One often gets satellite images of contrails and it’s hard to visualize what’s going on, especially with racetrack contrails drifting in the wind. So I wrote a little contrail simulator applet to demonstrate the formation of a contrail under various conditions.
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This news report is from 1980.

It’s based on this research paper:

EFFECT OF CONTRAIL CIRRUS ON SURFACE WEATHER CONDITIONS IN THE MIDWEST
(Searchable/Copyable OCR version here)

It’s interesting because it shows that back in 1980 people were noticing contrails persisting and spreading to cover the whole sky. At that point people had even noticed it contributed to increased cloudiness.

This is a useful video to show to anyone who thinks that this is a recent phenomenon. For more details, the research paper also makes it very clear that contrails in 1980 were just the same as contrails in the present day.
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It’s a lovely Friday morning here in Los Angeles. Clear blue skies, not a cloud to be seen, and no contrails either.

For that matter, there don’t appear to be any planes at all. I look up into the clear deep blue sky, and I can’t see a single plane. What’s going on? Where have all the planes gone?

Of course the planes are still there. Airlines have pretty regular schedules, and at any given time there’s going to be a few planes visible somewhere from my house.  The reasons why I’m having a hard time spotting them (I did spot one eventually) are several, but it boils down to this:

High altitude planes are very hard to spot on a cloudless sky with no contrails.

I’ll briefly list the reasons, then go into each one in more detail

1. Empty Field Myopia – The eye, when looking at a featureless field of vision, will focus just a few feet in front of you, so the planes will be out of focus.
2. Saccadic Masking – When your eye moves from one point to another, you don’t see anything while the eye is in motion.
3. Small Planes, Big Sky – a plane is about 1/100th to 1/10,000 the size of a contrail, making it proportionally harder to spot.
4. Invisible planes – Atmospheric conditions and the color of the planes can make some planes blend in with the sky so well that they are essentially invisible, or very indistinct.

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UK resident UnionJack1967 recently posted some photos on DavidIcke.com of five very unusual looking trails. He took several photos, and I’ve combined two of them here to show all five trails together.
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There are more contrails now than there were 20 or 30 years ago, because there are a lot more flights now.

But it’s not entirely that simple. As well as more frequent flights, there are more routes. Areas that almost never saw a contrail would suddenly start seeing them on a regular basis when a new route opened up between two cities. Say Denver, CO and Medford, OR. In 1990 there were no direct flights between Denver and Medford, so you’d have to fly from Denver to San Francisco, and then SF to Medford. Then an airline opens up a new route, and suddenly some towns on the line between Denver and Medford start seeing contrails.

This is well illustrated by these maps of air traffic created by French researchers:

The map is from an unusual perspective, viewing the globe from overhead of Europe, so the US is above and to the left of the center. It does not show all the flights in the world, seeming concentrating on those that connect in some way to Paris, but it does illustrate the huge increase in air routes that is reflected across all airlines. See how sparse the US is in 1980, and how criss-crossed it is in 2008. Continue reading »

One very popular photo amongst the “chemtrail” theorists is this one from NASA:

This enhanced infrared image from NASA's Terra satellite shows a widespread outbreak of contrails over the southeastern United States during the morning of January 29, 2004. Satellite data are critical for studying the effects of contrails. The crisscrossing white lines are contrails that form from planes flying in different directions at different altitudes. Each contrail spreads and moves with the wind. Contrails often form over large areas during winter and spring. CREDIT: NASA

The image is quite striking, showing a very large number of contrails over an area five hundred miles wide. It’s an infrared image which has been enhanced specifically to bring out the contrails. This image has been used by NASA a few times:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/releases/2004/04-140.html

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=4435

http://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/preview_lesson.php?&passid=83

It’s actually a small part of a much larger image. It was cropped and enhanced to just show the areas of contrail activity. Here’s the full image: Continue reading »

No. In all likelihood, the birds’ death had a quite normal explanation. The weather. See my full article here:

http://metabunk.org/content/134-Dead-Blackbirds-Fall-From-Sky-Prompting-Bunk

and another of the media coverage, with links to some more examples of mass bird deaths.

http://metabunk.org/content/137-Dead-Bird-Panic-How-Media-Focus-Distorts-a-Subject

But if you really want to go down the “chemtrail” route. Obviously if something were the result of spraying trails that are tens of miles long, a mile wide, and five miles up in the air, then the result would not be localized to one flock of bird in half a square mile.

[Update] Download the Google Earth files used to make some of the images below, and judge for yourself (or show your friends).  There’s a video to show you how.

CBS News chopper, filming the sunset on Nov 8th, 2010, catches this video of what looks like a missile, although moving suspiciously slowly. I'd estimate this is around 5:16PM, the sun is below the horizon. Low clouds are in shadow.

UPDATE – After geting a new photo of the trail, Liam Bahneman told me he was now siding with it being his second choice, UPS902.  Having reviewed the evidence, I fully agree that UPS902 is a much better fit than AWE808, especially when viewed against the composite photo.

UPS902 Turns out to be a much better fit

Most of the supposed “chemtrail” videos out there are simply videos of persistent contrails that the video maker somehow has decided are part of a giant world-wide conspiracy involving spraying something for some purpose.

But some videos are actually deliberate hoaxes, either by pranksters poking fun at the chemtrail community, or by people looking to promote the theory for one reason or another.

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