In 2009 Prince appeared on Tavis Smiley's PBS show for a wide ranging interview, and at one point he mentioned chemtrails (the conspiracy theory that claims the trails behind high-flying aircraft are not contrails, but some kind of deliberate spraying). When he died seven years later, new conspiracy theories started to form, suggesting he had been killed to keep him quiet about chemtrails, or that he had somehow died of "chemtrail flu". Sometimes both.
And so Prince became part of the chemtrail mythology, another piece of "evidence" that sounds superficially significant. But like most chemtrail evidence, it's based on a series of misunderstandings, and sometimes deliberate falsehoods, essentially a collection of myths.
Myth #1 - Prince started to talk about chemtrails, and then he was killed to shut him up.
Reality: He mentioned "chemtrails" once, and then he never mentioned them again. Not only that, he mentioned "chemtrails" once in 2009. Killing someone seven years after they stop talking about something seems like a bizarre way to shut them up. In fact Prince's death has resulted in vastly more discussion of Chemtrails than ever before. Way more than him talking about the theory ever did.
Myth #2 - Prince died of "chemtrail flu"
Reality: "Chemtrail flu" does not exist. It's an old myth based on the change of respiratory disease from the fourth leading cause of death to the third. In fact this change only happened because the top three causes of death all declined rapidly, and respiratory disease has simply not declined as rapidly.
Myth #3 - Prince was talking about the common version of the Chemtrail Conspiracy Theory, where "chemtrails" are used to alter the climate in a form of secret geoengineering.
Reality: He was talking about a fringe version of the chemtrail theory, invented by Dick Gregory, where "chemtrails" are "Manganese" being sprayed to make black people fight each other to keep them subjugated.
The reality here is a little more complicated than the previous two myths, but it's worth understanding exactly what Prince was talking about. Not just because it has very little to do with the more common version of the chemtrail theory, but because it's a fascinating conspiracy theory on its own.
First let's hear exactly what he said, which was in response to a question from Tavis: "tell me about (the track) Dreamer", to which Prince responded.
Gregory: "How much manganese are you spraying in my neighborhood at night, while I'm sleeping."
Prince: "Think they're spraying chemicals over the city / While we sleep"
Prince: "Think they're spraying chemicals over the city / While we sleep"
Notice also when Prince is discussing the song he says "you really didn’t know why, I mean, everybody was fighting", and Gregory similarly is questioning violence in black communities, saying "our children ain't violent because they are black." He then attributes it to adulterated malt liquor, lead in the water, and then manganese sprayed over the neighborhood at night.
So Prince seems to only have been talking about "chemtrails" in the context of this spraying of black neighborhoods for behavior control.
And in what might be considered a bit of a blow to the chemtrail theory, Prince says "when I was a kid, I used to see these trails in the sky all the time". Price was born in 1958, so he was a kid in the 1960s. So if you want to use Prince's account as supporting evidence for "chemtrails", they you have to also accept that planes left trails in the sky all the time in the 1960s.
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