“The sky is Falling”

We’ve all heard the story of Chicken Little—a fanciful tale about panic and jumping to conclusions. But how would it feel to truly believe that the sky is out to get you?

For believers in one strange conspiracy theory, it’s scary to see a blue sky crossed by wispy white contrail lines from passing jet planes. They claim some of those contrails are not clouds or exhaust from jet engines as they appear, but sinister “chemtrails.” Supposedly, an evil government conspiracy uses jet planes to secretly spread poison across skies worldwide. Is there any possibility this paranoid claim could be true?

Let’s Find out!

WHAT ARE CONTRAILS?

Before we dig into the chemtrails legend, let’s learn about ordinary, well-understood, non-evil contrails. These have been a familiar, common sight for several decades. But what are contrails, exactly?

They’re line-shaped clouds of tiny ice crystals. “Contrail” is short for “condensation trail.” They’re created when airplanes disturb air that is cold enough and moist enough. Jet engine exhaust includes gases, water vapor, and microscopic particles of metal and soot. These cause tiny water droplets to condense from moisture that is already present in the outside air, and these drops immediately freeze.

Passenger jets fly incredibly high—usually above 30,000 feet. That’s higher than the top of Mount Everest. At that altitude the air is always thin and cold. Those are good conditions for creating contrails. Planes flying at lower altitudes rarely leave contrails because the air is warmer closer to the ground.

Even when flying in the frigid air above 30,000 feet, jets sometimes create contrails and sometimes do not. It depends on the humidity— the amount of moisture in the air. If the air is too dry, there isn’t enough water to condense into a cloud.

PERSISTENT CONTRAILS

When you watch planes soar overhead, you’ll notice that some contrails are quite short and fade away quickly. Others stretch far across the sky and last a long time. Once again it’s humidity that makes the difference.

In a fact sheet about contrails, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explains why this happens:

After the initial formation of ice, a contrail evolves in one of two ways…. If the humidity is low…the contrail will be short-lived.

Newly formed ice particles will quickly evaporate…. The resulting line-shaped contrail will extend only a short distance behind the aircraft.

But if the humidity in the air is high enough, the contrail’s ice crystals don’t evaporate. Instead, explains the EPA,

Newly formed ice particles will continue to grow in size by taking water from the surrounding atmosphere. The resulting line-shaped contrail extends for large distances behind an aircraft. Persistent contrails can last for hours while growing to several kilometers in width….

If several planes cross the sky while conditions are suitable for forming persistent contrails, all of them are likely to leave lingering, expanding white trails behind them. Depending on the winds, these contrails may spread out so much that they blend together and create a thin hazy cloud layer across most of the sky.

So many planes crisscrossing the globe every day add up to a lot of manmade clouds—and a big environmental impact. (We’ll come back to that later in our story.)

THE INVENTION OF CHEMTRAILS

Most people alive today grew up seeing contrails as an ordinary part of the scenery, usually without taking much notice of them. Yet it seems contrails have always made a few people uneasy. There is something a bit odd—certainly unnatural— about lingering artifical lines drawn across the entire sky. Then in the mid-1990s, some people began to view contrails in very sinister new light.

The modern chemtrails legend began with a Washington state farmer named William Wallace. He started to notice just how many contrails hung over his log cabin in the mountains. They lingered, crossing over each other in giant X shapes. It result looked like a grid—like a tic-tac-toe pattern someone was laying down on purpose. But why, he wondered? Sometimes the contrails blurred together, drawing a hazy curtain across the sky. Wallace became suspicious, then alarmed. He started videotaping the patterns. Seeking answers, he sent one contrail video to a website that put writer William Thomas on the case. For Thomas, it was a life-changing assignment—the beginning of a “quest to uncover the biggest covert operation in modern times.”

Wallace told the writer that he thought the contrails were making him sick. He and his wife were both struggling with a variety of health problems, as Thomas reported in his first 1999 article about supposedly dangerous contrails: “Wallace became ill with severe diarrhea and fatigue after watching” several jets “laying cloud lines in an east to west grid pattern.” The mountain couple said they “get a taste in our mouth” when they see jets. “My eyes watered,” Wallace told the writer. “Fluid came out of my nose. I could hardly move my arm up above my head to comb my hair for about a week.”

A Legend Emerges

No doubt the Wallaces did feel sick. Certainly they saw a bunch of contrails. But why should they suppose that these two things had anything to do with each other? And why did Thomas accept their theory? After all, people sometimes get sick without it being caused by airplanes or sinister government forces.

Wallace was jumping to a conclusion without any direct evidence. But perhaps it’s understandable that he did. He saw two things that struck him as wrong and unexplained— unnatural-looking patterns of long-lasting contrails and an unusual pattern of illness—and thought it was unlikely to be a coincidence that both things were happening at the same time.

This reasoning seemed sound to the writer. He agreed that the contrail patterns lasted longer and looked more purposeful than he thought they should. And the Wallaces’ explanation for their health problems seemed to be confirmed when Thomas found other people who thought contrails made them sick, too. He concluded that the long-lasting contrails must be something like “high-altitude crop-dusting”— a widespread and deliberate chemical spraying program.