents…so far.)