The claim that newer, high bypass jet engines can’t produce contrails, which Geoengineering Watch came up with, is best encapsulated by this narration from a 2015 YouTube video by Dane Wigington, creator of Geoengineering Watch:

Wigington’s claim is wrong because contrails are not made by the bypass air, so it’s irrelevant how much bypass air there is. As mentioned, contrails are made by the exhaust gases that come out of the combustion chamber and the turbine.

Jet engines require a certain mix of air and fuel to burn efficiently. This mixture in the combustion chamber is essentially the same in both high bypass and low bypass engines. Since the mixture is the same, that means the composition of the exhaust is the same for both types of engine.

An exhaust contrail forms when the exhaust gases mixes with the ambient air. It does not matter much if that mixing happens with the bypass air pushed past the engine with the fan or if the mixing happens with the air that’s simply rushing past the engine from the motion of the plane. The end result is the same: the hot and humid exhaust gases mix with cold air and condense, then freeze, and contrails are formed.

Wigington and others seem to have got the idea that the bypass air somehow dilutes the exhaust gas. They miss the fact that dilution (mixing) is what causes the contrail in the first place. Contrails are mixing clouds, that’s how they work.

Not only is the basic exhaust contrail formation unchanged between high and low bypass engines, there’s another twist. Using the exhaust to turn the larger fan extracts some of the energy generated from the exhaust, which cools it down. Cooler exhaust reaches the condensation point quicker when mixing with the outside air, and so is actually more likely to make contrails than the hotter exhaust found in low bypass engines. There is extensive scientific literature on this, dating back many decades.15

There’s a number of things you can discuss with your friend here. Firstly, there’s the sheer scale of what is being claimed. If, in fact, new jet planes could not make contrails, then that would mean that every single commercial jet in the entire world has been created with this secret spraying program in mind. It means that almost every single time you see a contrail it’s actually a “Chemtrail.” This means that all the pilots in the world are in on the conspiracy, also all the ground crews, all the engine manufacturers, the FAA, and everyone in government, the entirety of the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, and all the corresponding organizations around the world.

The simple fact here is that Wigington, and all the other Chemtrail promoters who follow him, are not only wrong, but they have it completely backwards. High bypass jet engines make more contrails, not fewer.

It can be extraordinarily difficult to get your friend to accept this information. It can depend on how comfortable they are with the science. It can be helpful to look at old books that describe how contrails form. Try to work with them to understand how a jet engine works, what air is coming in, and what comes out. Find the common ground with your friend over how clouds generally are formed; then you can move on to the larger hurdle of convincing them contrails are actually just clouds; and so on. Focus on the fact that it’s the mixing of the exhaust with other air that actually makes the contrail, so mixing with the bypass air will still make a contrail. The dilution doesn’t make anything less likely: dilution is mixing, mixing makes contrails.

Remember it might take a while. Give your friend time to absorb the concepts. Don’t push it. It’s something that can take as long as is needed—the last thing you want is for them to stop listening to you.

But when they do, finally, hopefully, accept that high bypass engines are just as capable of making contrails as low bypass engines, then you’ve got a wedge. The fact that Geoengineering Watch (or whichever promoter initially hooked them on Chemtrails) got this wrong years ago, plus the fact that they have not corrected it despite being shown overwhelming evidence they were wrong, should be something that will make your friend start to question other claims made by that promoter. Perhaps when the promoter says they have “irrefutable proof” of Chemtrail spraying, your friend will consider that the promoter also said that high bypass jet engines were irrefutable proof. They are not.

Chemtrail Videos

One of the more frequent claims made by Geoengineering Watch is that they have “irrefutable proof” that planes are spraying Chemtrails. This supposed proof takes the form of videos that apparently show planes spraying. Almost invariably though the video shows a plane that leaves the type of contrail that they seem to be unaware exists, the aerodynamic contrail. It’s basically a giant misunderstanding.

This misunderstanding dates back to a hoax carried out in 2010 when a video was posted by an Italian Chemtrail promoter, Rosario Marcianò, who goes by the name “Tanker Enemy” on YouTube.16 The video shows a three-engine plane (a KC-10, US military) filmed from another plane that’s following behind and above. Condensation is seen streaming from the wings, and the sunlight is shining on it in a way that creates a rainbow-like iridescent array of colors behind the plane. The footage is accompanied by various annotations that identify “nozzles” that are supposedly doing the spraying. Most amusingly though, is the audio from the pilot and flight engineer in the plane with the camera:

ENGINEER: You see them spraying that Chemtrail?

