Tuesday, Mar. 30, 2004 - 7:42 p.m.

I See Chemtrails

Prompted by an email I received from Conspiracy Man, I found a website about chemtrails complete with photographs. In the photos, chemtrails don’t look like anything I haven’t seen in the skies all my life. According to the website, they began appearing in the early 1970’s, so perhaps I have been seeing them all my life. The crux of the issue, I think, is how can one distinguish chemtrails from ordinary jet contrails?

One morning a week ago, a day of clear blue skies, everything changed for me. I saw one plane leaving a fat, billowing trail that spanned from horizon to horizon. It matched the description of a chemtrail. At the same time, another jet nearby was producing a shorter trail that matched the description I had read of a contrail. The contrast was stunning. The contrail dissipated very quickly—disappearing completely around 20 airplane-lengths behind the jet. The contrail-plane also seemed to be flying at a higher altitude than the chemtrail-plane, which seemed odd. If contrails are caused by ice crystals forming from the water vapor in jet exhaust, one would expect a stronger trail higher up where it’s colder.

A parallel chemtrail that had been laid earlier had started spreading out into a wider cloud. Just as the website described, I clearly saw white tendrils coming down off the underside of the cloud, looking like some constituent in the chemtrail was too heavy to remain suspended in the air with the rest of the cloud.

A few hours later, the trails had spread out into thin horizontal sheets resembling cirrus clouds. They continued to spread out into a silvery haze that let the sunlight through.

In subsequent days, the pattern repeated on sunny days with blue skies. The planes regularly leave parallel trails, always from North to South. By late afternoon, the trails leave the sky a smeary bluish-white. I miss normal skies. Now I feel happy when I see a normal contrail. Hooray! Nothing but nice, clean jet exhaust.

I told someone about what I saw, and she responded that she knew all about chemtrails and had been at an outdoor music festival that got sprayed by chemtrails, and soon after, everyone there developed respiratory discomfort and became mentally confused. After some initial excitement, I had to reluctantly dismiss this story as annecdotal. Even if those symptoms could have been more objectively verified, they could have been caused by any of a great number of factors.

But what can I actually claim to know? Only that I saw two very different kinds of trails coming out of planes. I am willing to call the billowy, lingering kind of trail a chemtrail because it’s reasonable to presume it’s made of some kind of chemical, even if it’s just harmless dihydrogen oxide. I find the conjecture that chemtrails are made of something other than jet exhaust to be plausible. To accept that they’re merely contrails at this point, I’d need to hear an explanation of 1) how simultaneously, a plane at a lower altitude could leave a much longer contrail than one at a higher altitude, 2) how a contrail can linger in the air for hours, spreading out into a cirrus-resembling cloud, and later into a thin, white haze, 3) why the lingering contrails are only left by planes flying from North to South. For now, I think the explanation that those planes are intentionally spraying something is the most plausible explanation I can think of.

Keep looking up.

Surprise ending!

I reverted back to chemtrail agnosticism after reading this page. It suggests that the difference in duration of contrails could be due to a difference in humidity. I could buy that. This one nailed it for me, and now I’m leaning heavily towards disbelieving in chemtrails (This is the best pro-chemtrail rebuttal I've seen; I don't know how to evaluate it). Just as well; I had plenty of other things to worry about.

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