This idea was patented in 1963, but there is no evidence it was ever even built, and while it seems quite preposterous to most people, it seems it was patented by people who thought it might work.

An even more improbable patent is US 6960975, “Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state,” which describes a kind of flying saucer, propelled by bending the fabric of space-time. The idea is not based on any existing technology, but instead come from a very loose extrapolation of ideas in various papers on theoretical physics. It’s basically no better than the description of warp drives in Star Trek. There are plenty of similar patents for things like anti-gravity drives, and a “full body teleportation system—a pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another.”

Have these inventions been demonstrated to work? Clearly not, there are no full body teleportation devices, or warp drive flying saucers, or spinning baby extractors. Just because something has been patented does not mean it’s a good idea or that it works, or even that the underlying science is correct. It just means that someone had an idea, and they wrote it down in a way the patent office would accept.

While the above patents are obviously ridiculous, or highly impractical at the least, there are some patents that actually seem sensible. Yet we still know usages of the invention don’t exist because they refer to situations that do not yet exist.

There’s also several patents for a space elevator—a stunningly ambitious method of getting things into orbit by literally building an elevator that goes up to a satellite. Like geoengineering, this is not a new idea—the space elevator as a concept was invented in 1895 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Ideas about global solar geoengineering date back to around the same time, with Svante Arrhenius proposing (in 1905) to control the levels of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere in order to create an optimal climate.

The inventions above similarly have not been demonstrated to work in the real world, but they seem much more plausible than the previous examples, and they address things that people have been seriously talking about doing in the coming decades. Like geoengineering patents, they can certainly be used as evidence that people are thinking about doing something in the future (people are already researching space elevators),37 but they cannot be used as evidence that something is being done now.

Not only are the patent filing requirements rather vague and somewhat subjective, the current patent system has been considered by most observers to have been effectively broken for many years. Patents are awarded for the most trivial of “inventions,” and hundreds of millions of dollars often change hands over ideas a child might have—like buying something with one click or allowing a user to dial a phone number by tapping it.

People recognize there is a lot of money to be made from patents. Some people file patents not because they themselves plan to develop the technology, but because they think it’s possible that someone else might develop it in the future and then they can claim millions of dollars by licensing their patent. Patents just cost a few hundred dollars to file in the US (just sixty-five dollars for the provisional application).

This is called “Patent Trolling,” and it’s not just something that lazy individuals do. The flaws in the patent system force companies to patent every single thing they can think of, just so they will have a portfolio of patents they can counter-sue (or trade) with other companies—the 2009–2017 smartphone patent war being a good example.

These large companies file thousands of patents every year. IBM filed eighteen patents every day in 2012. Many of these are “just in case” patents for ideas that people in the company had. It was speculation about what they might develop in the future, not necessarily what they are developing now, and almost certainly not something they have actually finished developing.

Even if it pans out and there was some intent to use it, the vast majority of patents (95 percent) never even get used, as describe in Wired:

Yes, there are geoengineering patents, and patents for houses on the Moon, and Mars spaceships. But it does not mean that geoengineering is happening today any more than it means there are men on Mars.

All a patent means is that the person or company who applied for that patent thought that they could either make money from the patent in the future, or they should add it to their patent portfolio, just in case they wanted to develop the technology in the future, or possibly use the patent to make a deal later.

Even if your friend ignores all of the above, even if they continue to insist that patents are evidence of something, there’s still the fundamental objection to the whole “patents as evidence” theory—if you wanted to do something in secret, then why would you let private companies patent evidence of that thing?

Bottom line here? Patenting a thing does not mean that thing exists, or even that it works.

One With, One Without

Once you’ve explained to your friend that contrails can actually persist, and that modern planes are actually more capable than old planes of making contrails, then a subtler version of the theory emerges. The idea now is that planes are simply making contrails when they should not be.

There’s two versions of this claim. In the first you are shown (or told about) two planes that are in the same general area of the sky at the same time. One of the planes is leaving a long thick persistent trail. The other plane is not leaving a trail or is just leaving a short trail that quickly dissipates.

The solution to this puzzle is incredibly simple. One plane is flying higher than the other. It’s simply impossible to tell how high one plane is relative to another when both planes are over thirty thousand feet and the planes are of different types.

