BY CHRIS LYDGATE
Every morning when
she opens her eyes, Patricia Leedy, a Hillsboro antique dealer, rolls out of
bed, pulls back the blinds and scans the sky. She's not worried about the
terrorists. She's worried about jet contrails.
Not the ordinary
contrails, the needle-thin lines which dissipate within minutes. Leedy has seen
those all her life. What worry her, what gnaw at her, what set her pulse racing
and her joints aching and her lungs itching, are what she calls the chemtrails--the
thick, white plumes that linger for hours, their wispy tendrils meshing into a
ghostly veil that smothers the sky.
Professor William
Randall, who teaches chemistry at Lewis & Clark College, has seen them,
too. So have chimney sweeper Mark Guy, writer Deborah Yates, photographer
Courtney Scott and trumpet player Derek Sims.
You've probably seen
them yourself--diaphanous trails, lazily spreading across the blue like a drop
of ink in a glass of water. You probably paid no notice. But over the past several
months, WW has received dozens of phone calls and emails from readers
convinced of a fantastic set of propositions: that these chemtrails are
fundamentally different from contrails, that they are the result of the
government's secret campaign to spray chemicals into the atmosphere from
high-altitude jets, and that the fallout from chemtrails is making them sick.
"It's just so
blatant," says Leedy. "So blatant.... It just infuriates me.
Spreading this garbage into the air."
"I don't
understand why the news media hushes it up," says Randall. "Something
is being sprayed in the air."
"I know this
sounds like the babbling of a paranoid nutcase," says Guy. "But they are
spraying something. Look up from time to time."
Meteorologists and
government agencies maintain that nothing is amiss. "There is no such
thing as a 'chemtrail,'" Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Gibson wrote to U.S.
Sen. Ron Wyden in January. What people are seeing, Gibson explained, are simply
ordinary contrails (condensation trails), which, under the proper atmospheric
conditions, may persist for hours. "Contrails are safe and are a natural
phenomenon," he concluded. "They pose no hazard of any kind."
In spite of the
official denials, however, thousands of Americans insist that chemtrails do exist,
and that they are part of a vast government experiment to combat global
warming--an experiment gone terribly, terribly wrong.
They believe not
only that chemtrails are responsible for freakish weather patterns (such as the
drought in Klamath Falls) but that chemtrails have triggered an alarming rise
in asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, Alzheimer's, "flu-like illness,"
and a host of syndromes as yet unnamed.
It sounds like a bad
episode of the X-Files. But to dismiss its proponents as a handful of
wingnuts is a little too glib. Apart from the inevitable black-helicopter
contingent, they are ordinary people haunted by an extraordinary obsession.
Using an underground network of websites, talk radio and cable access, they
have bypassed the mainstream media and pieced together a surprisingly large
body of evidence--circumstantial, to be sure, but persuasive enough to lure a
swelling stream of new converts.
And this should come
as no surprise. Like it or not, chemtrails resonate close to the dominant
frequency of our current zeitgeist. Take the pervasive anxiety that we are
being bombarded with environmental toxins, combine it with a healthy dose of
airplane angst, throw in a sprinkling of unexplained phenomena, add a drop of
paranoia, and--Voila!--you get the chemtrail conspiracy, the (il)logical
product of an era where nothing can be trusted--not even clouds.
•
As the sun sets over
the West Hills, the twice-monthly meeting of Oregon Citizens Against Chemtrails
is called to order in an elegant duplex in Northeast Portland. On this
particular evening, eight local chem-trackers crowd around a VCR to examine
video footage of the sky above Orchards, Wash. As thick coils of jet exhaust
unravel across the screen, the adrenaline level in the room soars. There, on
the tape, is the evidence--irrefutable, in their eyes--that something has come
unglued in the heavens. "Oh my goodness!" exclaims one. "Holy
shit!" murmurs another.
Like all combustion
engines, jets produce water vapor in their exhaust. At the low temperatures of
the upper atmosphere, this water vapor combines with moisture in the air and
condenses into droplets or ice crystals, resulting in the familiar, pencil-thin
contrails that have become the hallmark of jet travel. That's not what the
chem-trackers think they're seeing.
As the chem-trackers
swap doomsday scenarios, Patricia Leedy fixes her gaze on a visitor, reaches
deep within herself, and manages to smile.