PILOT: Yup. Good thing we are above it.

ENGINEER: I know!

PILOT: Because we’d be dead right now.

ENGINEER: I gotta put this on YouTube.

PILOT: laughs Are you videoing right now? Oh God, don’t video right now!

ENGINEER: It’s like it’s spraying out of the top of its wings.

PILOT: Don’t do any evidence!

We now know that this is not a “Chemtrail” for several reasons. The first is that it’s recognizable as an aerodynamic contrail. You can clearly see that it’s not coming out of “nozzles,” but is instead forming, seemingly out of thin air, over the surface of the wings. The best way to convey this to your friend is to show them information about aerodynamic contrails. See Figure 6, and do a Google image search for “aerodynamic contrails” and you will find many images of planes leaving very similar contrails, including the iridescent colors. In many of these photos it is very clear that the trail is coming from the entire wing surface and starts out invisible—which means it can only be water condensing out of the air. Chemicals being sprayed would come from specific points on the wing, and would start out as thick, visible trails.

The second reason we can tell this is a hoax is the dialogue between the pilot and the engineer. Any natural English-speaking person should be able to tell that they are simply joking. The idea that an actual member of this lethal and illegal Chemtrail-spraying program would not only joke about being “dead right now,” but also joke about putting the video on YouTube, and then actually do it, is just silly.

Either of these reasons is sufficient to discount this video as evidence, but the case was sealed even tighter by the publication in 2011 of the original video by the engineer who took it, Tim M (a.k.a. USAFFEKC10). Tim posted the unaltered full-length video,17 and later posted some still photos he took at the time that proved conclusively that he was there.18 He wrote:

Case closed? Of course not. Tanker Enemy continued to use the video as “irrefutable proof” with a note that just says, “Don’t listen to hoaxers who repeat that this document is false or similar lies.” The video was also picked up quickly by Dane Wigington of Geoengineering Watch, who somehow overlooked the fact that it was a hoax and began to post more videos of similar aerodynamic contrails. In 2014, he wrote:

This was accompanied by a video of a United Airlines passenger plane leaving an aerodynamic contrail. Since aerodynamic contrails are much more sensitive to atmospheric condition than exhaust contrails, they tend to leave patchy contrails when flying through regions of uneven humidity. This is described by Chemtrail believers as being on/off spraying. But there’s nothing changing with the plane, what’s changing is the air that the plane is flying through.

Regions of differing humidity appear as clouds when the humidity is high enough to condense the water vapor into liquid drops. Depending on the pattern and amount of relative humidity, sometimes we see these cloud regions as isolated clouds, sometimes rows of clouds, sometimes patchy clouds, and sometimes a solid cloud layer. Thus, when the humidity is not high enough to form natural clouds and a plane flies along, then it leaves a trail only where there was already nearly a cloud. You get similar patterns of patchiness, but in a line.

What we’ve got is a normal phenomenon (an aerodynamic contrail) that is being misrepresented by people who either don’t understand it, or deny it exists. Far from something that “cannot be rationally disputed,” this phenomenon has a perfectly rational explanation—one that has been described and understood in books on clouds for many decades. At the very least your friend must admit that this explanation, this rational dispute, actually exists—even if they don’t initially agree it is correct. The way to get them to realize the explanation is correct (and that Geoengineering Watch’s flat rejection is highly unreasonable) is to show them as much about aerodynamic contrails as possible. All the books, all the websites, all the videos, all the photos, and all the scientific papers.

Aerodynamic contrails, like exhaust contrails, are real, they are a type of cloud, and they are not Chemtrails. They are not being deliberately sprayed from planes to alter the weather.

But sometimes something is.

Weather Modification

On August 24, 2017, a small Piper Comanche plane, registration N5526P, took off from San Angelo Regional Airport in Texas.20 It flew west about eighty miles to the Pecos area where it encountered a weak storm front. Flying along the line of clouds the pilot electronically ignited two small flares. The flares were not too different from those used by the highway patrol to create temporary traffic diversions. Cardboard tubes about an inch thick and a foot or so long, several flares are arranged in holders on each wing and wired so they could be individually ignited.

