Mystery in the sky? | News | goldendalesentinel.com

A reader came in and said, “Please come outside; I’d like to show you something.” He pointed to jumbled white paths in the sky. “What do you think those are?” he asked, then answered his own question: “They’re chemtrails.”

He mentioned the apparent surge in seasonal allergy reactions in some people lately. “The chemtrails could have something to do with that.”

He’s asked, but don’t chemtrails fall into the conspiracy theory category? “Depends,” he says, “on whether you believe in them or not.” After covering a few more chemtrail points, he walks away, but not before curiosity gets the best of this editor; moments later I’m on the sidewalk taking a picture of the lines in the sky.

Then along comes someone who asks what’s so interesting up there. After hearing the explanation, he says, “Oh, that again? Completely erroneous. It’s just condensation. That’s why they’re called contrails, short for condensation trails.”

Back-to-back accounts for the same phenomenon. Time to consult the oracle that lives on the computer.

Every search engine engaged to explore “chemtrails” comes up with the same information: chemtrails are devoutly held by some as absolute truth by some and utterly dismissed as a conspiracy theory by others. The overwhelming predominance of information online is on the side of conspiracy theory, ostensibly backed up by a large amount of scientific information. But to those who hold it as truth, no amount of “science” will dissuade them.

Nutshell summary: in the late 1990s, the chemtrail theory hit the big time largely as a result of late-night radio host Art Bell, who picked it up from a pair of internet forum moderators repeating reports that the U.S. Air Force had been spraying the American population with mysterious substances from high-flying aircraft. Add a dash of suspicious minds to a rumor, and often the result is a notion with a captivating mystique. Behold the chemtrail-but those with a matching mindset say they have good reason to be suspicious.

Immediately after the notion caught fire, there was push-back from the military and government agencies, which in itself was sufficient reason for many to believe the real conspiracy was coming from them. The Air Force said the theory was a hoax that got its start with citations from an internal paper outlining possible strategies to maintain air dominance in the year 2025; many of those strategies, the Air Force said, were fictional. Oh, really? responded the chemtrailers-why would you include “fictional” scenarios in a strategy paper? And on the back-and-forth went.

Scientists with no dogs in the fight apparently have explanations that satisfy most people unattached to an outcome. According to them, chemtrails simply don’t exist for two primary reasons: 1) even if they were designed to accomplish some malevolent purpose, they would be about the dumbest and most ineffective way to do it; and 2) every idea proposed to “prove” their existence can be readily disproven.

For example, a key “proof” of chemtrails cited outside The Sentinel office last week was that regular contrails dissipate pretty quickly. Not the chemtrails, it was stated-those will hang up there for hours, even days. That very fact establishes that they cannot be mere moisture vapor.

That would be intriguing if it were true. But every scientific source found in the search conducted for this story states vapor trails can remain etched in the air for very long periods of time. The rate at which contrails dissipate, according to multiple sources, depends entirely on atmospheric conditions; if the atmosphere is relatively dry, they will dissipate quickly, but if the air is heavily saturated with moisture, they can live for long stretches of time and even spread out into cirrus configurations.

And scientists state that to contaminate a population by spraying stuff (not to get too technical) in the air at extremely high altitudes is patently counterproductive. Unpredictable winds, they say, would move the elements around significantly and dissipate their effects.

Go figure. Like pretty much anything you can see in the sky, what you make of it depends on your point of view. Meanwhile sources on both sides of the issue have stated their readiness to provide additional research to support their obviously accurate perspectives.