The paths to debunking the chemtrails/geo-engineering conspiracy theory are many and pursuing one inevitably leads to others. I’m going to do a deeper dive into one, the lack of any kind of certifiable evidence of the alleged chemicals being “sprayed”. There are two tests referred to in the geo engineering watch website, a one time sample of the upper atmosphere in region where airplanes were leaving contrails and multiple tests of rainwater. Both are fundamentally flawed in that there is no correlation between the substances detected and their alleged source. The one test that could do that, a spectral analysis of the light passing through contrails doesn’t seem be even under consideration or if it was ever attempted, didn’t give the desired results which wouldn’t be good for website donations.

For those of you who don’t know, here is a bit on spectra and spectral analysis. Light spectra is not something exotic or alien to ordinary human experience. Our eyes perceive it quite nicely and we call it color. One of the fundamental properties of matter is that different substances absorb or reflect different frequencies of light and give it different colors. What we see is the spectra or frequency blend of light that results from this. Spectral analysis is simply a more precise and mathematical description of color. It works by separating the light into its component frequencies and measuring the amount of each frequency present and putting that into a graph. The graph lists frequencies horizontally and amount of each frequency vertically and the relative amounts of each frequency present interacting with light is the spectral signature of that substance. To take the spectral signature of a contrail requires an instrument that separates the light passing through it into component frequencies and measures the relative level of each frequency. In the absence of that, a good digital camera that saves raw files could give a good approximation and even our naked eyeballs could give us some indication that something different is in that contrail. That is very pertinent because the common chant among chemtrail conspiracy theorists is: “Contrails dissipate and chemtrails linger and are longer”. In other words, they are saying that they can’t see any difference between a contrail and the alleged chemtrail other than that one lasts longer in the sky than the other. That is essentially saying that they are one and the same because spectra is only one optical property that our eyes can pick up on. A couple of other important ones are opacity and reflectivity. There are multiple versions out there of what chemicals are in the chemtrails but I’m going to stay focused on the one used by the geo engineering watch website, that they are secretly trying to cool the planet with some sort of opaque reflective material sprayed with aerosol sprayers mounted in the wings of airplanes. Any substance that had enough opacity and reflectivity to stop sunlight reaching the ground would have enough of these two properties to be noticeable to our naked eyes and more than likely be different enough in color for the spectral difference to be seen as well. And yet, nobody seems to be able to see any difference between contrails and chemtrails at all. That doesn’t add up. The substances that could do that would either dissolve in water or would be collodially suspended in and have to be agitated like a paint can. They would be quite distinct from the water they were suspended or dissolved in which would evaporate quite quickly in some conditions but still leave a trail that looks very different from water vapor. Even if the substance was completely dissolved in the water, the water would still be likely to evaporate quickly if the air was dry and warm and still leave a visible trail in the sky that would not look like water vapor. Dry and warm air are the opposite conditions that lead to contrails and there are no reports of strangely colored trails coming from airplanes on hot and dry days.

Returning to spectral analysis, it is widely used in astronomy to find out what the atmospheres of distant planets are made of. There are several forms of spectral analysis some of which involve taking samples and doing lab analysis on them but the method used by NASA is open air spectroscopy. Due to the search for extra terrestrial life and the need to find extra terrestrial water to support that life, one spectral signature that is very well known is that of water, the exact same substance that contrails are made of. If neither our sense of vision or a more precise spectral analysis of a contrail finds anything but water vapor, it’s nothing but water vapor because finding something other than water vapor in a contrail a few miles above the surface of the earth is easy compared to finding it in other planets which is what is being done all the time.

And as I mentioned, the paths to debunking this conspiracy theory are many. Focusing on finding out and verifying what’s in a contrail brings up that the narratives put out about what’s in “chemtrails” are inconsistent with each other. That makes the narratives suspect as well. A common police interrogation technique is to separate suspects involved in a crime and interrogate them apart from each other to find out inconsistencies in their narratives. The lack of any mention of the most common and effective method of finding chemicals in atmosphere of any planet including our own also brings our the essential grift of the Mr. Wigington and the geo engineering watch website which is the main promulgator of this conspiracy theory. In just the most casual of google searches of his name, he shows up in all kinds of places outside of his own website like the Alex Jones show on X/Twitter. No surprise there because he’s obviously making money and profiting off of the disinformation he spreads and who better to hang with than the master himself of disinformation profiteering. He also sells a book that’s just a compilation of his website articles for almost $400. He also has a lot of Youtube content which, if it generates enough views, is also a source of revenue. He sued a climate scientist who debunked his film, “The Dimming” in 2022 and one of the damages claimed was that it affected revenue from the film. He also branches out into other conspiracy theories. I recently saw a post on Facebook that had a photo provided by him of a ship that was used to start the fires in Lahaina. It is just as bad as his photoshopped sprayers and just as likely to be an engineering impossibility but I don’t know enough about ships to say exactly why but just looking at the photoshop collage gives me the impression it wouldn’t float very long or work in any way as described. He’s basically the Alex Jones of environmental disinformation and, like Jones, is making a nice amount of money from it. And the business plan is nothing new, his business practices and persuasive techniques are the same ones used by religious cults and like any cult, chemtrails runs on faith not fact. In the bottomless echo chamber of social media, the chemtrail cultists constantly use the term “believe in” and call those of us who don’t accept their belief “deniers”, just like any good religious fanatic would.