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Contrail photos through history

Uncinus — Sat, 26 May 2007 23:51:00 +0000

I’ve collected together a few photos of persistent spreading contrails from the past from 1991 back to 1940, just to show that this is nothing new, and that skies exactly like those shown on the “chemtrails” conspiracy web sites have been happening for the past 60 years. Mostly these are just photos I found on the internet, but several, like the first four, are scanned from books, so can be physically verified.

1991, From the book Peterson First guide to Clouds and Weather

Here are four photos of contrails, scanned from the book. You can see these photos on the Amazon page linked above. Click on the photos for larger versions. I suspect the actual date of these photos is pre-1991, but that’s certainly the latest possible date.

1984, Rustler Peak, Oregon
Old and new spreading contrails. Then, as now, Oregon has a lot of North/South flyover traffic going between California and Portland/Seattle/Vancouver.

The above photo is from a collection of photos of forest lookouts in Oregon. Most of which were taken in the last few years, but a few like the above, back to 1984. It’s interesting to see just how few of them contain contrails, and just how many contain clear blue skies, regardless of which year they were taken in.

Here’s some from 1990, taken by a tourist in Washington DC:

Capitol Dome, 1990

New York, 1994,

New York, July 1, 1992

Persisting and Spreading Contrail. Mt Hood, Oregon, October 1964, Ed’s JG Photos

Mt Hood, July 15th 1985, Rob DeGraff

Mt Shasta, 1989, Taylor Sherman

1995, Mirror Lake, Oregon

1991, Oregon, Coos Bay, Jonathan Harel

1985. Tahoe

1986. Mt Whitney, California

Arizona, September 1988

Mount Adams, September 1987.

North Vancouver, 1989

Paris, March 31, 1983, OliBac

Oregon, 1990, mdintenfass

1986, March 8. London, England.

1989, May. Echo_29, Nigh time contrails cas shadows on the clouds.

1988, Prague

pre-1981 – Plates 173 and 174 from “A Field guide to the Atmosphere“, by Schaefer and Day

1977 Michigan – a single persistent contrail cuts the sky, through some rippled clouds. Found on a chemtrail forum.

1972, From the book Clouds of the World, by Richard Scorer

1970 – Photo of a stop sign with a persistent and spreading contrail. I found this photo on a forum somewhere. I’m not sure of the source or accuracy of the date.

1967 – Plate 113 from Cloud Studies in Colour, Richard Scorer and Harry Wexler. Shows over 30 contrails, some criss-crossing:

1963 – Photo by Bob Shomler

1958, San Fancisco airport: Two persistent contrails cross in the sky.

1954, A photo by Ansel Adams entitled “Rails and Jet Trails”

1945, Europe: Contrails from fighter escorts (P-51s). Both old and new. You see lots of these types of photos when people try to debunk chemtrails, the believers say that engines back then were less efficient, so produced more trails. Ironically, the more efficient an engine is, the more of the fuel is combusted, so more water is produced. So the more modern an engine is, the more likely it is to produce a persistent contrail.

1944, Contrails formed over Germany by the 91st Bomb Group on a mission to Zeitz, Germany on 30 November 1944

1940, Europe, Bomber with fighter escorts

1940s, From the 1950 book Air Force: A Pictorial History

For more WWII contrails, see here:

WWII Contrails

[UPDATE] Here’s a collection of photos from “fuzzylogic”, originally posted on davidicke.com. They are are all from the site airliners.net, and most are dated in the 1960s and 1970s.

(UPDATE 7/27/11) Here’s an excellent collection of historical accounts, images and moves of historical Contrails from Phage on the Above Top Secret forum:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread732398/pg1#pid11900067

Chemical Analysis of Contrails

Uncinus — Tue, 15 May 2007 15:36:00 +0000

What is a contrail made of? Mostly ice, since the primary exhaust emission of a jet aircraft is water vapour, which freezes within a couple of seconds, and forms the visible part of the contrail. If the air is fairly humid, then the contrail can persist for quite a while, and even spread out, turning into a sheet of cloud.

Jet engines also emit the usual things engines emit: carbon dioxide, smoke, and small amounts of unburnt hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide and small amounts of other things. Aircraft emissions are regulated.