A useful way of demonstrating this is to use a Flight Tracking app like FlightRadar24. Use the app to find the altitude of the planes and show that the planes they thought they were at the same altitude were actually at different altitudes, often over a thousand feet apart.

Then note that contrails only form in altitudes where it’s cold enough and humid enough. If one plane was at that altitude (and leaving a contrail), and another was just above or below that altitude, then it might not leave a contrail.

The second version of this claim involves an attempt to determine the weather at the altitude a particular plane is flying and noting that the humidity is too low for contrails to persist. This would be a valid approach, however the measure that is commonly used is perhaps the least accurate for this purpose—data from weather balloons.

Weather balloons are a bundle of instruments (thermometers and humidity sensors) attached to a balloon. A balloon is released and rises through the atmosphere. As it climbs it radios back the readings from these instruments until the balloon finally bursts and falls back to the ground. These balloons provide a nice snapshot of a vertical slice of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, balloons are released only twice a day, and from stations that are 200 to 400 miles apart. Atmospheric conditions can rapidly change over just a few minutes, and in just a few hundred feet, so these widely spaced snapshots are generally useless for finding the conditions at any one particular spot in the sky. Compounding the problem is the fact that some types of humidity sensors on the weather balloons actually stop working at around the same temperatures that contrails form.39

Some far better sources of atmospheric humidity data are the various weather forecasting models which combine the weather balloon data with continuously updated fine grained data from ground stations, aircraft, and NOAA satellites. This produces a much higher resolution chart of what the humidity is at any location and altitude at any given time. Invariably the appearance of contrails matches up on these charts with the presence of appropriately high humidity (above 60 percent). There are multiple independent outlets who distribute this weather information.40 Show them to your friend and have them check the local humidity against their observations and contrast it with the measurements the Chemtrail promoters make using only weather balloons.

Government Admissions

There are two ways in which people claim the government has “admitted” to Chemtrails or covert geoengineering. The first is to point at weather modification (discussed earlier). In this case you’ve just got to explain to your friend what weather modification actually is: cloud seeding to make it rain or snow more, something that has been openly done for sixty-plus years.

The second way is to point to people in government or academia discussing possible future geoengineering, and then claiming that’s an “admission” of current geoengineering. Here’s an example.

The best approach here is to first get your friend to actually read the full context of what Brennan said. Then get them to look at the actual current state of geoengineering research (discussed earlier). Here’s what Brennan actually said:

Notice Brennan’s use of the future tense: moving forward “would” raise challenges, SAI “could” help reverse the effects of global warming. It’s simultaneously speculative and uncertain—a description that reflects the current state of geoengineering research and explains why nobody has actually done it yet. The government has not admitted Chemtrails or admitted geoengineering. They have simply admitted something that nobody has ever denied—that geoengineering is something we might consider doing in the future.

Chemtrails has been described as a gateway conspiracy theory. It’s easy to get into as you can just look up to the sky and see the “evidence.” There’s a large number of seductive and seemingly authoritative videos on the topic and a laundry list of different claims of evidence to suck people in. But it can also be a gateway out of the rabbit hole. As we’ve seen in this chapter, all the claims of evidence have been addressed, often in great depth. If someone takes an honest and unbiased look at the evidence then it’s very unlikely they will continue to believe. The challenge is in getting them to take that first look. In the next chapter we’ll meet Stephanie, who resisted looking at contrary evidence for a long time, until she was helped by a friend.

Chemtrails Summary and Resources

Key Points to Convey to Your Friend

• Contrails can persist and spread, and have done so since the 1920s.

• There’s a lot more air traffic now than thirty years ago.

• Modern jet engines make more contrails, not fewer.

• Trails that come from the wing are aerodynamic contrails.

• Weather modification has been done openly since the 1950s and does not leave trails.

• Photos of barrels on planes are ballast barrels on prototype commercial planes.

• Aluminum is everywhere, so it shows up in all tests of air, soil, and water.

• There are genuine concerns about geoengineering, but we’ve not even got to the stage of doing tests yet.

• Patents don’t mean something works, and why would you patent a top-secret program?

• Different planes leave different length contrails at different altitudes.

• The government has not admitted to a secret geoengineering program.