Contrails or Chemtrails?

 - jim Young

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Illuminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.” - Alan Moore

Aircraft of any size passing overhead in Stroud in the 1950s was a rare event. Rare enough to cause my friends and I to pause whatever we were doing, whether it was playing marbles or baseball, and look to the skies.

We were fascinated by jet planes that flew so high above us, we wouldn’t have even noticed them were it not for the vapour trails they left behind. And just as quickly as they appeared, the vapour trails began to dissipate, leaving us to return our focus back to our childhood games. 

 

By the late 1990s however vapour trails seemed to linger longer in the skies causing concern among some conspiracy theorists. We had been taught that vapour trails were the result of condensation created when the hot vapour from jet engines met with the cooler temperatures of the earth’s atmosphere.

However, some believed these vapour trails or contrails as they are also called were actually chemtrails. “If vapour trails usually dispersed quickly,” they reasoned, “there must be something added to these vapour trails to make them last a little longer.” 

Speculation ran rampant that the government was involved in a plot to release chemicals into our atmosphere for a number of reasons ranging from weather modification to population control. Some argued chemicals were added to manage solar radiation, biological or chemical warfare and for any number of other nefarious reasons.

My intent here is neither to dispute nor support either side in this ongoing debate. I offer no scientific nor speculative suggestions for this phenomenon. Instead I am simply offering an interesting observation I have recently made in my own backyard. 

I captured both sets of these pictures in the afternoon of May 24, 2024. My deck faces south and the first jet with its vapour trail appeared to my left in the sky shortly after 4:00 pm according to the time-stamp on camera. I think it was travelling in a southerly direction.

The second jet appeared further west, to my right in the sky about a half hour later. It seemed to be travelling south as well.

This first picture, I took on a whim and didn’t give any particular thought to what I was seeing.

As is sometimes the case, which I believe is due in part to the curvature of the earth, the jet that was causing this vapour trail appeared to by flying into the ground behind the trees and is not visible. In an attempt to capture more of the vapour trail (without getting out of my seat) I took this second picture.

However at this time I noticed some peculiarities in the vapour trail the jet had left behind. The vapour trails that typically run parallel to each other were criss-crossed in several places. Was the pilot doing barrel rolls? I zoomed for a closer look.

The closer look showed some other abnormalities in the vapour trail. Parts of the vapour trails seemed to be strong solid lines with wisps of clouds beside them as they began to dissipate. Behind them (which is above in the photo) the solid lines disappeared leaving only clouds of vapour in their place. Yet even further back solid lines appeared again. There seemed to be no uniformity in the density of the vapour trail.

I felt a stronger zoom was in order.

In this photo you can see the vapour trails ended abruptly in some places, only to be continued again shortly after but only at the points where they had appeared to criss-cross in the previous photos. And the parallel lines were far from “parallel” at any point in the trail.

Again we can see the vapour trails have dissipated where the parallel lines were the closest. We can also see in this photo where the vapour trails appeared to criss-cross… in fact they didn’t. They just became very close to each other. I wonder what would cause that?

In spite of my curiosity I was still not inspired enough to get out of my chair. But you can see in this photo the vapour trail has vapourized past my roof. It appears the more the vapour trails dissipate, the more the “cloudy” portions of it separate from the more solid trails. I suppose this could be explained by air currents moving the less dense, “cloudy” portions along.

This next photo is taken of the second jet that crossed our sky that afternoon. By this time I had relocated to the other end of my deck and I was now facing west.

This photo shows a more typical version of what we would expect ordinary vapour trails to look like. And by the length of the vapour trail, it appears the trail is dissipating much more quickly than the first one did.

I wish I had thought to zoom in and take a few more pictures of this second jet and its vapour trail. But even enlarging the photo shows the vapour trail seems to consist of uniformly parallel lines that don’t converge in various locations along the vapour trail. The vapour trails also appear to be dissipating at a more consistent rate.

What does any of this mean? I don’t know and I don’t even have any theories about it, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. I’m sure there are logical and reasonable explanations for all of it. By definition there has to be.

Whether or not those explanations are scientific laws of nature or a government interference is another matter.

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