There were a couple of threads on this three or four years ago, and undoubtedly they'll be back again in another three or four years. Conspiracy theories such as this, like urban myths, are next to impossible to kill. No matter how much evidence you bury them in, they keep coming back. People seem to have a real fondness for them.

The first contrails began to appear in the late 1940s when the first high-altitude jets like the military B-47s and B-52s, and commercial 707s went into service. If someone hasn't noticed them until recently, they haven't been looking. I remember seeing contrails—lots of them—in the mid-Fifties when the first SAC B-52s went into service, and sometimes whole squadrons of B-52s would fly over at very high altitudes.

My brother-in-law was a pilot for Northwest Airlines, now retired, and before that, he flew F-89 Scorpions in the Montana Air National Guard. My nephew followed in his father's footsteps, started out as a bush pilot in Alaska, and now flies for Southwest Airlines. They've both made a lot of contrails. When atmospheric conditions are right in the upper atmosphere (at the altitude where most commercial jets fly), water vapor—condensation—forms behind the engines. If there are high winds at that altitude, they dissipate fairly quickly, if not, they may hang around for awhile, gradually "fuzzing out" before they fade away. They are "chemtrails" only in the sense that there may be hydrocarbons from unburned jet fuel mixed in with the water vapor. The same kind of emissions come from automobile engines.

Now, I don't deny that there are conspiracies and other evil forces at work trying to do us in, and we do need to be constantly vigilant. They're called "politicians."

"The Chemtrail Conspiracy" falls into the category of "Daddy! Daddy! Something under my bed is drooling!"

Here's the skinny.

Don Firth