Chemtrails conspiracy theory took off in Maricopa, where it’s surprisingly mainstream

While Maricopa’s rapid development during the housing bubble kept eyes earthbound, Shawn Brian’s gaze wandered skyward.

In 2006, he lived on Rancho El Dorado’s Bishop Drive.

It was that year, less than six months after YouTube.com launched, when he uploaded the first video to his channel titled “Chemtrails over Arizona.” It was one of a dozen videos filmed in Maricopa that have garnered more than 200,000 views.

Fashionably late to adopt his 9/11 conspiracy theories, Brian really was ahead of his time with this one.

According to records from YouTube — now the second-most visited website in the world — his was the first video mentioning the word “chemtrails” ever uploaded to the site from America. A previous video referencing chemtrails was published a few weeks earlier by a user in Italy.

The sky is falling
People who endorse the chemtrails theory believe the government or other groups endorsed by the government engage in secret aerial spraying of toxic chemicals for purposes like population control, brainwashing or weather manipulation. They point to visible, linear plumes in the sky, similar to contrails, as evidence.

The thick white lines that protract across the sky are actually trails of water vapor that condense and freeze around the exhaust from an aircraft, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Contrails look different depending on temperature and humidity.

“It just seems silly,” said David Keith, a geoengineering researcher at Harvard University who has publicly debunked chemtrail theory for more than a decade. “I haven’t seen a single piece of evidence suggesting there’s anything real here. I don’t believe there is one person who really works as a normal scientist who thinks that.”

Still, the theory has gained traction in recent years, buoyed by the harangues of respected politicians and podcasters, and normalized by the references that seep into popular culture, like Lana Del Rey’s 2021 album Chemtrails over the Country Club.

It’s a global phenomenon and its influence, naturally, is no less itinerant than the aircraft upon which the theory is based. But its roots in Maricopa are conspicuous and undeniable.

The Global Chemtrail Report Center in September last year published a map identifying 107 locations with “known chemtrail activity” around the globe. It’s a new resource for subscribers to the theory that was accessed more than 190,000 times by June 10.

One of the pins on the map is in Maricopa, near Murphy and Steen Roads. It’s one of two pins in Arizona; the other is in Kingman.

Brian, a 48-year-old heavy metal musician, has submitted his Maricopa findings to the Global Chemtrail Report Center, describing the spraying he saw as “heavy.”

“I walked out my front door at about 6:50 a.m. and saw lines and a huge X thing in the sky,” he recalled of the morning of March 31. “This day, the entire state was hit extremely hard. The debunkers tell me it’s normal and has to do with weather conditions…Yeah, right.”

Choosing to believe
It started with a 1996 Air Force research paper: “Owning the weather in 2025,” which came just after London tested more than 750 mock chemical warfare attacks on the public during the Cold War. Researchers found the chemicals used could be cancerous.

The research paper’s titular year seemed a far-off, almost futuristic date at the time. More of a concept than a leaf on the calendar, like when George Orwell penned 1984 in 1949.

But now it’s not even half a year away, and chemtrails “are one of the most popular conspiracy theories,” CNN declared just four months ago.

An unscientific InMaricopa survey of 680 local residents in May found more than half of people think it’s possible the chemtrails theory is true or partially true, while more than one-fourth “strongly believe the government uses chemicals to control the population.”

That means Maricopa residents believe in the conspiracy theory at rates more than triple the national average, according to Statista/YouGov polling released in February.

The nonbelievers laugh off chemtrail theory as a fringe movement. Rancho Mirage resident Brandon Ash conflated two conspiracy theories when he quipped in April, “Thankfully, my 5G service repelled the chemtrails, just like the salesman told me.”

But 1 in 4 Maricopans is something more than fringe. Like another Rancho Mirage resident, Danny Martinez, who was driving through Komatke, near Laveen, when he noticed, “There sure are a lot of chemtrails today.” He called them “weather altering.”

A Maricopa resident who only identified himself as Jeff last year became a contributor on the website ChemtrailsExposed.com, where he shared his findings after using a 120,000-lumen light near John Wayne Parkway and Honeycutt Road to see “flakes like a snowstorm” in the beam near suspected chemtrail spraying, in his words.

Other Maricopa residents have even taken to giving the so-called chemtrails nicknames in hurricane-esque fashion, like a self-styled “conspiracy theorist” who posted a series of images tagged in Maricopa on X, then Twitter, offering names like “The Phoenix,” “Basket Weaving” and “The Drunken Chemtrail.”

Seedy business
One devout believer in chemtrail theory is Marcy Rosemond, a 52-year-old barista from Santa Rosa Crossing. Her question is this: “What exactly are we breathing in?”

Growing up in the 1970s near McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash., Rosemond’s father was an airplane mechanic. She was raised around planes and believes she’s no stranger to how they function.

“In my childhood, I never saw multiple planes flying leaving trails at the same time,” she said. “That led me to seriously question if cloud seeding is really taking place, what exactly are the chemicals used and long-term effects of breathing the air.”

Unlike chemtrails, cloud seeding is very real. It’s the process of launching silver iodide particles into certain clouds, from the ground or an aircraft, that cause the clouds to drop up to 10% more rain. Utah this year is spending $14 million on cloud seeding projects in the Upper Basin.

As Rosemond sat on her back porch the morning of May 7, she watched as a plane dove from the sky, leaving a predictable contrail in its wake. Days earlier, she saw a similar plane in the same area, belching out those pesky, grid-like streaks that lingered for hours.

But something was different this time.

“What I saw today dissipated within seconds. It didn’t stay and fan out as it previously did,” Rosemond said that afternoon. “The weather is exactly the same, so clearly there is a difference between a contrail and cloud seeding.”

