There seem to be at least 30, possibly more (click the photo for a larger verision).  What is even more remarkable is that it was taken sometime before 1967.  That’s over forty years ago.

The photo is plate 113 of the book Cloud Studies in Colour, by Richard Scorer and Harry Wexler, published in 1967 by Pergamon Press.  The photo was taken by Richard Scorer, probably in England.  The accompanying text reads:

Condensation trails are left by aircraft when the air is sufficiently cold for the mixture of air and exhaust to be saturated.  This does not usually happen except when the temperature is close to or below -40C, in which case the cloud freezes almost instantaneously and does not readily evaporate.  The cloud is then spread out by any wind sheer which may be present.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MVc9GX5K_As

This video has been seized upon by the Chemtrail community as evidence that “chemtrails” are real, and that the German government has admitted they are spraying “chemtrails”.

Unfortunately the entire video is a very bad translation of a story about one Meterologist, Karsten Brand, who is was concerned that the military was using too much chaff (anti-radar powder). The military admitted that they do use chaff, but not too much, and it’s not harmful. Brandt contend they use so much it can affect the weather, and might be harmful to people. He’s also annoyed because it interferes with his weather radar.

The Meterologist behind all this, Karsen Brandt (show above, supposedly blaming it on “chemtrails”), actually goes out of his way to distinguish these odd cloud images from “chemtrails”, in this article, translated,

http://www.worldweather.net/news/specials.mv?action=show&id=5947

Following the publication of pictures of non-existent clouds on the radar we have many questions. Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions:

Are they “Chem Trails?
On various Internet sites will be discussed passionately that aircraft chemical balance to either make the ozone hole or act for the United States (who else also ..) changing the weather to world domination. This is - according to the supporters of this conspiracy theory - not just a trial from time to time, but regular, worldwide and especially in Germany. The sprayed chemicals leave greyish-white trails in the sky That is not a normal contrail, “Chem Trails” would quite different and would also behave differently.

The beauty of this conspiracy theory: Everyone can see the trails, everyone may feel threatened, but no (normal) citizens can touch or examine them. On the Web pages are shown photos of various trails, the “strange” pattern in the sky behind.
For the layman, it is at first glance strange that one day contrail stay in the sky for hours, but the next day dissolve within minutes . But this “phenomenon” varies with the humidity and the change is very easy and simple to explain.
Of course, we also can not be excluded with absolute certainty that a plane sprayed chemicals in the atmosphere. But as regularly and to the extent claimed by the conspiracy theorists, you can use common sense to exclude. For such a comprehensive worldwide conspiracy, should not only hundreds, thousands of US pilots be involved, but also scientists, German authorities, etc., etc. . How high is the probability that with such a number of people, there is no leak?

The big problem with the video is the translation. In the shot above, the german word “duppel” is translated as “chemical trails (chemtrails)”, when the actual translation is “chaff”. The German word for “chemtrail” is “chemtrail“.

Another rather obvious distinction is that Brandt is talking about invisible clouds, whereas “chemtrails” are very visible (since they are aircraft contrails).

There are other problems as well, as pointed out in other places:

The German sentence which appears on screen is :

“Die Aufzeichnungen belegen, dass dabei sehr geringe Mengen von Düppeln ausgebracht werden”

The english sentence thats blended out at the same time reads :

“The registers report emissions of chemtrails at low altitudes”

(Note that you never see the full version of both sentences at the same time. One is wiped out as the other is filled in)

The actual translation should be more like :

“The reports show that very small quantities of chaff were used”.

So what’s the real story here? Well, here’s the background of the story in German:

http://www.donnerwetter.de/news/specials.mv?action=show&id=6718

It’s a letter written to the local government in April 2006, describing false images of clouds that show up on weather radar, and asking if there have been Military tests that explain these tests. Here’s a rough (Google) translation:

Small request with response
Question wording of the Small

Small request with response

Question wording of the Small
Mr Ralf Briese (Greens), received on 04.04.2006
Mysteriöse weather phenomena on North German country - threat hazards for humans and the environment through military might experiments?

