I See A Chemtrail Out My Window Right Now! What Am I Breathing????

When I was a little kid I would watch the skies for planes (still do.)  I wondered how something so small in the sky could be so big on the ground, and how something so fast seemed to be moving so slowly.  And I wondered why sometimes I saw just a silver-gray dot, with maybe a hint of glare off a window, while other times there were great big white trails following the plane.  Eventually I learned what causes those contrails, and saw plenty more, in real life and in movies and newsreels about World War Two, where great fleets of planes would blanket the sky (and where those trails were avoided when possible because they made it easy for enemies to find the planes.)

Basically, planes will leave trails because just like your car's exhaust, plane exhaust is hot and wet.  Now picture it coming out in a cool, dry area of the sky, and poof!  You have a little cloud.  Whether they actually form, and exactly what they look like and how long they last, depends on the actual conditions where the plane is.

Some time in the '90s, some people became convinced that part of what we see in the sky is a vast conspiracy to poison us, maybe brainwash us.  They said what we see are really "chemtrails," poisonous substances spread by the military, or secret airline projects, and that they were covering the globe with chemicals.  Now I am open-minded, but also skeptical.  You have to show me facts before I will believe something bizarre.  Not that bizarre things can't be true, just that I tend to live by Occam's Razor, and of course Sagan's rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  And I have always been watching the skies, and along the way I've hung out a lot at airports, even worked at them, and gotten my pilot's license.  So, unlike some other things that are the subject of conspiracy theories I know quite a bit about this particular topic.

(I'm going to ignore, for the purposes of this post, the fact that chemicals are indeed sprayed from planes to fight pests, and fertilize crops, and seed clouds.  All these things happen, but they are pretty common, and presumably not conspiracies.)

Now, I do not doubt that our government has done things without our knowledge, and experimented on us.  Tuskegee, nuclear bomb tests, and all sorts of other instances of such misbehavior mean I would not put it past them to try to alter the weather, or use chemicals on us for other reasons.  But if you want to convince me that it is not just possible but is actually happening, I'm going to need a little proof.  I have read articles about this (and written letters to the editor in response.)  I have debated people about it online.  I have seen a lot of pseudo-scientific garbage thrown around supposedly proving that chemtrails exist.  I have seen uncountable  pictures and videos supposedly of chemtrails but clearly showing normal contrails.  Hey, when you don't understand something, it's easy to jump to conclusions about what it is.  And with our increasing lack of historical perspective, and short attention spans fed by cable news and the internet, it's easy to just look out the window and make instant assumptions about what we see, instead of putting it in context and thinking for a moment about what it is likely to be.  But I am still disappointed to find presumably-intelligent people convinced that any time a plane flies over it is dropping deadly chemicals.

All of the "evidence" I've been shown has been normal aviation occurrences.  Those who actually spend time in the sky, or lots of time observing it, are baffled by the willingness of some to believe in chemtrails, and by their zealousness in refusing to accept facts.  Contrails occur whenever the atmospheric conditions support them, and can vary quite a bit.  They can be short or long, skinny or wide, disappear almost instantly or last for hours (sometimes even causing a thin layer of clouds.)  You might see two planes flying at the same time, with only one leaving contrails.  Why?  Because, though you might not be able to tell, they are flying at different altitudes.  The atmosphere, and the weather, are not as uniform and obvious as you might think.  Winds and temperatures can vary greatly as you go up.  Which leads us to one of the assumptions of chemtrail believers: that whatever is being sprayed is drifting down on us, for whatever purpose.  Look, if something is sprayed at 30,000 feet, even 10,000 feet, it is not going to come straight down on you.  In those vertical miles, the winds are blowing in different directions at different altitudes, and whatever it is will be dispersed, or at the very least drift way off target. 

There is talk of patterns, of concentrations of chemtrails over cities, etc.  "There's no other reason for this!"  Except that there is.  Obviously planes congregate around cities for takeoff and landing.  But also, they often fly over or near cities due to the way navigation systems are set up.  Planes don't just fly around willy-nilly; they typically go along established routes from point to point.  Small planes not so much, and as GPS becomes more entrenched we will move to a system of more-direct navigation.  But for now, airliners and military flights follow "highways in the sky."

Some will say "but there are so many more of them now!  Something must be going on!"  Indeed- there is something going on.  Air travel is far more common nowadays, mainly because it's a lot cheaper.  Yeah, I hate paying $400 to go somewhere, but adjusted for inflation that's actually low.  Flying used to be reserved for special occasions, and fairly high-up business travelers.  Now almost anybody can go, partly due to deregulation.  Also partly due to airlines cramming more and more seats in, so that your knees now touch your chest.

Conspiracy theorists will say the military and airlines are doing this spraying, for whatever reasons the believers come up with at the moment.  Hey, the military might be able to keep something this big a secret.  Pilots and other aviation employees, not so much.  They talk.  A lot.  They have a lot of time to kill.  And another thing: airlines do not like excess weight, so how would they carry tanks of whatever substance makes these things?

There is talk of contrails looking different nowadays, and maybe they do.  Up into the '70s most jets used turbojet engines; since then, we've gone to turbofans.  Basically, they are more efficient jet engines with fairly different designs.  I don't know enough about engine design to guarantee that this makes contrails come out a little differently, but I wouldn't be surprised.

As with anything else, if you don't know much about a subject, and take what little you do know out of context, you are not going to come to accurate conclusions.  I try not to make assumptions based on inadequate evidence.  The "evidence" for chemtrails consists of a lot of misinterpreted facts.  I know quite a bit about aviation, and the weather, and when I see the pictures and videos they pass off as proof of chemtrails I have to laugh at how little they know about both.  It's normal stuff, but if you pass it through a lens of ignorance and paranoia it might look different.