Some people think that if a contrail stays in the sky for a long time, that this is very unusual, and that it means the government is spraying something in the air, either to change the weather, or to poison people. They call these persistent contrails “chemtrails”

Of course, persistent contrails are nothing new, they have been around at least since the 1940′s – when planes were able to get to sufficient altitude. But some people believe in the “chemtrail” theory so strongly that they ignore this fact, or they say “well, SOME of the persistent contrails must be chemtrails”.

One person who was convinced of this was Clifford Carnicom, who put a report on his web site that he said showed that “contrails” were poisoning the air. What happened was someone called Sue Miller collected three samples of rain and snow. She then sent them to someone called Therese Aigner, who then sent them to a lab to be analyzed for Aluminum, Barium, Calcium, Magnesium, and Titanium.

When the results came back, they detected very low levels of those elements, but Miller said: “This devastating data points to a deliberate atmospheric release of massive quantities of material containing Aluminum, Barium, Calcium, Magnesium, Calcium, and Titanium.“

Scary stuff. But what do these results actually mean. All three samples were about the same, so lets look at the first one:

	Result	MDL	EPA
Aluminum	<0.100	0.100	0.200
Barium	0.100	0.020	2.000
Calcium	<1	1	N/A
Magnesium	<1	1	N/A
PH Field	7.2		6.5 to 8.5
Titanium	<0.050	0.100	N/A

The “Result” column is the amount the substance found in mg/L (milligrams per liter). The units here are important. Sometimes concentration is measured in ppm (parts per million), which is the same as mg/L. Sometimes they are measured in ppb (parts per billion, so 1 mg/L = 1 ppm = 1000 ppb). Make sure you use the right units when looking at things like this

The second column, the MDL is the “Method Detection Limit”, defined as the smallest amount where you can be 99% sure that there is a non-zero amount of the substance. If a number is below the MDL, then you can’t be sure that it’s just instrument noise. If something is less than MDL, then you can’t say with any certainly if any of the substance exists. The best you can say is “there might be some, but we can’t say for sure, but it’s definitely less than the MDL”

The third column (EPA) is one I added for some perspective. It lists the allowable limits for drinking water from the EPA. If the EPA has not set a limit, then I put N/A.

Most of the substances are lower than the MDL, so we can’t really say if there is actually any of these substances in the sample. But the “chemtrail” people say “Tests were ordered for several elements that should NOT be present in normal rain/snow“. So is that right? Should the results come back as zero?

There are two problem here. Firstly if there actually WAS zero aluminum in the samples, then the tests would STILL come back as “less than MDL”, because of “noise” in the instrument. If an instrument has an MDL level, than means it can’t detect zero values with any confidence.

Secondly, we DO expect these substances in rainwater. Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, so is found in dust in the air, and hence in rainwater. The EPA says:

Virtually all food, water, air, and soil contain some aluminum
Everyone is exposed to low levels of aluminum from food, air, water, and soil.

The EPA has not set safety limits for aluminum, the limit listed above is for taste and color reasons.

Calcium, likewise, is found in abundance in rocks (and hence airborne dust), as is magnesium and Titanium. There are no EPA limits set, because they are not particularly toxic.

The only substance with a measurable result was Barium. This was present in the samples a concentration that was just 5% of the allowable EPA limits for drinking water. Not a dangerous amount, but should it be found in the air (hence rainfall) at all? The CDC says ”

Barium gets into the air during the mining, refining, and production of barium compounds, and from the burning of coal and oil.
The length of time that barium will last in air, land, water, or sediments depends on the form of barium released.

So yes, barium is in the air, from such things as burning of coal and oil. And seemingly from this test result, not at a dangerous level.

Quickly looking at the pH value – that measures the acidity or alkalinity of a solution, where a value of 7 is considered neutral. Drinking water ranges from 6.5 to 8.5, so the value here of 7.5 is nothing unusual for drinking water. “Acid rain” for example is defined as having a pH of less than 5.0. But rain is usually slightly acidic (pH of around 5.6) because of the carbon dioxide in the air, however it varies depending on location and atmospheric pollution (and can be has high as 8.5) . In the US rainwater is usually under 5.6, so getting a value of 7.5 is somewhat suspicious. since rainwater pH is constantly being measured, it’s very unlikely that such a high pH would have gone unnoticed. The fact that this one set of sample has a high pH suggests that either the samples were contaminated during collection, or that they were actually ground water, and not rainwater.