Several reputable media reported recently on mysterious phenomena in the sky over north German countryside. Thus, already in the last year in July at various radar screens of different weather stations to an apparent cloud over a distance of up to 400 km have been registered, although it neither rained nor the sky was cloudy. The radar is not explainable phenomenon has been repeated at the end of March 2006. The German meteorologists are faced with a mystery. Thus, for example, says Karsten Brandt, meteorologist and director at the weather service “gosh” in Bonn: “This is not right with things.” Together with weather experts from Germany and the Netherlands is Brandt agreed that it is “the appearance” no natural Statement as bird flight or kerosene from airplanes. Similarly, a Fehlmessung of radar equipment be excluded, since different recordings independently, the same pictures in the Netherlands, Emden and Hanover have made. “Golly” against unknown because large environmental pollution and misleading the public.

Meteorologists from the whole federal territory suspect behind the appearances military experiments. This is Joerg Asmus, a meteorologist at the German Weather Service in Offenbach, assuming that the military either to induce changes in weather or simulating terrorist attacks (see DER SPIEGEL 13/2006 - 27 March). Even physicists from the German Center for Air and Space in Oberpfaffenhofen, and geoscientists Bundeswehr come to the conclusion that particles in the atmosphere have been issued to the precipitation radar to disturb. In the expert authority of the Federal Environment Agency take the phenomenon seriously. Apart from the legal issues, which authority allowed these experiments and by what standards relevant here has been traded or whether a legal approval, are environmental and health issues.

I therefore ask the provincial government:

1st What she has knowledge about the phenomena reported on North German country?

2nd How are they evaluated and explained?

3rd Does the provincial government, the assessment of meteorologists, geologists and physicists, that the unerklärbaren weather phenomena or radar records to military experiments must act, otherwise no serious explanation to be found?

4th Has the state government knowledge of such military trials on the north German country with the goal of terrorism or the weather influence?

5th Is to be feared that these tests or other health hazards to humans and nature out?

6th Which country or authority would be notified of such military trials?

7th After the relevant standards such experiments are allowed?

(To the State Chancellery sent on 10.04.2006 - II/721 - 506)

Here is the response (the “admission”):

Reply from the state government
Lower Saxony Ministry Hannover, 24.05.2006
For Home Affairs and Sports
– 53.01-30309-02 –

The Small answer, I request on behalf of the State Government, as follows:
According to the available information, neither the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Sports nor in the other participating departments (MS, C, MU) to answer the knowledge of the issues facing state government. For this reason, to clarify the issue a request for information on the questions to the Ministry of Defence (BMVg). The parliamentary and Cabinet Department of the BMVg stated in a letter dated 28.04.2006 the questions answered as follows:

At 1:

The Ministry of Defence (BMVg) has no knowledge of the reported phenomena. The BMVg are from the first phenomenon in question in July 2005 due to the specified retention periods, and the sensors used no records available. Back to the question time in the affected area were no national air force exercises, tactical checks or similar aviation activities. According to a study of radar records of the Air Force, we found that at the end of March 2006, in the night of 22 On 23.03.2006 about 1 hour before the occurrence of the phenomenon in Dutch airspace an aerial combat exercise took place. The records show that very small amounts of chaff were issued, but which demonstrably after about 1 hour and 10 minutes had disbanded.

2:

The possibility of causing such a phenomenon in the magnitude described by active electromagnetic radiation can, because of the physical connections, in principle be excluded. Only the spreading very specific Chaff in significant quantity (in the range of several tons) could generate such a phenomenon. The self-protection equipment of aircraft of the German Armed Forces and allied forces in the context of air combat exercises but only a fraction of that amount expelled. The Air Force has no electronic interference or Täuschverfahren, a phenomenon of this dimension at the same time closely limited impact on a specific sensor could cause. Based on the present information systems come flying the Bundeswehr as a possible cause of clouds phenomena in question.

At 3:

The Bundeswehr is not conducting experiments, such a phenomenon could cause.

At 4:

The Bundeswehr is not conducting military trials with the goal of terrorism or the influence of weather.

At 5 to 7:

See answer to 3 and 4

Summary:

• A meteorologist sees cloud images on radar that he thinks are not actual clouds, he estimates they are 350 km long.
• He asks the government (via his local Green Party member) if they made these clouds with chaff.
• The government denies this, but says maybe the Dutch, but probably not for clouds that big.

It’s a bit of a stretch from this to “German government admits to clandestine chemtrail activity”.
(Note: if any German speakers would like to supply additional information here, I’d be very grateful - particularly with any follow-up story that might have been done).