The pilot fired two more flares, then flew over to another small weather system and fired two more for a total of six flares. The next evening Hurricane Harvey made its enormous ponderous landfall in Galveston, Texas, and proceeded slowly inland to dump a historic fifty inches of rain over the Houston area—causing equally historic flooding.

Could these two events be linked? One day there’s some organization conducting odd weather modification operations in Texas, and the next it’s the worst rainfall in history, also in Texas? Surely these events must have been linked?

No. Texas is a big state. Pecos is over 500 miles from Houston, and at the time the flares were ignited, Hurricane Harvey was 800 miles away, out gathering energy from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. There’s simply no way lighting six flares in Pecos could have a measurable effect on a weather system 800 miles away. It’s not clear if it really even did anything in Pecos. It would be like lighting six small flares over London, England, and having it change the weather in Rome, Italy.

And yet the conspiracy theorists still thought it was possible. They found the operations report on the Trans-Pecos Weather Modification Association’s website and interpreted it as a revelation of something nefarious. The very fact that weather modification was being performed was construed by the conspiracists as validation of what they had been saying all along. Here were chemicals being sprayed out of planes. Here were “Chemtrails” modifying the weather.

The conflation between the very real process of cloud seeding and the unfounded theory of Chemtrails goes back a long way. There’s a constant string of Chemtrail believers having an excited confirmatory revelation when they find out that yes, there indeed are planes spraying chemicals and modifying the weather. The conspiracy is seemingly confirmed, the debunkers are debunked, rejoice!

There are two problems with this. The first is that nobody has ever denied that cloud seeding takes place. It’s something that has been done very openly and publicly since the 1950s. It has been mentioned many times in mainstream media; in fact, it even entered popular culture for a while as a topic of interest in the 1960s, to the extent that an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show featured it as a plot device in the 1965 episode “Show of Hands,” where the son needs to make a costume of a rain cloud for a part in a school play:

SON: I’m a good cloud. An airplane flies over me and seeds me.

MAID: Seeds you? What in the world for?

SON: To make me rain on the crops.21

But the thing that the conspiracists seem to miss is that cloud seeding is no more “Chemtrails” than crop dusting is. Sure, it’s a chemical being sprayed out of a plane, but the Chemtrail theory is quite clearly about a secret plot that involved spraying chemicals out of large planes at high altitudes, often in a clear blue sky, leaving visible trails that persist and spread, to achieve some poorly-defined nefarious end. Cloud seeding is not secret, it uses small planes at low altitudes, it’s done to existing clouds, and it does not leave visible trails.

This can be a difficult thing to convey, as people are reluctant to give up the proverbial holy grail of actual-planes-spraying-chemicals. The discussion will frequently devolve into a semantic one of pointing at weather modification and saying, “Look, Chemtrails are real.”

Try to stay away from semantics and focus on the knowledge gaps. Your friend probably only just heard of cloud seeding weather modification, so you should give them context. Tell them about the history of cloud seeding, explain that it has never been a secret, it uses small planes, at low altitudes, and does not leave trails in the sky.

One thing that might make your friend think that there’s a connection between the trails he sees and the weather is that there actually is one. Contrails are a type of cloud, more specifically a type of high ice cloud called a cirrus cloud. Natural cirrus tends to be wispier, and often develop curls and streaks. Sometimes they form in thin layers, sometimes they are patchy. When it persists more than a few minutes a contrail will eventually start to resemble normal cirrus clouds. This was observed as long ago as 1921 in an account published in the US Air Service Newsletter:

For nearly one hundred years contrails have been recognized essentially as man-made cirrus clouds. One thing that has been known for even longer is that the formation of cirrus clouds can predict the weather, and in particular the existence of cirrus clouds is often an indicator of coming overcast or rainy weather. Cirrus clouds predict the arrival of warm fronts because the air of a humid warm front arrives at high altitudes first, forming cirrus clouds, then at medium altitudes forming alto clouds, then finally at low altitudes when cumulus rain clouds form. Contrails usually form a bit before cirrus clouds, so seeing contrails in a clear blue sky, shortly followed by naturally forming cirrus, is often a good clue that it’s going to rain soon.