There are a lot of jets in the air

Uncinus — Fri, 11 May 2007 20:09:00 +0000

There are a lot of planes in the air, several thousand at any given time over the US. This animation shows all the tracked air traffic in the air at once. Each dot is a jet. Click on the image to see a 24 hour animation.

The animation is interesting since it shows there are broad flight paths that a lot of planes follow. This (along with wind) explains the parallel trails, and the grids.

If you have Google Earth installed, then click here for near-real time flight tracking of ALL the tracked flights in the US. It looks like this (click for a closer look, there’s more than there initially seems):

Given all these jets flying along regular airways, it’s hardly surprising that when the weather is right, that parallel persistent contrails will show up and then grids where the paths cross. In fact it’s surprising we don’t see more!

And here are some more Flight Pattern Visualizations. Pretty stuff.

See FBOWeb for more info on flight tracking:

A brief history of "Chemtrails"

Uncinus — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:06:00 +0000

“Chemtrails” are supposedly long lasting contrails that are being deliberately created by the government for some sinister purpose. In reality, these contrails just look like normal contrails. It’s a fringe conspiracy theory that spread over the internet, mutating as it goes for survivability. But where did it begin? What is the origin of the word “chemtrail”, and who started this particular conspiracy theory?

The folowing link takes you to an archived copy of a conspiracy theory web page from 2000:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000817011330/azwest.net/user/slim/

On it is a link to a file entitled “GENOCIDE.TXT” containing emails from 1997, the first part of which originally came from the BIOWAR-L mailing list dated 9/18/97.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000818173333/azwest.net/user/slim/GENOCIDE.TXT

(9/18/97)
[...]
The lines filling our skies are not contrails. The lines are dispersed and may linger for hours
[...]
We now have proof that our goverment is using chemical agents on populated areas they are adding it to military jet fuel. Have you ever looked up at a vapor trail behind military aircraft flying so high a symbol of Americas power. Look again!!
Commerical jets also leave a lovely (non-toxic) vapor trail when the heat from the turbines come in contact with the cool air condencing the water droplets into steam. Softly the lines defuse into the blue sky. So what is different about the military aircraft, the answer is simple, It’s the Fuel JP-8+100 is some really bad stuff.
When you look up over the skys of New York City on a clear, sunny morning you see the military aircraft making patterens across the sky with their vapor trails. The smoke is thick and does not go away. When it comes in contact with the sunlight it turns to a purple color, then desipates into a over cast Purple Haze.
[...]
this whole thing stinks of a Goverment DePopulation Program.

Here you have the key elements of the chemtrail theory, that there are two types of contrail, one that goes away, and one that does not. Further more the one that does not will make you sick.

The earliest dated actual article I could find on this theory was from January 8, 1999, by William Thomas, which recounts the suspicious of three people about contrails, dating them to well before 1999

http://web.archive.org/web/19990503013500/ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-08-05.html

Wallace has been watching formations of high-flying jets weave grid-like contrails above his home since last summer [summer 1998]. Each time, “We get a taste in our mouth,” he reports. He and his wife Ann get “kind of tired and sick,” having “no energy to do anything.”
[...]
Series of aircraft contrails in a high traffic region over the northern Gulf of Mexico 1992 (Images courtesy NASA)
[...]
Wallace and his wife are not alone in their plight. In March, 1996, Dr. Greg Hanford bought an expensive camera and binoculars to keep an eye on jets spraying white bands above his Bakersfield, California home. Hanford has counted 40 or 60 jets on some “spray days.”
[...]
Pseudo-color, multispectral images taken April 20, 1994 by a NOAA satellite, reveal a number of contrails over Oklahoma and Kansas.
[...]
Pat Edgar has been watching the jets spraying over eastern Oklahoma since a sunny day in October, 1977 when as many as 30 contrails gradually occluded the sky. “They look like they’re playing tic-tac-toe up there,” he says. “You know darn well it’s not passenger planes.”
[...]
Rogers, does not attribute his strange malady to the mystery jets. But neither he nor his doctors can explain his breathing difficulty, which began shortly after spraying began in November, 1997, and is getting worse.

