🌊 The Truth About Chemtrails

We investigated those mysterious streaks in the sky above

In a recent episode, Tucker Carlson claimed as fact that chemtrails are real. But are they? Heck, what even are they? We break down the issue and interview Harvard professor Dustin Tingley to get answers.

When a jet flies high in the sky, giant streams of vapor trail behind it. From the ground, perhaps you’ve wondered: What are they?

The traditional answer is boring: Those giant streams are condensation trails, or contrails. Contrails are most visible when the air is humid; if the air is dry, they evaporate quickly. The reason they exist is that the water vapor from aircraft engines freezes into ice crystals that don’t evaporate (the average temperature at high altitudes is -50 degrees F). They can last for hours, spread out, and even evolve into persistent cirrus clouds.

This is the answer you’ll get from scientists, the government, Wikipedia, and every mainstream news outlet. But it’s not the answer you’ll get from Tucker Carlson and an increasingly large faction of the alternative media. They believe these trails are far more nefarious: They’re chemtrails, and the government is spraying them to poison the public, control the weather, and slow birth rates.

Tucker Carlson dedicated a recent episode of his podcast – the biggest show on X and third most popular podcast on Spotify – to chemtrails. It began with a vintage, AI-worthy Tucker opening:

It’s always the obvious questions that are the most vigorously discouraged, and one of the questions that’s been most discouraged over the last 30 years is: What are those lines in the sky you see trailing jets? What is that?... It’s clearly not water vapor, so what are they?

The episode – titled “US Government Admits Chemtrails Are Real (It’s Worse Than You Think). Dane Wigington Reveals All” – has received over 1M views on YouTube in its first 10 days online.

Tucker’s guest for the episode is Dane Wigington, the founder of the obscure website Geoengineering Watch. Wigington explains the trails in the sky by claiming government planes are spraying a toxic mix of aluminum, barium, strontium, manganese, surfactants, polymer fibers, and graphene into the atmosphere for its own nefarious purposes. Tucker responded to Wigington’s list of chemicals with a simple: “Horrifying.”

In today’s deep-dive, we look at the chemtrail conspiracy, then interview Harvard’s Dr. Dustin Tingley for an alternative perspective.

The chemtrail science went a bit over Tucker’s head (he at one point asked why the planes were spreading magnesium instead of manganese, confusing the two), but Wigington, an engineer according to Tucker, was fluent in the technical jargon, lending an air of authority to his viewpoint. For example, when asked about the contrail explanation, he responded:

“All military tankers and all commercial aircraft are equipped with what’s known as a high-bypass turbofan jet engine. That’s a jet-powered fan. Ninety percent of the air that moves through that engine is not combusted. So by design, that engine is nearly incapable of producing any condensation material except under rare and extreme circumstances.”

Theories range from controlling the weather and blocking the sun to population control and mind control. But the reality is this: Those theories are popular, claiming tens of millions of Americans and political leaders like Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) and Health Secretary RFK Jr. as adherents.

This summer, Greene posted on X, “They are admitting that they are controlling the weather and spraying chemicals in our skies.” RFK Jr. has also promised to crack down on “government planes spraying the skies with chemicals,” which could reference chemtrails or confirmed attempts to cause rain through “cloud seeding.”

Regardless, the chemtrails theory has not taken hold of Trump’s EPA, whose chief, Lee Zeldin, published a comprehensive takedown of chemtrail conspiracy theories this summer, declaring: “Instead of simply dismissing these questions and concerns as baseless conspiracies, we’re meeting them head on. We did the legwork, looked at the science, consulted agency experts and pulled in relevant outside information to put these online resources together.”

For the more zealous conspiracy theorists, denials and takedowns of this sort from government officials like Zeldin are meaningless: Of course they’re denying it! They’re all in on the racket or, at the very least, willfully ignorant.

Yet we wanted to hear that perspective, so I spoke to Harvard’s Dr. Dustin Tingley.

Tingley started looking into chemtrails in 2016 because of a text from a conservative friend.

“One of my best friends in life is an Ultra Trumper. Ten years ago, he started texting me about chemtrails, and I’m like, ‘Seriously, dude?’” he told me over Zoom.

Tingley co-authored a 2016 paper on the chemtrails conspiracy theory and reported some fascinating findings, among them this: “What can explain the apparent spread of the chemtrails conspiracy? Per the [​Cooperative Congressional Election Study] results, chemtrails conspirators are not confined to generally extreme political beliefs. Neither ‘extreme’ Democrats or Republicans are more likely to subscribe to the conspiracy theory than ‘moderate’ ones.”

In total, Tingley and his research partner found that belief in the chemtrails conspiracy is between ~30 and ~40% of the general US public. Tingley theorizes, “[The conspiracy] taps into this desire to think that there’s like, this broader operation happening that is screwing me over. And that’s a real feeling. That is absolutely real. And I think it is not appropriate to say that, that, you know, they don’t have these feelings, that they’re wrong about having those feelings.”

