The Weekly Doubt | Issue 5

The Weekly Doubt | Issue 5

Chemtrails

If you want to poison the entire population of a city, what could be a better method than to spray everyone from a plane? Quite a few things, actually, but I’ll get to that in a minute. 

A “contrail” is a condensation trail left when a plane flies through the air. According to conspiracy theorists, regular contrails disappear quickly, as you would expect from what is essentially steam. “Chemtrails,” apparently, look like contrails, but linger in the air for far longer than they should. 

Chemtrail conspiracy theorists speculate that the purpose of the claimed chemical release may be psychological manipulation, human population control, weather modification, biological or chemical warfare, or that the trails cause respiratory illnesses and other health problems.

According to the website geoengineeringwatch.org, people who don’t believe in chemtrails are “either intellectually challenged to the extreme, or they are paid shills in the employ of the various organs of government propaganda.” I can’t prove I’m not either of these.

I sympathise with people who believe this idea. The trails left by planes are massive, you can see them for ages after the plane has gone, and they look creepy as all hell. Treating the government with suspicion is always healthy. However, there is no reason why a chemtrail would behave differently to a contrail. The time a contrail lingers is dependent on what the upper-level winds are doing, not the contrail’s chemical composition.

Anything released at 10,000 metres would be blown kilometres away from where you see it, with virtually no chance of settling straight down onto the people below. If It did drop to the ground, it would be so diluted it would have no measurable amount of the chemical by the time it lands. That’s why crop-dusting planes have to fly about 10 metres off the ground to try to ensure most of their dust hits the right crops. Science writer Kyle Hill calculated that to poison the population of the US with chemtrails, the government would need to schedule four million 747 flights flying as low as crop-dusters each week – 18 times more flights than currently fly in the US per day. 

If the government wanted to poison us they’d do it in a more efficient way, for example, by putting it in the water. There is, of course, a world crisis as the result of pollution which plane emissions contribute a huge amount to. If you want to get fired up about what’s coming out of a plane, you should do it over global warming, not chemtrails. 

This article first appeared in Issue 5, 2016.
Posted 12:50pm Sunday 3rd April 2016 by Wee Doubt.