Chemtrails in the Sky Are Evidence of Nefarious Activities for Broad-Based Conspiracy Theorists

Anyone living near a major metropolitan airport has gazed up at the sky and seen them: patchworks of crisscrossing contrails left by passing jetliners. Most of us don't give a second thought to this common sight of a scratched-up sky. If we do, it's likely to reflect on the explosion in air traffic and its growing contribution to air pollution.

But for an expanding minority of Americans, those hanging contrails represent something much more sinister than increased carbon emissions. Since the late 1990s, a flourishing conspiracy theory subculture has been ringing the alarm that many of these contrails aren't normal vapor-and-exhaust contrails at all. Rather, they are chemtrails, mysterious and menacing chemical evidence of secret government programs to modify the weather and depopulate the planet.

Investigation into, and speculation over, the nature of these chemtrails has grown over the last decade from a marginal belief into a millions-strong Transatlantic Truth Quest, with chemtrails taking on the stature of celestial UFOs. If first-wave UFO sightings were the projection of early Cold War fears, chemtrails are the climate-change-age corollary, with cultural panic over pollution and changing weather patterns projected onto the clouds and planes in the sky.

As with flying saucers, hundreds of YouTube clips purport to capture cities "getting pasted" by secret government planes. Dozens of chemtrails Web sites compete for the loyalty and business of a sprawling, gullible and increasingly global chemtrails flock. Like the white lines that are its obsession, the chemtrails scene crisscrosses with every other strand in the pantheon of cosmic conspiracy culture. Most chemtrails sites, like the lovable dontchemtrailmebro.com, also peddle in 9/11 Truth, alien contact, Northern Idaho survivalism and the "suppressed" theories of the twin martyred wizards of etheric energy, Wilhelm Reich and Nicolai Tesla.

The chemtrails scene is a loud saloon of shouting New Age conspiracists spouting conflicting theories at the bar, with the usual assortment of hucksters and Internet paranoids filling the tables. The self-styled leaders of the movement are a diverse lot but share a consensus starting point that thousands of jets are spraying millions of gallons of "chemtrail soup" around the world on a daily basis.

Chemtrails, they hold, are easily distinguished from normal contrails by their longer duration and expansive dissipation patterns. Most of the spraying is believed to take place at night over the population centers of NATO countries, although some skywatchers suspect Russia and China are being targeted as well. As for the content of the soup and who is responsible for the program, that's where things get contentious. But the major theories are generally some variation or combination of the following:

1) U.S. oil companies are secretly spraying reflective chemicals in the air to reduce global warming and thus reduce criticism of fossil fuels.

2) A New World Order cabal -- also known as the Illuminati -- is spraying cities with pathogens in the first of a two-stage depopulation program.

3) NATO aircraft are involved in a top-secret weather-modification program, and/or are refining a new-generation of high-frequency atmospheric weapons.

4) The U.S. government is using commercial and military aircraft to assist and monitor weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes in order to both destroy enemies and pump money into the domestic economy through emergency spending/recovery bills.

Scott Stevens is a leading proponent of the fourth theory. A former TV meteorologist in Pocatello, Idaho, Stevens was fired when he began giving national radio interviews on chemtrails. He took his severance and moved to the foothills above Denver International Airport, where he now conducts plain-sight research into chemtrails full time, maintains the chemtrails site weatherwarsinfo.blogspot.com, and hosts "Amerika Now," a local AM-radio conspiracy culture talk show.