This is an oft-asked question. The answer is reasonably straightforward, but misunderstanding is common. To understand why a contrail can last as little as a fraction of a second, or as long as several hours, you need to understand what a contrail is, and how it forms.

Here’s another question, which has the same answer:

Q) How long does a snowflake last?

Why is this basically the same question? Because contrails are generally made of ice crystals. Jet exhaust contains a lot of water vapor (the chemical reaction actually produces more water than there was originally jet fuel), and when this gets shot out of the back of the engine at 2000MPH, it hits the frigid air (typically colder than -40 degrees), and the water vapor condenses and freezes, very quickly, into tiny ice crystals, just like snowflakes.

So why do these ice crystals sometimes stay around for a long time, and sometimes vanish in seconds? The temperature is well below freezing, so they can’t melt, can they? This is puzzling, because it involves something that most people know nothing about: “sublimation“.

Sublimation is when a substance (in this case, water), goes directly from being solid to being vapor (a gas), without actually melting into a liquid. It’s like evaporation, except instead of a liquid evaporating, it’s a solid (ice). If the air is dry (i.e. there is little water vapor in it), then the ice crystals will quickly sublimate into vapor, and the trail will vanish quickly.

However, if the air already has a lot of water vapor in it, then the ice will sublimate slower, and the trail will last longer.

If the air has so much water vapor in it already that it can’t hold any more (i.e. it’s “supersaturated”), then the ice crystals can’t sublimate, and so the contrail will stay around for a long time. The ice crystals might even attract water from the air, if there is enough, and the contrail will get thicker. Winds might make the contrail spread out to even cover the whole sky.

The above is a simplification, as other factors like temperature, pressure, and sunlight have an effect. But it explains the basic reasons why some trails last only a few seconds, and some can last for hours, and spread out to cover the sky.

Finally, there is one more way of asking the question:

Q) How long do clouds last?

This is the same question because contrails are clouds. Contrails are physically very similar to cirrus clouds (except they are long and thin), and so they act almost exactly the same. You see cirrus clouds that last for hours, so why not contrails?

It was a particularly good day for contrails. You can see about seven in this photo. There’s also a nice contrail shadow, and a halo around the sun.

I was looking at the MODIS archive of satellite photos, and realized they had one for that date, and rather luckily it seems to have been taken within an hour of the photo I took, so it shows the exact same contrails from space. LA is just a bit to the right of the center of this photo.

As the photos are about an hour apart, the trails have shifted and distorted a little. But you can still match them up. Here I’ve color coded them.

It’s interesting also to look at the full size satellite photo of the area, so you can see where trails form, and where they do not form.

Los Angeles is in the middle of the photo. You can see the trails forming over Los Angeles, and it’s quite clear from looking the the cloud bands that they are forming in an area of high humidity.

Lookin up the coast, there is a gap in the clouds, and a corresponding lack of contrails. Then in the top left corner the clouds resume, and so do the contrails. In fact you can see several much thinner trails there. Here’s a close up:

These are probably the same planes that created the trails over Los Angles, just about an hour later, as they continue to fly north. The abrupt start of the trail as it enters the moist air is very obvious here.

This is all interesting in the context of the “chemtrail” theory. You often hear the chemtrailers posting things like “heavy spraying over Los Angeles today!!!” Then there are days with “no spraying”. MODIS is a wonderful resource for explaining why this perception happens. Sometimes there is a moist region of air at the right level over a particular place, and that place gets a lot of persistent contrails.

Looking at contrails from the ground only gives you a little bit of the picture. The satellite photos tell the whole story.

For example, here’s a “Massive Chemtrail Assault” Youtube video, from Austin, TX, 11/15/07

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXJRNnmx0h8

And here is the satellite image of the greater area from that day. Austin is on the right, towards the end of the huge sweep of clouds. It’s clear that the contrails are just forming around the edges of a region of high humidity.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?USA6/2007319/USA6.2007319.aqua.1km.jpg

Full Size original images here, about 1MB each:
My Photo: img_3175a.jpg
MODIS photo: aeronet_la_jolla2007350terra250m.jpg

You can see it’s taken from a photo album. I cropped, sharpened, and contrasted it a bit to bring out the details of the contrails. The text “Note Little Friends” probably refers to the fighter escorts making curved contrail in the background.

