How many people are interested in chemtrails? Not very many I suspect. But how to measure them? One way is to see how popular they are on the internet. You could measure how many web pages mention “chemtrails”, but that could give a distorted picture, as the people who believe in chemtrails might tend to be much more likely to post their beliefs on the internet. Lots of people knit, for example, but only a tiny fraction of them make knitting web sites.

We could count blog posts, but that has similar problems, as people who believe in conspiracy theories seem quite keen on spreading those theories, and so are more likely to blog about them

The best way that occurred to me was to measure search terms. Simply see how many people were googling for “chemtrails” vs. other words. In this Googlified world, if people are interested in something then they google it.

Here’s my raw data:


 Google Google Blogs Google Images Video News Scholar Pages/Posts Groutability 2006
“Global Warming” 67500000 733828 996000 18420 32584 102000 91.98 80
Ufo 36700000 317795 3335000 163722 929 24000 115.48 80
Knitting 20600000 601088 668000 7035 1715 143000 34.27 50
Archery 11900000 95539 296000 3614 1453 12500 124.56 12
Parkour 4510000 35404 83100 39931 49 39 127.39 8
Fread 2600000 3224 8280 32 10 3580 806.45 1.6
Grouting 1600000 6873 17800 193 58 36600 232.79 1
Bboy 1210000 14443 25700 77250 10 49 83.78 3
Chemtrail(s) 791000 4828 9180 2123 5 38 163.84 1
“fox hunting” 707000 7923 15900 106 64 2380 89.23 1.2
“Killer Bees” 434000 7090 10400 195 197 568 61.21 0.8
Morgellons 236000 3756 2970 143 4 26 62.83 1
Vexillology 112000 1037 1610 0 4 34 108 0
Reborning 47000 397 1070 0 0 0 118.39 0



The columns are fairly self explanatory. They are the number of results returned by google for web, blogs, images, videos, news and scholar. The pages/posts column is the ratio of total web pages to blog posts. The “groutability” column is the ratio search volume for that word to the search volume of “grouting”. I chose grouting as it seemed like a thing people would be searching for at a fairly constant volume, but not too much.

I chose search terms that had a similar result to chemtrails. I also added some outliers, that were very popular, or very unpopular, mostly activities practiced only by a few (like reborning). I included “morgellons”, as it seems like the most similar thing I could find with a distinct name.

You can look at the numbers and draw your own conclusions. Chemtrails has more results than “killer bees”, but less than “bboy” ( a type of athletic break-dancing). It has vastly less than knitting and archery. But a lot more than “reborning” (making realistic baby dolls).

But how many people are interested in chemtrails? Well, there are about 30,000,000 knitters in the country, and 600,000 blog results. So given the 4828 blogs results for chemtrails, that would indicate 241,000 people have some interest in chemtrails. But, like I said, it’s not easy to accurately extrapolate. If you could extrapolate from blogs, you could say there are three times as many chemtrailers as there are vexillologists (flag enthusiasts).

Or you could say: a lot more people are interested in Parkour than are interested in chemtrails.

[Update] Chemtrails on Usenet (archived on Google Groups), were only mentioned in 1999.  Here are the year-to-year search results for the word “chemtrails”.  There are NO results prior to 1999

1999 – 1070
2000 – 2050
2001 – 2810
2002 – 2250
2003 – 2060
2004 – 2100 
2005 – 1570
2006 – 2450
2007 – 2230