No one in the
Portland area believes in chemtrails more sincerely than Leedy. With an angelic
face and scrubbed-pink skin, she looks vaguely like an opera singer. In fact,
she is a churchgoing, 46-year-old antique dealer, a mother of two, and a
lifelong skywatcher. She first saw the trails in 1999, when she noticed that
certain jets left behind "a huge, thick plume" that lingered for
hours. In the days after seeing the trails, she grew "deathly sick."
She felt like she was suffocating, like invisible needles were piercing her
joints; her exhaustion was so profound, she could barely put pen to paper.
Her doctors were
baffled. But when she chanced on a radio show about the link between chemtrails
and mysterious "flu-like illness," her heart skipped a beat. That
night, her husband Don, a process engineer at Intel, brought home some
information he found on the Internet. "When I took a look at that, I had
to sit down," she says. "It just blew my mind."
Since then, Leedy's
life has been turned inside out. When the bombardment is heavy, she and Don
keep the windows clamped shut, even though they don't have air conditioning.
Formerly a technophobe, she now spends hours trolling the Internet for the
latest chemtrail news. She keeps a calendar, marking off "spray days"
and charting her symptoms: She says they synchronize perfectly.
Leedy has a warm,
outgoing personality and a bewitching smile. But there is an undercurrent of
real frustration in her voice. "I hate it," she says. "I just
hate it. If I knew a place where there was no spraying, I would pack up and go.
But it's everywhere."
Other chem-trackers
offer variations on this theme. Trumpet player Derek Sims and his wife, Karina,
saw their first plume while driving back from Mount St. Helens. Now he has a
fungal infection his doctors cannot explain. (In addition, the Simses' cats,
Tao and Jasmine, are constantly sneezing). Carpet salesman Chuck Tautfest
wonders if local TV weathermen have been "hushed up." Housecleaner
Robin Bee straps on a surgical mask whenever the spraying gets heavy.
And that's just the
tip of the iceberg. Type "chemtrails" into your favorite search
engine, and you'll find a deluge of references. Hundreds of websites depict
lurid photos of eerie plumes, with eyewitness accounts from Boston to Botswana.
Military projects, weather control, mind control, global warming, genetic
engineering, the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission--conspiracies enough
to fill the Texas Book Depository many times over. For chem-trackers, the
plumes have become a sort of Rorschach blot, an aerial projection of their
worst nightmares.
•
Presiding over this
conspiratorial miasma is talk-radio host Jeff Rense, whose weeknight show, Sightings,
is broadcast from a studio somewhere in Southern Oregon. (Citing threats to his
life, Rense asked WW not to print his exact location.) Five nights a
week, millions of Americans (including an estimated 21,000 Portlanders) in 120
cities tune in to Rense to catch up on the latest news on alien abduction,
Bigfoot, paranormal phenomena--and chemtrails.
A former news anchor
at KOBI-TV in Medford, Rense began to hear reports of chemtrails in 1999. At
first, he wondered if the trails could be the result of some atmospheric
anomaly. Then, looking up at the sky one bright, sunny day, he saw an aircraft
flying overhead, leaving a "thick, white, cotton-candy, sky-writing type
plume, which did not dissipate, but began to drip across the sky in clumps,
like a frozen white rope," he told WW. "Right then and there,
I knew something was going on."
Since then, Rense
has logged thousands of calls and emails on the topic. Together with Will Thomas,
an environmental reporter from Canada, and Cliff Carnicom, a computer
consultant based in Santa Fe, N.M., Rense has become a clearinghouse for the
constantly mutating chaos of the chemtrail movement.
Chem-trackers have
compiled considerable evidence that the government has, at the very least,
expressed interest in experimenting with the sky.
A 1996 Air Force
research paper, often cited by chem-trackers, states that in the next
quarter-century, "U.S. aerospace forces can 'own the weather' by
capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those
technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war
fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible."
Chem-trackers also
point to nuclear physicist Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb,
who in 1997 outlined a plan to combat global warming by introducing tiny
particles into the upper atmosphere, forming a planetary sunscreen that would
reflect a small fraction of the sun's rays back into space.
How would this be
done? In 1991, researchers at the Hughes Aircraft Company obtained a patent to
cool the atmosphere by adding tiny particles of aluminum oxide to the fuel of
jet airliners, "so that the particles would be emitted from the jet engine
exhaust while the airliner was at cruising altitude."
Of course, none of
these documents prove the government is actually conducting operations. But,
chem-trackers insist, they do suggest a capability--and a motive.
