Happy Chemtrails

By Guy Denton

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

A sinister plot is unfolding in America’s skies. Just ask Dane Wigington, a self-professed expert on climate science. In an interview with former Fox News host turned “truth-teller” Tucker Carlson last November, Wigington declared that the U.S. government is secretly dispersing poisonous “aluminum nanoparticles” from airplanes, “dismantling the planet’s primary life support systems,” and manipulating weather events such as hurricanes and blizzards. In short, a syndicate of shadowy figures is plotting our national destruction.

 

But how, you might ask, have these nefarious activities not been widely exposed? By Wigington’s account, it’s obvious: Meteorologists won’t speak out for fear of losing their “paychecks and pensions,” organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace are similarly afraid of sacrificing their nonprofit status, and the entire military is involved in the project under the direction of the Department of Defense.

 

Anyone who has ever stumbled across the more paranoid precincts of the internet has likely heard these claims before. The chemtrails conspiracy theory — which, broadly speaking, posits that toxic chemicals are regularly being released from American aircraft — has existed online in various forms since the 1990s. Recently, however, it has experienced a resurgence in popularity, including on the right. As belief in chemtrails grows within the Republican Party, it’s important for conservatives to consider how we can prevent people from being enthralled.

 

Carlson’s interview with Wigington racked up millions of views across YouTube and other social media platforms. “US Government Admits Chemtrails Are Real,” the title declared. “(It’s Worse Than You Think).” If you don’t recall the government making this confession, that’s because it never did. But that hasn’t stopped the idea of chemtrails from infiltrating mainstream political discourse.

 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, has accused DARPA, a DOD research lab, of spraying noxious elements into the sky. “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it,” he told an audience last year during an interview with Dr. Phil. Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, repeatedly invoked the theory before her resignation from Congress. In a post on X last July, she claimed that a cabalistic “they” have admitted to “controlling the weather and spraying chemicals in our skies.” The following month, South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace (R.) — who is currently running for governor — proclaimed that if elected, she will “support any action” to “ban chemtrails.” Even among the public, belief is strong. One 2017 study from Harvard’s Dustin Tingley and Gernot Wagner, published in Nature, found that roughly 10 percent of Americans believe in the chemtrails theory “completely,” while a further 20–30 percent view it as “somewhat true.”

 

Reality, however, is far less akin to an episode of The X-Files than the chemtrail cadre might think. The trails that planes often leave behind are simply a result of condensation that occurs when water vapor from jet exhaust freezes in the cold atmosphere. They even have a name that reflects their actual source: contrails.

 

“Contrails first became commented on during the Second World War because of exhaust trails from high-flying fighters and bombers,” Ron Smith, a fellow of Britain’s Royal Aeronautical Society, told me. “With the growth of air travel, there are more jet airliners than there were, so there are more contrails.”

 

Depending on atmospheric conditions, contrails can linger for minutes or hours at a time. Occasionally, they will form in unusual patterns, or gaps will appear within them. Conspiracy theorists, Smith said, will often attribute these peculiarities to “pilots switching their chemtrail systems on and off.” But “local variations in humidity and temperature . . . on the aircraft flight path” are the real cause.

 

Yet if the science behind contrails is so simple, why are so many people drawn to a fantastical explanation? To understand the appeal of the chemtrails theory, it’s worth considering why conspiracy theories are attractive in general. Fundamentally, human beings feel a need to understand. They crave straightforward explanations for events or phenomena that are beyond their frame of reference, but those easy answers aren’t always forthcoming. When we encounter things that are unfamiliar, our preconceptions about the world will often lead us to certain conclusions. In an era defined by social media — when falsehoods are rampant, algorithms provide an endless buffet of conspiracy content, and the like-minded can connect with one another on an unprecedented scale — it has never been easier for conspiracy theories to gain currency.

 

Dave Thomas, an adjunct professor at New Mexico Tech known for debunking chemtrails and other conspiracy theories, told me that before the internet, conspiracy theorists largely worked in isolation and tried to promote their ideas by sending “dense, multipage” letters to “a few selected reporters or scientists.” Today, “the internet has spawned numerous discussion groups that have evolved into ‘echo chambers’ for all sorts of conspiracy theories. In such groups, members feel like they are insiders, helping the few brave pioneers who have discerned the only real path to the Truth.”

 

The popularity of the chemtrails theory, in particular, is a creature of our online world. When it first emerged in the 1990s, message boards and mailing lists had made it possible for conspiracists to reach vast audiences with a few keystrokes.

 

“People started posting theories about military jet fuel being toxic,” said Mick West, a science writer and expert on conspiracy theories. “And as evidence of that, they pointed to the fact that planes sometimes leave long trails that sometimes spread out and cover the sky. That’s how it started.”

 

West noted that chemtrail theory was “very much an underground thing for a long time,” although it was occasionally acknowledged in local newspapers and radio stations. Fringe writers such as William Thomas and Michael J. Murphy attempted to promote it in books, speeches, and media appearances, but they received little commercial attention. Now, however, West believes that the theory is “making a little bit of a transition into the mainstream,” thanks in large part to figures such as Carlson and Kennedy.

 

Belief in chemtrails can take a surprising variety of forms. Some advocates of the theory think that the government is experimenting with mind control. Others are convinced that it’s an elaborate plot to control population growth. Even within the chemtrails community, there are those who seek to enforce certain standards of sanity. Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who co-authored a 2022 study of chemtrail believers, discovered as much when she interviewed the founder of an online chemtrails discussion group.