Already, I was surprised: A Harvard professor with a Trump-loving friend who doesn’t talk down to conspiracy theorists? I knew I had found the right guy to get an alternative viewpoint. He offered some history:

Contrails were first discovered in like 1920 – a long, long time ago. And I think that’s really important to understand. They were first discovered when planes started to go up higher and higher, such that the temperature was getting really cold. And interestingly, scientists at the time didn’t know what they were. But the Department of Defense became very interested in them because they would give away where their planes were traveling. So in an era where you didn’t have more advanced radar systems, all of a sudden you’ve got planes coming in for an attack, and you look out in the distance and you see these trails before you could see the plane there. That’s a big concern.

I researched this claim myself and found a US Army Medical Corps captain in 1918 claiming that he had seen “several strange and startling clouds – long, graceful, looping ribbons of white. Never before had I seen a plane writing in white upon the blue slate of sky.”

Tingley considers this an important point because we knew about this effect long before the conspiracy emerged:

“So this goes back decades before we knew anything about climate change or we even had the technologies to even imagine spraying stuff or doing these chemtrails. And, so I think the history here is really important to understand.”

Tingley completely refutes the claim that modern jet engines wouldn’t leave contrails, saying:

The physics are wrong. The chemistry is wrong. Anytime you’re running hot engines up where it’s really cold, there’s condensation, and you get crystallization. It doesn’t matter if you’re flying a stealth bomber or a jet from the 1970s, you’re going to create this. Now, I’ll tell you what’s not going to create it to the same extent – a pure battery-operated airplane, since you’re not going to be introducing as much of the particulate matter from the engine.

Beyond the fact that every government agency, established scientific organization, and university scientific department denies the existence of chemtrails, and that no solid evidence of mass chemical dumps from jets exists, Tingley believes it’s far-fetched to believe such a massive operation could be conducted without leaks:

For any conspiracy story, it’s super helpful for people to ask themselves the following question: For this sort of thing to be happening at the level and scope that this ‘expert’ is saying it is happening, you have to have so many people in on the action. You would have to have people loading up the chemicals, you know, you would have to have such an elaborate, organized orchestration in order for this to be happening… Then undoubtedly some of them would have the incentive to be like, you know what, Tucker, I got you. I got the material for you. I got the videotapes of us uploading the chemicals. And that person would be on Tucker’s show tomorrow and could get rich and famous. And that’s never happened because it doesn’t exist.

Tingley also made the point that this phenomenon is a global phenomenon. It doesn’t merely happen with US planes – every jet flying at high altitudes leaves a condensation trail. However, Tingley did acknowledge that cloud seeding – the practice of manipulating clouds to produce or prevent rain – exists:

As the EPA website documented, cloud seeding and the ability to modify weather patterns is a technology that exists. It is not a technology that is widely deployed in the United States. But it’s complicated. The ability to do it isn’t so easy. You know, you can’t be like, ‘Oh, I want it to rain today on this field,’ right? Nature’s a very complicated beast.

Cloud seeding dates back to the 1940s when a GE researcher dropped six pounds of crushed dry ice into a cloud in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, causing snow to fall immediately. The government began researching it, and today, the US government deploys the technology with some frequency. As Tucker’s guest noted, cloud-seeding technology was used during the Vietnam War, when “Operation Popeye” sought to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and make key road surfaces muddy so that North Vietnamese trucks couldn’t pass.

So cloud seeding and weather modification are real technologies and subjects for a future story.

But chemtrails? Neither documentary evidence nor the tens of thousands of Americans who’d have to be involved seem to exist.

Of course, it’s unlikely that Dr. Tingley will sway chemtrail believers. The top YouTube comments on Tucker’s episode are: “Our government is being controlled by absolute evil” and “A country that sprayed Agent Orange has no limit to its evil.”

In other words, any governmental reports or scientific papers are unlikely to sway those who believe that the US government and all members of established institutions are corrupt or evil. Yet to them I’d ask: Are the chemtrails just bad at their mind control job?

Editor’s Note

So, what do you all think: Are chemtrails real, or just a conspiracy theory? Let us know by replying here.

Some replies to our series on Citizens United and dark money:

Dustin wrote:

Re: the dark money. I would wonder if people who’s businesses rely on marketing (or other advertising streams) significantly suffer from this influx of money every 4 years. Say you sold a widget on Amazon/Meta ads for a living; I bet every 4 years their sales dramatically decline because their dollar spend wouldn’t compete with these SuperPAC funds… That’s really tough on your standard small business owner…

Seems that argument alone (and helping the greater good succeed) would suggest capping the amount of funds these organizations can spend. But then someone would likely game the system and create 100 small funds instead of 1 large fund? Just thoughts…

Nathan said:

Sure, American billionaires favoring their side can be problematic, but we NEED to eliminate any and all opportunities for foreigners to influence our elections.

And MJ from Florida wrote:

I’m not a political genius and perhaps look at the world rosier than others, but I’m stumped as to why someone would want to donate money to a politician and not support them by revealing who the donor is. If you really believe in your choice, tell the world and tell them why. It sounds like people want their candidate in so they can extort them for a favor or two without the world knowing what their intent is. I applaud the people who reveal their choices, even when I don’t support their candidate. At least I know why they do what they do. I also think that if people knew that outsiders (other countries) who are not US based were supporting a candidate, then they definitely were looking for something that might not be in our best interest.

Thanks for reading and writing in. Enjoy your Saturdays.
—Max and Max