Stripped of its wilder
variants, the theory runs like this: The U.S. government (or the United
Nations) has embarked on a secret campaign to reverse global warming (or to
alter the weather) by adding particles to jet fuel. Unfortunately, the spraying
has resulted in international epidemics of flu-like illness, asthma, bronchitis
and Alzheimer's, in addition to freakish drought and floods.
For evidence that
spraying is a real phenomenon, chem-trackers point to reports that tiny
filaments--known as "silly string" or "angel hair"--have
been spotted in the wake of military jets.
That may sound
far-fetched, but such an incident really does seem to have taken place in the
skies over Enterprise, Ore. Last October, Elane Dickenson, news editor of the Wallowa
County Chieftain, was sitting at her desk when a caller reported that
thousands of "spider webs" were falling on downtown Enterprise.
As she subsequently
reported in the Chieftain, when Dickenson arrived at the Ace Hardware
store, masses of fine filaments were descending from the sky, covering utility
lines and car antennae. And, overhead, she saw the telltale streaks of
high-altitude jets.
Dickenson scooped up
a handful of the filaments and took them to OSU's Wallowa County Extension
Office for analysis. Under the microscope, the filaments appeared to be very
similar to--but somewhat coarser than--spider web. Dickenson consulted Oregon
State University entomologist Lynn Royce, who said that spiders do on occasion
generate large quantities of web to propel their newly hatched spiderlings out
into the wild. But Royce said that a massive fallout was unusual--and that
spiderlings should have been observed on the webs (they weren't).
Dickenson is hardly
a radical. She has worked at the Chieftain, one of Oregon's oldest
newspapers, for more than 20 years. "I'm not much of a conspiracy
person," she says. "But that stuff was really weird."
In addition to the
filaments, chem-trackers say that chemtrails contain other compounds. Santa Fe
chem-tracker Carnicom has collected dozens of rainwater samples in the wake of
heavy spraying that contain high concentrations of aluminum, magnesium, barium
and--ominously--red blood cells. He has forwarded these samples to the EPA,
only to receive them back, unopened.
Government agencies
maintain that chemtrails are a hoax--that they are nothing more than persistent
contrails that linger because of moisture conditions in the air.
"Contrails have been a normal effect of jet aviation since its earliest
days," states a fact sheet published by the EPA, NASA, the Federal
Aviation Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. "Persistent contrails are mainly composed of water
naturally present along the aircraft flight path."
"The Air Force
doesn't conduct any weather manipulation experiments," Air Force
spokeswoman Marriane Miclat told WW. "There is no spraying going
on."
"It's one of
those things that seem to be based on a little bit of fact and stretched out of
all recognition," says OSU climatologist George Taylor, who fields several
calls a month from anxious chem-trackers. "I try to explain it's just
condensed water vapor, but it's not very convincing. They say I'm in on the
plot."
Chem-trackers don't
want reassurances. They want investigations, studies, proof that the government
is not spraying chemicals. But what counts as proof when you don't trust the
government, the doctors or the media?
•
If there is a giant
conspiracy to spray chemicals from the sky, chances are good that Professor
John Day is not a part of it. The author of six books on meteorology, Day is a
world-renowned expert on clouds, a professor emeritus at Linfield College and a
regular contributor to the McMinnville News-Register, where--at the
sprightly age of 88--he pens a weekly column, "Words on the Weather,"
still running strong in its 23rd year.
Day is also a
tireless champion of the grandeur and beauty of clouds. "Most people don't
spend much time looking up," he says. "I have tried to do what I can
to persuade people to see the beauty of the sky."
When he hears the
word "chemtrail," however, Day's frosty mustache droops, and his
sky-blue eyes darken. "I don't happen to warm up to that phenomenon,"
he sighs.
Despite his
reluctance to be drawn into the controversy, Day graciously agreed to examine
photographs of chemtrails to see if he spotted anything unusual.
"This is a
perfectly normal situation with cirrocumulus cloud and a single spreading
contrail," he declared after inspecting one photo for a full minute. Then
he flipped to the next. "Nothing weird about that. Cirrostratus
cloud..."
And the next.
"The criss-cross pattern is a consequence of planes flying criss-cross
patterns...."
And the next.
"I've seen many situations like this one...."
Contrail formation,
Day explained, depends on the relative humidity of the atmosphere--the ratio of
what is to what could be at a particular temperature.