It seems pretty clear that this article is the beginning of the Chemtrail as a popular internet phenomenon, as it was shortly after this article that William Thomas was invited onto Art Bell’s radio show on January 25th. It’s also very clear from the article that individual suspicions regarding contrails did not suddenly start in 1999. In fact the article dates it back to 1977 (although later version of this article change it to 1997). Of course, paranoia has been going on for a lot longer than that, see

http://contrailscience.com/contrail-confusion-is-nothing-new/

There’s a follow-up article later

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508051059/ens.lycos.com/ens/apr99/1999L-04-22-01.html

Sky Samples Analyzed
By William Thomas with Erminia Cassani
VICTORIA, British Columbia, Canada, April 22, 1999 (ENS) – As unmarked tanker-type aircraft continue spraying sky-obscuring chemtrails over regions of the U.S. and Canada, this writer and American journalist Erminia Cassani have obtained laboratory tests of fully-documented samples of aerial fallout. The samples were tested by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) licensed facility.

And see this take on the original article from Feb 23, 1999 (read the full article continuing on page 12)

http://www.phoenixarchives.com/contact/1999/0299/022399.pdf

It contains a very interesting depiction of the power of suggestion:

Art said that after Mr. Thomas’ first program he went out to observe how the jets were flying over his Pahrump, Nevada studio/home. Art was shocked to see aerial spraying, and both he and his wife got sick.

Interesting he never noticed this before, but simply talk to William Thomas for four hours, and you start o notice things.

Google Groups archives internet news-groups back to 1981, but the earliest mention of chemtrails was from May 8th, 1999: on alt.fan.art-bell

This cartilage gel that Art’s plugging could be used for the joint ache
that chemtrail victims complained about last night…say…wait a
minute…maybe chemtrails were deployed to boost cartilage gel sales…!

Here we have mention of chemtrail victims, and “joint ache” as a symptom.

In May of 1999, we have this from William Thomas:

http://www.carnicom.com/will0416.htm

CHEMTRAILS OVER AMERICA
Issue #2 April 7-16, 1999
Dear Friends and concerned sky-watchers,
A March 17, 1999 radio interview going out to 15 million listeners
“rang the Bell” on an investigation financed entirely by your efforts.
During this third four-hour segment with Art Bell, I mentioned recent
breakthroughs in an investigation undertaken by a small team of
dedicated associates. My warmest thanks to Richard and Samantha Young,
D, Joe, Erminia, DJ, Karal Ayn, Ken, MB, Barbara, Mark and John for
sharing their valuable time, attention, research and insights.

Again referencing the Art Bell show. The “Chemtrails over America” bulletin apparently had issue #1 on march 9, 1999. That also seems to be about the time people started taking photos of normal contrails and calling them chemtrails.

Judging by the earliest postings, it seems like hypochondria plays a large part. People start to connect the contrails with illness, and suspect they must contain some kind of poison.

Art Bell had a page on contrails, dating back to at least Nov 27th, 1999. Available on Archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.artbell.com/contrails.html

Not a lot of commentary on the first page, but there’s the first usage of the photo of Boeing E6 TACAMO dumping fuel, titled: “The strange contrail mystery continues. (9/30/99)”

Looking at the previous year (1998) on usenet, there is NO mention of chemtrails. The word “contrail” crops up 324 times, mostly in reference to meteors and rockets. There are a few references to the affect of contrails on climate change. But NOTHING about deliberate contrail creation, or anything like “chemtrails”.

The web site chemtrailcentral.com was registered on May 6th, 2000, about a year after the “chemtrail” idea was created. The earliest archived page from there indicates a lot of local media involvement, and their archive indicates nothing before 4/24/2000, which said:

Monday a KHOU crew met with Chemtrail Tracking USA Club co-founders Lorie [Kramer] and Dona of Houston and member Rhonda from Ft. Worth, as well as other local members of the Yahoo! based club for the taping of a story on Chemtrails and public concern over their purpose and health impact. Reporter Ron Travino and cameraman Nathan visited for several hours at the house of Lorie, taping, talking, asking questions, and viewing photos and videos.

On chemtrailcentral, there’s actually a thread about the history of chemtrails. There people give their recollections of how it all started. Most date it to late 1998 or 1999. A few people report earlier contrails (1989, 1991) , and then surmise it must have started earlier.

A post there by 3T3L1 quotes chemtrail debunker Jay Reynolds:

derivation of the word “chemtrails”
Posted on August 26, 2001 at 09:06:54 AM by jayreynolds
was by Val Valerian(pseudonym for Former USAF captain [John] Grace)
in April 1999. Grace/Valerian recognized that the power of suggestion
worked against his claim and proposed coining a new term more suggestive
of his claim

That does not sound unreasonable, since the earliest reference to the word I have is April 1999. This page claims to be reporting from March 29th 1999, but could have been written after the fact, based on photos taken that day. It’s archived back to October 1999.