 

“He told us that his forum had rules,” Bruckman told me. “It was okay to say, ‘Chemtrails are being sprayed for deliberate depopulation.’ But it’s not okay to say, ‘Chemtrails are sprayed for deliberate depopulation because aliens are coming.’ He said, ‘This is a science-based group, and we don’t allow crazy stuff on our forum.’”

 

Whether the more prominent supporters of the chemtrails theory — such as Carlson, Kennedy, and Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy theory website Infowars — genuinely believe in it is a complicated question. In West’s judgment, most of them are driven equally by sincerity and self-interest.

 

“If you have a worldview that is a certain way — you feel like there’s this deep conspiracy in the world — then it’s very easy for you to believe certain things,” he said. “I think there’s a degree of that with Tucker Carlson. Even people like Alex Jones, they don’t believe half the stuff they say. A lot of it is for effect. But they do believe the other half.”

 

Unlike UFOs, UAPs, or lizard people, contrails are observable in everyday life, and this visibility helps make the chemtrails theory appealing. For those who don’t understand the cause of contrails, their presence can seem bizarre or alarming, particularly in a post-Covid world where trust in government and the scientific establishment has eroded. Yet the science behind contrails is easy to grasp, and common objections from conspiracy theorists are similarly easy to disprove.

 

A popular notion, for instance, is that contrails did not begin to appear until the 1990s. But an abundance of evidence from photographs, movies, and television shows proves otherwise. Thomas, the New Mexico Tech professor, points to the World War II documentary The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944) — in which “long and long-lasting trails are shown, along with gaps in the contrails” — as a notable example.

 

In recent years, Wigington and other chemtrail advocates have made geoengineering — the idea that technology can be used to modify the atmosphere and reverse climate change — central to their theories. Wigington believes that geoengineering is merely a disguise for the deployment of chemtrails, and this idea has caught on in local politics. In 2024, Tennessee’s state legislature passed a bill designed to ban geoengineering, and several of the bill’s supporters seemed to reference the idea of chemtrails in their public remarks. Similar legislation has been considered in states such as Arizona, Louisiana, and Iowa.

 

But at present, large-scale geoengineering is entirely theoretical. David Keith, a geophysics professor at the University of Chicago, supports a proposed form of solar geoengineering that would lower the Earth’s temperature by reflecting greater amounts of sunlight back into space. “There’s no question it’s doable,” he said. “But the point is, it’s not actually happening.” Chemtrail believers will often emphasize that the number of applications and approvals for geoengineering patents has increased in recent years. “These patents are real, but you can patent anything,” Keith said. “That doesn’t mean that anybody’s executing the patents.”

 

The most blatant problem with the chemtrails theory is that it presumes that the perpetrators are almost supernaturally competent. It would take an extraordinary amount of planning and coordination to not only execute such a scheme but keep it secret for decades. Even in small groups, human beings are dysfunctional. For the chemtrails theory to be viable, thousands of people at every level of the government and aviation industry would need to be involved. And all of them — from the malevolent politicians orchestrating everything, to the crew of each flight, to the workers manufacturing the chemicals, manning the loading docks, and managing the supply chains — would need to willingly participate in harming the public without ever once speaking out or being detected by an independent party. If only airlines could use that same mastery of organization to make every flight arrive on time.

 

“I think governments can do a good job of keeping operational secrets on a short time,” Keith, the geophysicist, said. “So like, the mission to capture Osama Bin Laden, when you’re just talking a small SEAL team, you can keep the secret of where you’re going.” Of course, governments have lied to the public in the past. “But I think what they don’t do is sustained lies that involve huge numbers of people. There’s no precedent for it. And even less when there’s no justification.”

 

Even so, many chemtrail believers remain wedded to the theory, and helping people who have fallen down the rabbit hole find a way out is no easy task. One potential tactic, said Bruckman, the Georgia Tech professor, is for “recovering believers” to perform outreach: “Look, I was there too. Let me tell you how I learned that I was confused.”

 

Another method, according to West, is to steadily provide people with clear information that disproves the theory — for instance, by demonstrating that the ballast tanks used in certain planes contain water rather than chemicals. Still, West said, “these things take a long time. You can’t just show them stuff and have it immediately work.”

 

Most of the experts who spoke to me suggested that the answer lies in harnessing the internet to guide people to the truth rather than to fantasy. For instance, the algorithms that often feed conspiracy content to social media users are “adjustable,” Keith said. He cites Wikipedia as an example of an algorithm that seeks to promote evidence and reliable sources, while the Facebook algorithm often amplifies misleading or inflammatory content. “I think you could imagine an algorithm that, in different ways, ties people together and does try to anchor closer to reality.” Who would decide what it actually means to anchor the public to reality, however, remains an open question.

 

Bruckman, meanwhile, recognizes a singular solution: metadata. She contends that as artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, it will soon be impossible to distinguish real videos from those generated by AI, and canards will flourish. But if every video on social media were labeled with certain details, “people could make informed choices about what to believe and what not to believe,” Bruckman said. Such details could include: “By the way, this is AI. By the way, this has been disproven; here’s the data if you want to see it.” (The Community Notes tool on X, which allows users to fact-check deceptive posts, is one example of how such a guardrail could be implemented without infringing on users’ rights.)

 

Despite the potential of technological innovation and stronger online guardrails, the conspiratorial instinct will remain ingrained in human nature. “I think a lot of the debunking stuff that gets done deteriorates over time,” West said. “There’s some chemtrail explanation sites that just don’t exist anymore. It’s a never-ending battle because you get people who weren’t even born when I started investigating chemtrails, who are now believing in chemtrails.”

 

It seems some of us are destined to keep watching the skies.