When relative
humidity is low, contrails dissipate within seconds. But when relative humidity
is high, especially at the subzero temperatures of the upper atmosphere, the
addition of even a tiny amount of water vapor acts as a catalyst. Under these
conditions, contrails may linger and spread to cover the whole sky.
"Contrails can
persist a long time," Day concluded, gently. "If you have the right
situation, you can produce a cirrostratus sky that will last for hours and
hours."
At length, Day
extracted from his bookshelf a well-thumbed edition of Peterson's Field
Guide to Clouds and Weather, which he co-authored in 1991 (a good 10 years
before chemtrails became widely discussed), turned to the section on contrails,
and pointed to a photograph of a thick, white plume--a plume that looked for
all the world like a chemtrail.
That photo doesn't
disprove the existence of chemtrails, of course. But it does suggest that the
chem-trackers' most compelling evidence--the "sudden" proliferation
of persistent trails--is nebulous.
It's no exaggeration
to say that we live in an age of anxiety. Over the past 20 years, formerly
innocent phenomena--a drop of blood, a chip of paint, an unwashed apple--have
mutated into deadly biohazards. We are under assault from the air we breathe,
the food we eat, the bodily fluids we once exchanged (more or less) freely.
Lead lurks in our drinking fountains, mercury in our thermometers, mold in our
basements, and aflatoxins in our peanut butter.
Given this
atmosphere of paranoia, perhaps it was inevitable that even clouds--the
ultimate symbols of harmless fluff--would eventually fall under suspicion.
Ironically, there
are legitimate concerns about contrails. Some researchers believe that
contrails may contribute to global warming by boosting the earth's cloud
cover--a phenomenon likely to intensify as air traffic climbs.
But that's not what
the chem-trackers are worried about. They want an explanation for the coughing
fits, the fungal infections, the unearthly filaments and the drought in Klamath
Falls. Terrifying though it may be, the chem-trackers have found something that
gives them a sense of purpose, a mission in life--a mission that gains new
urgency every time they look up at the sky.
--WW interns
David Shafer, Brett Weinstein and Marianne Reid contributed to this report.
Tracking the
Lines in the Sky
Despite our
considerable skepticism about chemtrails, WW decided to conduct the following
experiment: Setting aside for a moment the question of whether chemtrails
exist, we asked local chem-trackers to alert us when they spotted a suspicious
plume. We then attempted to track down the identity of the aircraft and
interview its operators.
The call comes in at
4:41 pm on Thursday, Sept. 6. Patricia Leedy has spotted two jets in the
northeast quadrant of the sky, flying north, trailing thick plumes over
Hillsboro. "I can see them now," she says. "They're right
overhead!"
I thank her, hang up
the phone, and page Mike Fergus, a public-affairs officer at the Federal
Aviation Administration in Renton, Wash.
Fergus and I have
worked out a procedure in advance: When I get a "live call" on a
chemtrail, I will relay the information to him, and he will relay it to the
regional Air Route Traffic Control Center in Auburn, Wash., which monitors
civilian flights over Portland. Based on the time and the location of the
sighting, an air traffic controller will--hopefully--identify the offending
aircraft.
Minutes later,
Fergus calls back. ARTCC has a positive identification for both jets. The first
is Alaska Airlines Flight 513 from Ontario, Calif., to Seattle, a Boeing 737
cruising at 39,000 feet.
The second is a
private jet, a British Aerospace BAE 125, cruising at 35,000 feet, owned by
Potelco, a utility contracting firm based in Sumner, Wash.
Finally! We've
nailed the sprayers! Or have we?
"If I refused
to comment, it'd make your story more exciting," says Alaska Airlines
spokesman Jack Walsh. "But I can unequivocally say no, there is no
spraying. If there was anything like that going on, we'd know about it."
Contacted by WW,
the pilot of the Potelco jet described the chemtrail theory as "rather
fantastic," and said there was nothing unusual about his plane, its engine
or the fuel he was using. "The persistent trail is a matter of
physics," said the pilot, who asked that WW not print his name.
"Sometimes you see them, and sometimes you don't." He added that the
plane, the sole jet owned by Potelco, was returning from "a trip on
company business."
Chem-trackers were
not convinced by the denials. "I don't know if you're getting the real
facts on that," Leedy told WW. "I would be surprised if
anybody came clean."
Nonetheless, the
experiment suggests that the chemtrails hypothesis now implies a conspiracy
involving, in addition to the government, Alaska Airlines and a Washington
company whose specialties include ditch-digging.
--Chris Lydgate
Originally
published 9/26/2001