Ye Gods!!! I can't believe this "chemtrails" thing is back again.

Somewhat over a year ago, "Dreaded Guest" posted a whole series of paranoid conspiracy theories, apparently trolling for responses. These nitwit posts included the contention that the Sand Point Naval Air Station in the northeast section of Seattle is a concentration camp run by the federal government and that a lot of people who were arrested in the "Battle in Seattle," the WTO protests a few years ago, are interred there, à la Guantanamo.

His (or her) problem with this was that it was totally untrue. The former naval air station was decommissioned several years ago and accept for a few buildings used by NOAA, it was given to the City of Seattle and is now known as Magnuson Park (named after former Washington State Senator Warren G. Magnuson) and is open to the public. I've been there many times for various events or just loafing along the shore of Lake Washington on a nice day. Great place for picnics.

Along with some 40,000 peaceful demonstrators protesting at the WTO conference, there were couple of hundred barbarians, along with a number of boisterous teenagers, who didn't give diddly squat about the WTO, but who looked upon the event as an opportunity to run amok, setting fires in Dumpsters and smashing storefront plate glass windows. The Seattle police—not the federal government—rounded these vandals up, and when the King County jail was full, they bussed them out to Magnuson Park and put them in the old Navy brig, which was still there. They process them, called parents to come and pick up their rowdy kids, charged the rest, and released them on bail the following day. Not exactly what most people would consider a "concentration camp." Granted, there were cases of some police "overreacting," but these cases were thoroughly investigated, handled with dispatch, the guilty parties were treated accordingly (everthing from reprimands through suspensions to firing). Since he felt responsible because it happened on his watch and because he also felt the citizens of Seattle had lost confidence in him due to the behavior of a dozen or so police officers, the police chief himself resigned. The new chief has tightened discipline within the department.

But this didn't stop Dreaded Guest. He (or she) came back with several other pieces of twaddle, including this "chemtrail" conspiracy. Here too, the facts just don't hang together. These are contrails—condensation trails—droplets of water that condense out of the atmosphere, that jet engines at high altitudes leave behind them. These have been around since the late Forties and early Fifties when the first jet fighters and bombers (such as the B-47 and B-52) went into service. When jet airliners, such as the 747 went into commercial service, contrails increased in number, and since almost all non-private (commercial and military) aircraft manufactured since then are propelled by jet engines, the number of contrails have increased, just as one would expect. The idea that these are something new, or that they are the trails of military planes "crop dusting" us with bacteria or some other substance to turn us into obedient zombies or dose us with drugs and medicines without our knowledge or any one of a number of dire, deep-laid, and despicable conspiracies on the part of the government, or governments, or agencies unknown, is just plain rampant paranoia. The various folks who promulgate these stories about "chemtrails" can't even get their stories straight about who it is who's supposed to be spraying us with which chemicals.

My brother-in-law was a career airline pilot, recently retired from Northwest Airlines. Prior to that, he flew F-89 Scorpions in the Montana Air National Guard. He's made one helluva lot of contrails in his life. When I told him about Dreaded Guest's obsession with "chemtrails," he just shook his head and laugh. Contrails, he said, are the result of a combination of altitude and weather conditions. How fast or slow they dissipate depends on how much wind there is at the altitude in question. High winds, they dissipate quickly. In light winds or in calm, they can hang around for quite awhile. There may be hydrocarbons or minute droplets of unburned jet fuel in the contrails, just like emissions from an automobile engine, and some environmentalists have expressed concern about what this might be doing to the ozone layer. But that hardly qualifies as the deadly and dastardly conspiracy that some folks try to claim that it is. Incidentally, at lower altitudes, jet aircraft are emitting the same hydrocarbons they do at higher altitudes, but do to that atmospheric conditions at lower altitudes, they don't leave contrails.

The document attributed to "anonymous mechanic" is all over the internet, and most of the web sites dealing with "chemtrails" referred to this one source as their authority for the "truth" of this conspiracy. I guess this accounts for the reappearance of this bit of paranoid ding-dongery.

Stay tuned folks. Next week:   the Dreaded Black Helicopters!   

Don Firth

P. S.:   There are those whose level of paranoia is such that they will maintain that my expression of skepticism regarding this matter makes it clear that I am part of the conspiracy.

P. S.:   How's this for paranoia? I suspect that Dreaded Guest might still be with us, wearing another mask.