The original pages from Val Valerian/Valdemar Valerain/O.H. Krill/John Grace, can be found on archive.org. The earliest real mention of spraying on his pages date back to emails 13 Jan 1998. John Grace is a UFO conspiracy theorist who published several books on shadow governments and suchlike, he also faked documents to support arguments in his books.

There are also some early mentions in the archives of CTRL – the Conspiracy Theory Research List, a mailing list for the discussion of conspiracty theories. Here’s the earliest entries:

http://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=ctrl@listserv.aol.com&q=date:[19950101+TO+19990301]+chemtrails

I think some of the date stamps on these are wrong, but they do date from around 1999. There are some other early references to contrails in 1999, including one that links to the earliest debunking page, still active, with photos from Feb 11th 1999:

http://users.erols.com/igoddard/contrail.htm

Digging into the CTRL archives a bit more gives us this:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg05861.html

Subject: The Millennium Report - Special Edition: Contrail Reports Increasing
Across the US
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Paul Anderson - TMP / CPR-Canada)
Date: Thu, Feb 18, 1999 10:43 PM
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Millennium Report - Special Edition:
Contrail Reports Increasing Across the US
_____________________________
In This Report:
Special Edition:
Contrail Reports Increasing Across the US
The contrail controversy continues to grow; according to
William Thomas, the independent journalist who has brought
this issue to national attention (yet still not being reported in the
mainstream media it seems) the "contrails" have been reported now in
at least 40 US states. Many reports and photographs are now available,
many on various web sites (see contrail page in Special Research
Projects on the TMP web site for links).
[...]
* *William Thomas: Next Interview on Art Bell - February 18, 1999* *
William Thomas: (Previous Interview) on Art Bell - January 25, 1999
http://ww2.broadcast.com/artbell/abell/9901/ab0125.ram
(This audio file link requires RealAudio or RealPlayer)
William Thomas: Mystery Contrails: Poison from the Sky? - Update
http://www.islandnet.com/~wilco/investsky.htm
More Contrail Reports and Feedback
(Special Research Projects)
http://persweb.direct.ca/psa/conrep.html
LA Mystery Contrails: Report and Photos
http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/lacon.htm
Ground Zero: Are These in Your Skies?
http://www.heavensake.com/groundzero/~scrc/main.html
Horizon
http://horizon.worldinter.net
The Harbinger
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Keep/4885/contrails.htm
Contrail Photo Taken by Art Bell
http://www.artbell.com/images/artcontrail.jpg

Which dates things a bit more precisely, the first Art Bell show with William Thomas was Feb 18th 1999

Now, the “LA Mystery Contrails: Report and Photos”, link above seems to go to an early version of Jeff Rense’s web site, with a post by “Marvin Rush”. It has some nice photos of contrails spreading into cirrus, dated 2-13-99

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508124811/http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/lacon.htm

The “Harbringer”, “heavensake” sites are not avaialble.

This “Horizon” page gives a lot of good archived links with dates back to 1/8/99

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508175410/http://horizon.worldinter.net/

Jay Reynolds, a long-time chemtrail debunker, has a page which contains several personal emails the details the early days of chemtrails:

http://goodsky.homestead.com/files/evolution.html

Procrustean Science

Uncinus — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:26:00 +0000

“Procrustean Science” is a wonderful phrase I came across on the internet in a paper on “Indigenous siderophiles in the lunar highlands”. It’s a rare phrase, deriving from the legend of Procrustes, who was an inn-keeper that liked his guests to fit their beds exactly. If the guests were too short, he would stretch them on a rack, and if they were too long, he would chop off their feet.

In Procrustean science, the bed represents the theory, and the guests represent the facts and observations constituting the evidence. If the facts do not fit, then they are simply altered to make them fit the theory.

That’s the problem with chemtrail theory, they start with the theory, and then pick and choose facts, and narrowly interpret information in a way that fits the theory. They problem is that you can do that for ANY theory. Just constantly refine your interpretation so it is always correct.

Real science does not work like that. It starts with the facts, and then considers all possible explanations, and narrows in on the theory that fits the facts, rather than picking and adjusting the facts that fit the theory.