And why am I so hard on Taos’s favorite conspiracy theory, chemtrails? It’s just the sheer stupidity of it and the obvious grift of the geoengineering watch dot org website that is the main promoter of it. I’ve often said that the path to debunking it are many and varied. Here is one, the technical aspect and it will focus on the many failings of Mr. Wigington and his website to make his case. The first thing you see on his website is the Paypal donate button. The grift is obvious. To make his case, he mainly has a list of long expired patents and one test where he flies to the upper atmosphere where planes fly and takes a sample of the air and has it analyzed. He finds all kind of substances in it. It sounds good if you don’t know how testing and sampling work but if you do, his methodology is completely flawed. One, all he got was a random sample of the upper atmosphere and there’s no way to connect what he found to the contrails in the atmosphere. All kinds of chemicals work their way from the ground into the upper atmosphere and once there they can travel vast distances. The substances found could as easily come from a smokestack in Siberia as from an airplane. The way to find out what a contrail is made of is to do a spectral analysis of a contrail. Spectral analysis the way we find out what the atmosphere of other planets are made of. When light passes through a chemical it filters some frequencies and passes others and every chemical has a spectral signature. It’s both cheaper and more accurate than taking samples of the upper atmosphere. And no matter what the method, you never just do just one test and claim definitive results, you always repeat it multiple time to account for false positives and sample and lab errors.
And for the patents, they are some kind of joke. There’s a big difference between conceiving of something and carrying it out. If I do a reverse engineering of what Wigington describes in his website and start making a list of what would be required to implement a chemtrails program, it quickly becomes a reductio ad absurdum. It would require engineers to design the spraying systems, manufacturers to make them and install them in airplanes, technicians to clean and maintain them, ground crews to put the chemicals in the planes and on and on. All of this would create an extensive paper trail and somehow, none of it has ever been leaked and Wigington provides none of it. The last time I looked at his website, he had a photoshopped image of some pipes sticking out of an airplane wing. At that point, I just wrote him off as a jackass who didn’t know what he was talking about. He obviously doesn’t know that the way to turn a liquid into an aerosol is to put it through a narrow aperture under pressure just like it’s done in an airbrush or spray bottle. If a liquid was passed through his photoshopped sprayers, the plane would pee chemicals, not spray them. It’s also not a good idea to use the wings of an airplane to do this either. The real world examples of planes dumping chemicals like the ones used to fight forest fires always do it from the rear of the fuselage. That’s for a good reason, it’s simple and safer.
I’ve just touched on a few of the technical flaws of Wigingtons website. Pilots and people who know something about aviation would find a lot more. And all of them lead to another path to debunking his bullshit, the money trail. All of the engineers, technicians, pilots and ground crews involved in the chemtrails program would have to be paid. There would be contracts and purchase orders galore. He has yet to provide one financial document directly related to his purported secret chemtrails program. And this is the US federal government that’s supposed to be doing this. The paper trail would be extensive and ultimately lead to some congressional appropriations. Mr Wigington and his website have found no evidence for this. Instead, it reads something like a religious tract where he speaks with an authoritative voice and wants you to accept the truth of what he says on blind faith alone. Well, Mr. Wigington, faith is for god, the real world requires real facts and real evidence, not photoshopped images and expired patents.
And I final word on why I’m so belligerently critical of the chemtrails conspiracy theory. As pseudo religious beliefs go, it’s depressing and every time a plane leaves a contrail, it’s believers get angry and depressed. Nothing like ruining a beautiful day with a load of crap put out by an internet grifter.
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