It looks similar to this more famous photo:

That’s know as “Top Cover for the J Group”, and is detailed here. This photo was also taken over Emden, on September 27th, 1943, by Stanley M. Smith. Given the weather, and the planes involved, it might well have been taken on the same mission, within a few minutes of the first photo.

This photo was taken near Portland, Oregon on December 11th, 2005, at around 11AM.

So why would a plane be flying in this unusual pattern? Well, it turns out it’s not really very unusual. It’s called a “holding pattern“, and it’s a very specific pattern that planes fly in when they need to hold their position. Holding patterns have this very distinctive shape because the aircraft have to fly them in a very particular way that takes exactly four minutes to complete, so the ATC can know where they are, and when they will be facing in a particular direction. They fly straight for a minute, then turn 180 degrees over a minute, and then fly straight again. It looks like this:

For passenger jets, holding patterns are most common on the approach to busy airports (the one above is for Martha’s Vineyard), and it’s not too uncommon to make a few turns in a holding pattern shortly before landing. The contrails in the above photo is probably not this, as it’s at too high an altitude. Passenger jets do sometimes enter high altitude holdings (I’ve been in one once as a passenger), which could account for this.

High altitude holds are also used by refueling tankers, as they wait for the planes they are going to refuel. Pilots obviously also have to train to fly in high altitude holds, and given the number of turns above, that’s the most likely explanation for this particular photo.

Remember the winds at altitude are typical around 50-100mph, so after the four minutes loop, the previous contrail could be blown around five miles away, giving the illusion that the plane is now holding over a different area. It’s not. The plane is playing over the same area, but the contrails have moved.

Of course, if you don’t know this, it might look a bit odd to you. Some people work these racetrack contrails into the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory. Look at this poster on the right. There’s a photo of a racetrack contrail with five turns, separated and distorted by the wind. Overlaid is the text “Look up, Phone Radio DJs”.

These racetrack contrails are pretty rare (unless you live near a training area), but hopefully now if you see one, you’ll be able to tell what is going on, and not feel the urge to call a DJ.

[BTW, the plane in the upper right of the poster is a Boeing E-6 Tacamo, dumping fuel]

Our attention was first drawn to the sky by the sudden appearance of several strange and startling clouds–long, graceful, looping ribbons of white. These were tapering to a point at one end and at the other where they dissolved into nothingness 60 degrees across the sky, were about as broad as the width of a finger held arm’s distance from the eye. On close observation we noticed some distance ahead of each cloud point the tiny speck of a chasse [sic] plane…. [N]ever before had I seen a plane writing in white upon the blue slate of sky.

This is very interesting, as it’s the earliest known account of contrails (note that these are non-persistent). It was also very novel and interesting at the time, and was reported in a letter to Scientific American, (”Clouds formed by Airplanes“, Jun 7, 1919, p 60) by Wells’ brother, Everett Wells, and provoked some discussion of what might be forming these clouds.

The earliest report of both a persistent spreading contrail, with gaps, and a distrail comes very shortly after, in 1921, in the US. Air Service Newsletter.

An altitude flight was made in the morning at McCook Field recently by Lieut. J. A. Macready in a La Pere with supercharged Liberty [engine]. When the airplane reached a height of 26,000-27,000 feet at 11:50 a.m., a long feathery white streamer was observed forming behind a rapidly moving dark speck. The cloud was of the cirrus variety, well defined at the edges and apparently 10 to 15 times the width of the plane. The sky behind the first portion was clear blue with no clouds in the near neighborhood. The first streamer seemed perhaps 2 miles long. Then a gap of one-quarter mile. The second streamer formed with a background of light cirrus cloud and after 2 or 3 miles the plane seemed to go into the cirrus background, for the streamer formation ceased while an apparent path of blue continued beyond for a way in the cirrus cloud. The whole streamer may have been 3 miles long. After 20 minutes the streamer had drifted and spread until it merged indistinguishably with the other cirrus clouds visible.

