Fear From Above: Chemtrails vs. Conspiracy Theory in the Bay Area

[Mick West]

Quite a long article about chemtrail folk:

http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisc...te-geoengineering-protest/Content?oid=3955115

Patrick Roddie films the sky every day. Two years ago, he rigged a camera on the roof of his apartment building in Lower Pacific Heights to record timelapses of the sun's dawn-to-dusk arc, along with the sky's usual bland traffic of birds, airplanes, and clouds.

Many of Roddie's timelapses — which he uploads to YouTube — capture something else, too: hazy, white threads that thicken in the wake of airplanes and sometimes tattoo the sky in grids. To the uninitiated, these are contrails, the harmless water vapor that commercial planes spume as they track across the sky at 30,000 feet. To Roddie and his followers, however, these are chemtrails, the toxic signature of a covert government program to slow global warming and control the weather.

Roddie knows this sounds like boilerplate conspiracy theory. "Don't trust me," he says. "Assume I'm full of crap. I'm just some Irish guy."

 

[Auldy]

Great read. Shame about getting called out on the domestic flight numbers.

 

[scombrid]

West is methodical in his refutations. First, he says, contrails have increased over the last 20 years because more airlines now fly local routes rather than from hub city to hub city.

I don't recollect this being said this way. I think the journalist misunderstood a statement. Air lines are in fact flying more direct routes and they are using jets to do it. The turbo props that were doing a lot of the distribution out of Charlotte, Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia have been scrapped and replaced with small jets.

This isn't accurate. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that U.S. airlines have cut the number of domestic flights nationwide. In fact, the reduction is so severe that the Justice Department is investigating whether "airlines colluded to shrink flight schedules in unison so they could boost prices." Local routes have been hardest hit.

This is another wrong statement by the journalist. I don't think the journalist has a grasp of the issues that the Justice Department is investigating. Air passenger traffic is at an all time high. Just cutting routes a little bit is going to drive price up a lot.

Yes, in the last year or two airline mergers have cut a lot of service. Southwest dropped a lot of AirTran's routes. American is slashing US Airways routes. Ticket prices have adjusted accordingly. Justice Department is looking to see if airlines have colluded beyond these merger situations to manipulate the supply of seats.

But air traffic, particularly jet air traffic, has increased substantially in volume in the last 20 years. Journalist is being very sloppy here.

 

[JRBids]

Case study #2, the Morgellons woman, is wonderful to see in the article. It shows the thinking of the typical chemtrail believer.

 

[Mick West]

Great read. Shame about getting called out on the domestic flight numbers.

Yes, it's a shame he focussed on that. There are many reasons why people might see more contrails than they previously though they did.

West is methodical in his refutations. First, he says, contrails have increased over the last 20 years because more airlines now fly local routes rather than from hub city to hub city.

This isn't accurate. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that U.S. airlines have cut the number of domestic flights nationwide. In fact, the reduction is so severe that the Justice Department is investigating whether "airlines colluded to shrink flight schedules in unison so they could boost prices." Local routes have been hardest hit.

The point I was making there is that people might live in a place that did not have overflights when they were young (in the early 1990s or before), but the addition of new routes could have made contrails show up more regularly in that particular location.

Airline routes have increased since the 1980s. What he's referring to is a contraction in flights since the peak in 2007.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323687604578469160553588132

The study, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows that from 2007 through last year, U.S. airlines cut the number of scheduled domestic flights by 14%. The number of seats offered fell by slightly less, as airlines pushed passengers onto bigger planes, says the study, which was prepared by MIT's International Center for Air Transportation and is expected to be made public Wednesday.

Yes, there's been some route restructuring in recent years. But the point still stands, changes in the route map can make people think there's been some change in "chemtrails" if they suddenly start to see more contrails.

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

Nonetheless, Roddie has attracted a following of devout chemtrails believers in the Bay Area. Fifty-three-year old Val Hall is one of them. A landscape gardener from Richmond, Hall first learned of chemtrails from a young man who'd joined her work crew at a job in Point Richmond in May 2006.

"While we were working, a jet put a persistent contrail all the way across the sky, and the kid showed me," Hall says. "I'd never seen a jet put a line like that all the way across the sky in my life. Some of my crewmembers looked at him and thought, 'This guy's crazy,' but I didn't think he was crazy."

The kid gave Hall a name for what she'd witnessed — chemtrails — and explained the various poisons strafing people in the Bay Area. Hall never saw the kid again after that day, but she began watching the sky closely, and in 2011 she went online to do her own research. That's when she found Roddie.

"I never wanted to be an activist in my life, but all of a sudden I had to be an activist," Hall says. She calls herself a "warrior for the deep blue sky," an allusion to her childhood in the Bay Area when the sky was a lush, cinematic blue instead of the "chalkboard" it is today. Hall now admins 15 different Facebook groups devoted to exposing chemtrails.

15?

 

[Mick West]

15?

That does not mean she started 15 groups. Groups have multiple admins, and it's common for someone active in a community to eventually get made an admin of a group.

It's a lot though, so maybe that's just how many groups she's a member of, and she admins some.

 

[skephu]

Roddie knows this sounds like boilerplate conspiracy theory. "Don't trust me," he says. "Assume I'm full of crap."

No problem. That's what I'm going to do

 

[Graham2001]

An update from the CBS network:

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015...a-government-conspiracy/#.VgSbTaippZ8.twitter

REDDING (CBS13) — There is a growing, underground movement of people who believe California's drought is part of a government conspiracy instead of a naturally occurring event from a lack of rain during the last four years.

The movement's leader, Dane Wigington, says he's putting his life on the line to reveal a truth that will shake society to its core.

 

[MikeG]

"The data backs this up; I've already bet my life on this fact and again, those who doubt this is going on, those who want to deny, those protecting their paychecks and pensions by denying it will not be able to much longer. The damage is too cataclysmic. There will be no hiding this issue much longer," he said.

This statement really does capture Wigington's approach. He is the lone crusader, risking his life against a threat only he knows over revelations of a cataclysm that has been right around the corner for years.