Date: 1996–Present
Location: Worldwide, but primarily the United States
The Conspirators: Airlines, unknown government agencies
The Victims: Unsuspecting citizens
When you look up in the sky and see an airliner leaving a condensation trail—commonly called a contrail—you’re probably not alarmed and recognize it as a normal phenomenon. But if you’re a conspiracy theorist you may take a different view, supposing the trail to be explainable only as some poisonous or otherwise harmful gas or drug being sprayed by the airplane in order to hurt the people below. They call it a chemtrail, a combination of the words chemical and contrail.
Some believers insist that the chemtrail is made up of a psychoactive drug meant to damage the intelligence of the population to keep them more susceptible to government abuses. Others believe it is an ongoing weather modification scheme, perhaps to combat global warming, that is done without any regard to its impact on people’s health or the environment.
The contrails you see behind airliners are normal and unavoidable condensation created by the plane burning hydrocarbon fuel in certain high-altitude conditions. No chemtrails are needed to explain them.
Although contrails have been familiar since the 1930s when planes first started going high enough, conspiracy theorists had never paid much attention to them until 1996, when a panel of US Air Force officers presented a paper entitled “Weather As a Force Modifier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” Without going into how it might be accomplished, this report muses on how a hypothetical ability to control the weather could be useful in battle situations. Storms, floods, or droughts could be sent to the enemy. Favorable conditions could be orchestrated for our own troops. Space weather—conditions in the Earth’s magnetosphere that can impact radio transmissions and electronics—could be used to interfere with enemy communications. Fog could be created or removed on either side for a tactical advantage. And so on, and so on. Although the paper was speculative and did not presume the existence of any such technologies, conspiracy theorists took it to mean that the US government is absolutely able to do all of these things. The precise genesis of the legend isn’t clear, but somehow the idea got started that this weaponization of weather was to be accomplished using chemicals sprayed from innocent-looking airliners.
Global warming was also coming into the public’s attention about that time, and the Internet chemtrail community quickly made the connection. As CO2 emissions continue to saturate the atmosphere, and the resulting greenhouse effect continues to add heat to the Earth’s climate systems, governments are growing increasingly concerned about strategic effects from sea-level change, sea ice, and other impacts. Conspiracy theorists have thus (rightly) assumed that governments would like very much to do something about it, and (wrongly) assumed that whenever they see a contrail from a jet, it’s likely to be some secret effort to somehow reduce global warming—perhaps an aircraft spraying something to alter the atmosphere’s chemistry.
Eventually, the Internet chemtrail community broadened its scope to include drugging of the population. They believe that if the people can be dumbed down, they can be more easily controlled. Internet trolls began writing elaborate stories, claiming to be airline executives or maintenance engineers coming forward to reveal secret modifications to airliners, including vast chemical tanks hidden on board. Photographs have been attached to the stories appearing to show airliners with gutted interiors, their seats replaced with rows of tanks to hold liquids.
This conspiracy theory was significantly reinforced when the Space Preservation Act of 2001, which banned weapons in space, was presented to the US House of Representatives. The bill included a long list of speculative future “exotic weapons systems,” and on this list was chemtrails. It also listed other ideas, purely science fiction, such as plasma weapons and tectonic weapons—basically, anything and everything these particular senators speculated might eventually exist, based on whatever Star Trek episodes they’d seen. Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists took it as proof that these systems all exist today.
The main problem with all the chemtrail beliefs is that, under common conditions, airplanes are always going to produce contrails. Burning hydrocarbon fuels, such as jet fuel, produces water at about the same volume as fuel burned. Thus, an airplane is always spraying water into the atmosphere as it flies. At altitudes above 25,000 feet and temperatures below −40º (both Celsius and Fahrenheit, as −40º is where the scales happen to intersect), the saturation point is exceeded, and the water condenses into a visible cloud, which we call a contrail. This is a fact of simple physics, and there is no need to introduce the spraying of a mysterious chemical to explain it.
Similar problems plague other claims made by chemtrail believers, such as the idea that the government is spraying mind-control drugs. There are a number of factual problems with the idea of drugging a population by spraying the compound from airlines. The main problem is that airliners fly way too high. The jet streams would carry the drug far away from the areas it was sprayed over, and the majority of it would rain down into the oceans. Note that when crop dusters spray fields, it’s done at an altitude of only around 500 to 1,000 feet, not thousands of feet. The chemicals are expensive, and we usually want them to go where we intend.
Another problem is the concentration. Any drug released from a plane wouldn’t be concentrated enough to have an effect—even if by some miracle it floated directly down rather than being carried away by the jet streams. Think about it this way, when a dentist gives nitrous oxide, it’s given at a concentration of about 30 percent. But stratospheric delivery at airliner fuel tank volumes, by any reasonable calculation, would result in a concentration measured in parts per trillion. There really aren’t any medical gases that produce a pharmacological effect in such trace quantities.
We encounter similar problems if we take the alternate theory that the idea is to address global warming instead of drugging the populace. Again, the altitude at which planes fly is the culprit. If airliners were trying to spray something into the troposphere where they fly, it would soon rain right back down to Earth. If you wanted it to stay up there, you would need to put it well up into the stratosphere instead.
Such geoengineering has actually been studied, and may indeed be enacted. This theorized technique is called SAI (stratospheric aerosol injection) and it involves the act of depositing certain compounds into the stratosphere, resulting in a screen of sulfate aerosols to reflect a tiny percentage of sunlight back into space. Airliners fly at a maximum of 45,000 feet, but the sulfate aerosol gases work best to reflect sunlight at an altitude about twice that high. In addition, it would be impossible to get enough of the compound even up as high as only 45,000 feet without making an unreasonably huge number of flights, up to a million a year! Fighter-type aircraft could be used, but balloons or rockets would be better choices, both for cost and payload. So if SAI was indeed happening clandestinely, visible aircraft chemtrails would likely not be correlated with it, as planes fly too low, would be too expensive, and can’t carry enough payload.
But does the 1996 Air Force report “Weather As a Force Multiplier” prove that we are indeed using chemtrails to change weather? Not if you read it carefully. Not only does the report say that “artificial weather technologies do not currently exist,” but it actually proclaims clearly on its second page, “This report contains fictional representations of future situations/scenarios.”
The chemtrail theory also suffers from a total lack of evidence. If airliners around the world truly all had been retrofitted with huge chemical tanks and spraying equipment, airport maintenance workers would know about it. No one has ever produced any photographs or other evidence. The pictures online of airplane interiors filled with large tanks and pipes turn out to simply be ballast tanks used in testing of airliners.
Contrails are 100 percent reproducible and are often visible when you look up into the sky. When we compare a known, proven phenomenon to a purely speculative, implausible, and scientifically impossible phenomenon, it doesn’t take much computation to determine which is the real explanation.