Since 2007, the Central Arizona Project has helped fund cloud seeding programs in California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Today, Salt River Project is studying the feasibility of cloud seeding in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, although officials still decry it a conspiracy theory here, saying it has never been used in the Grand Canyon State.

Jasmine Nelson, who lives in Hidden Valley, said she became skeptical of the Arizona sky after learning about manmade weathering elsewhere. She said she thinks it’s possible NASA creates our rainclouds, something the federal space agency has proven it’s capable of.

But the silver iodide particles associated with cloud seeding are launched into clouds — they, themselves, are not clouds. The particles aren’t visible to the naked eye and wouldn’t create skinny, protracted trails across the sky.

Cloudy with a chance of screwballs
The evidence against chemtrails hasn’t kept them out of politics. Arizona is no exception.

During the 2018 midterm elections, the Senate Leadership Fund, aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, spend $10,000 in Arizona on an ad campaign against then-Republican Sen. Jeff Flake’s primary opponent, endowing her the sobriquet “Chemtrail Kelli.”

Dr. Kelli Ward, who until last year chaired the Arizona GOP, once invited the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to a town hall in Kingman to hear constituent concerns over chemtrails.

This year, Republican lawmakers in Kentucky, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee proposed dog-whistle legislation banning so-called chemtrails. It is Potemkin legislation that serves no further purpose than as a showpiece counter to an artificially constrained problem.

In Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee quietly signed the bill, which claims it is “documented” the federal government conducts “experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere,” into law.

It’s not a partisan effort, though.

Similar legislation was proposed this year in bright blue Rhode Island, where staff reporters at the left-center Newport Daily News, a local arm of USA Today, unironically published this headline: “Chemtrails Poison is Ruining Rhode Islanders’ Health From Above, and You May Not Even Know It.”

In Arizona, lawmakers last year set up the Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee and tapped Kristen Meghan as an expert panelist. Meghan said “governments or shadowy forces are routinely spraying the planet with chemicals” on alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ radio show.

Meghan has written that “chemtrails is a term used to disparage the truth about it.”

Poison Sky
The year was 1999, and Steve Wargo, a filmmaker based in Tempe, was off-roading in the desert with a friend.

“I stopped, and I looked up in the sky and said, ‘That’s not normal. That’s not clouds. That’s not jet trails,’” Wargo recalled. His friend replied, “’It could be those chemical trails.’”

That was the first Wargo ever heard of chemtrails, a term first used no more than three years earlier. Intrigued, he quizzed another friend, a Lockheed C-130 pilot based at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport.

“I said, ‘How come there are different patterns? If the wind is blowing, I see some jet streams spread out, but others are rock solid,’” Wargo remembered. “The guy told me, ‘Those are spray patterns from the government.’”

Examining his friend’s aircraft, he said he found nozzles along the wings and tail inconsistent with fire prevention mechanisms, what they purportedly were.

In 2001, Wargo penned the screenplay for Poison Sky, consulting his cousin, the Warner Bros. writer behind 2006’s The Hoax.

The film stars Kevin Sorbo, Hercules star-turned-climate change-denying MAGA mouthpiece, and Arlene Newman-Van Asperen of Lost and Jurassic World fame.

Although Sorbo now lives in Florida, his film studio is in Mesa.

“They kicked him out of Hollywood for being a Republican,” Wargo said of Sorbo, who is a climate disinformationist, according to the Vancouver climate think tank DeSmog. With 1.9 million followers on X, he has long been one of the platform’s most-followed right-wing activists.

Tessa Harrison, a publicist for Sorbo, did not answer questions from InMaricopa for this story. But it goes without saying her client was fit like a glove into the role of Olaf Strom in Poison Sky, a movie set in a fictional Arizona town much like Maricopa. It’s a hold-onto-your-tinfoil hat docudrama that Wargo said he hopes will bring “recognition about what the government is doing.”

Bringing it home
Wargo, photographed often with star-studded actors and musicians like Paula Abdul, Danny Trejo and Jerry Springer, remembers his first drive into Maricopa when it was a one-light rural farming town.

“You come into town, you turn left at the railroad tracks, you squiggle your way along the railroad track for a little bit and you find yourself at this Nissan track facility,” he recollected.

What he described was one of many expeditions his crew made during the 23-year-and-counting journey to bring Poison Sky to the silver screen. Other scenes were filmed in Prescott, Payson and Kingman.

The docudrama, when finished, may contain clips from Ward’s 2014 meeting with DEQ over chemtrails. Six days after the Lake Havasu City News-Herald reported this fact, Raw Story published this headline: “Chemtrails movie ‘Poison Sky’ to feature TV’s Hercules and terrified AZ residents.”

Since then, chemtrail theory has only become more mainstream, especially near Maricopa. Six months after Ward’s town hall, the blog “Stop Chemtrails” named Pinal County Airpark “one of the most busy chemtrail base[s] of operations in the entire U.S.A.”

That’s what Wargo wants to accomplish with his movie: “For people to understand.”

“The government used to brag about it, and all of a sudden, they went into 100% denial,” he said. “It’s a little bit scary. It seems like nobody ever has to answer to what the government is doing.”

Poison Sky was endorsed by Arizona Chemtrail Trackers, a group of some 250 activists from around the state, including Maricopa.

But the movie remains unfinished. Its original investor, whom Wargo said can’t be named due to an NDA, died mid-production and the coffers dried up. The investor, who lived in metro Phoenix, “was an older guy, but he was a firm believer in the whole chemtrail thing,” Wargo said.

Poison Sky is $50,000 away from completion after a journey of nearly a quarter-century. Wargo, 75, is determined to give it one more college try.

If he’s successful, he believes, a few more people in Maricopa will open their eyes to the danger that has hung above their heads this whole time.