Both these accounts were reprinted in the June 1921 Monthly Weather Review, in the article The Argonne Battle Cloud, which also includes an account from Captain W. H. Nead, that includes an account of iridescence in the trails:

The Rainbow Division, on the morning of October 10, 1918, was lying in what had at one time been a wood just back of Montfaucon. The sky was clear except for a few fleecy clouds to the northwest. Three airmen came from the northwest and passed almost over our regiment, continuing on to the southeast.
Behind each machine was a trail of white, which at first sight appeared to be smoke resulting from poor engine combustion, but which upon more careful observation proved too wide to have been caused by smoke. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was the fact that when the planes reached a certain point in the sky the rainbow (sundog) colors became distinctly visible.

And even back in 1921, the mysteries of contrail formation were not too difficult to discern:

The end products of complete combustion of gasoline are water vapor
and carbon dioxide, and it is found that if the water vapor were condensed,
there would result a little more than 1 gallon of water per
gallon of gasoline consumed. It was found by Wells and Thuras, in
studying the fog off the Newfoundland coast (see U. S. Coast Guard ,
Bull. 5, 1916) that there were 1,200 water droplets of diameter 0.01 mm.
in a cubic centimeter of air in a dense fog. If we assume that an airplane
travels 3 miles on a gallon of gasoline (approximately the figure
given by the Aerial Mail Service) it is possible to show that if only a
small part - a fourth or fifth - of the water vapor were condensed,
there would be abundant cloud to produce the effect observed at the
Argonne Battle. It should be stated, however, that this water vapor
would have to be discharged into air which was very cold and nearly
saturated. This seems to be the correct explanation, and is substantiated
by scientists at the Bureau of Standards, who say that they have
actually observed this cloud behind airplanes and automobiles. The
Bureau of Standards is working on a device for condensing and using
this water aboard dirigibles as ballast.

The weather review goes on to discuss how vapor trails (contrails) can form at low altitudes, even down to the ground, if it is cold and damp enough. They even give examples I’d never heard of, contrails formed by a horse, and a herd of reindeer:

A horse, warm from running over the ice, on a cold day in Greenland, was accompanied by a cloud 50 meters in height formed from its breath. Von Hann gives a similar case regarding a herd of reindeer. The human breath also has been seen to transform itself into small clouds of ice needles.

At first glance it looks like two jets flying in parallel, but I think that actually the upper jet is somewhat higher than the lower jet. It’s hard to see, but it also looks like the upper jet has four engines, while the lower seems to have two:

This might explain the longer persistence of the upper jet. It also might account for the curious way the upper jet trail goes from four mingled streams into two separate streams that then twist away and break up. The sequence seems very similar to this one from Clouds of the World, published in 1972 (photos probably taken in the late 1960s):

See here again how it start out as four trails, they merge and separate into two trails, and then break up into two swirly trails due to wake eddies.

In my photo it looks like the outer trails simply fade out sooner than the inner trails. This suggests that the inner engines are on a higher power setting than the outer engines (and hence produce more water vapor).

It shows a contrail from the lower left that then turns into a distrail on the upper right, cutting through a layer of clouds.

Distrails form when the contrail makes the cloud actually precipitate. The cloud is just sitting there - small water droplets or ice crystals in the air, but when the contrail comes through it the extra moisture forms larger drops (or ice crystals), which fall, leaving this gap. It’s very straightforward, but it looks a little odd, and puzzled this guy back in 1944:

My photo of the distrail above looks quite dramatic, but it’s actually slightly misleading. I’d enhanced the contrast to bring out the details in the cloud, and it gave it a rather dramatic orange cast. The original is a little more relaxed - which illustrates a problem with photos of contrails - they can look a little suspiciously colored, but it could quite possibly be post-processing that made look that way.

Not every long straight line in the sky is a contrail. Here Aristotle suggests it’s “a sort of wave-mark in the air”. Basically an isolated row cloud, low on the horizon.

Aristotle’s take on the weather is very interesting. He has quite an extensive section on atmospheric optics - halos, sundogs, etc. Pretty advanced for 2347 years ago.

There actually WERE contrails before airplanes were invented, just rather rare, and of a different sort. Here’s an image of one from 1751, showing how it formed, and how it was distorted by the wind.

and one from 1866.

These are meteor trails, which could be comprised a disintegrating meteor, but also of clouds precipitated by the dust and pressure changes. This type of contrail has been around for billions of years.

The next photo was thought to be a meteor contrails with a fireball, but later analysis sowed it was more likely a normal contrail combined with some cloud and illuminated with the setting sun.