The problem here is one of false correlation. Your friend sees contrails (which he thinks are Chemtrails, because they don’t fade away), and then a few hours later it gets cloudy and starts to rain. He might even notice this pattern by himself, as people have done for hundreds of years before planes ever flew. Depending on where he lives, he might not have seen any clouds for weeks, then there’s these contrails, then cirrus, then rain, all in one day. You can understand how it seems suspicious.

Again, the best thing to do here is to show them old books on clouds. In particular show them a picture of a warm front moving in. Show how the picture contains the exact same things they have been seeing in the sky: high cirrus, followed by rain. It’s just like that, but since the air can make cirrus it can also make contrails. That’s really all there is to it.

Cloud seeding does not make clouds, it makes already existing clouds rain. Put simply, contrails are clouds that form in the same places in the sky where cirrus clouds form.

Chemtrail Planes

Another hoax that grew into a common claim of Chemtrail evidence was the one about ballast barrels, the claim that got Willie to believe:

This curious bit of eternal bunk came about because of the way new types of planes are tested. All planes have what is known as a “flight envelope,” which is the set of minimum and maximum conditions it is designed for—like minimum and maximum speeds and bank angles. But the flight envelope also includes the passengers and cargo. A plane must still be able to fly safely when nearly empty, and also with a full load of fuel and passengers.

These configurations need to be tested; in fact a full set of such tests is required by the FAA. Now it’s not practical (or safe) to herd 400 people into a test aircraft to pretend to be passengers, so the airline manufacturers hit upon the idea of using barrels of water to replicate the weight, as explained by Boeing:

There are many similar accounts of these tests in books on aviation, and in fact they can be seen in videos of the first test flights of the Boeing 747-10024 in 1969, and the Boeing 707 in the 1950s. Ballast barrels are a fairly common thing in the aviation industry—if perhaps unfamiliar to most people.

That unfamiliarity was taken advantage of when someone edited a photo taken by photographer William Appleton. The original photo from 2005 is of the interior of a plane that contains ballast barrels. It’s in a Boeing 777-240/LR, a newly developed version of the 777. You see the barrels with tubes running between them. There’s a reflective vest draped over a seat and taped to the wall there’s a sign with small type fixed with yellow and black striped tape.

The doctored version is exactly the same, except the words “Sprayer 05” and “HAZMAT-INSIDE” have been added to the wall around this sign. This doctored version was then posted to various Chemtrail groups around 2007. It was very quickly debunked when the original photo was found, along with the explanation of what the barrels actually were. I wrote an article on it for Contrail Science in 2007.25 These doctored images have been an unusually persistent bit of bunk. Despite the readily available explanations to the contrary, this photo continued to be shared as “proof” of Chemtrails, along with an increasingly large number of photos of ballast barrels in different planes.

It’s this persistence (it showed up on Geoengineering Watch in 2013, six years after being explained) that paradoxically makes it a great debunking tool. It’s something where you can prove conclusively that the images in question are in fact photos of ballast barrels on test planes (in a recent example from 2017, Donald Trump was photographed while being shown around such a plane). We can also demonstrate how the hoax started with the fake photo. Perhaps most importantly we can show all the people, like Geoengineering Watch, who are still using these photos as evidence.

A key technique in helping people out of the rabbit hole is to show them that the people they have trusted for information are not as reliable as they previously thought. You have to be careful not to simply appear to be bad-mouthing them, so if we have a clear instance like this, where they have been irrefutably wrong for years, then it will give your friend greater clarity regarding their sources of information and may allow them to ask more reasonable questions about other topics. Back to Willie:

Chemical Tests

The ballast barrels hoax is easy to explain to people, as the idea is relatively simple to understand, and the undoctored photos are quite clear. A different piece of Chemtrail “evidence” that is frequently held up as “irrefutable” is less tractable; that is chemical analyses of soil. Not because it’s empirically better evidence, but because the analysis involved chemistry, a subject that many people misunderstand. That misunderstanding has created some of the more enduring parts of the Chemtrail mythology.

The basic claim is that high levels of certain chemicals (aluminum, barium, and strontium are often listed) have been found in tests of air, water, and soil. The claim was first popularized in the pro–Chemtrail-theory 2010 documentary What in the World Are They Spraying (commonly referred to as WITWATS). The film was by Michael J. Murphy, but the tests used in the film were largely carried out by Geoengineering Watch. In particular a lined pond on Dane Wigington’s property in Northern California was tested. The test results were shown in the documentary as: