The different types of contrails also look radically different close up. You’ve probably seen lots of them in the sky and not realized they were not coming from the engines. With a bit of practice you can tell the difference from a distance—aerodynamic contrails usually look flatter, more ribbon-like. But the real difference is close up. Exhaust contrails form directly at points behind the engines, with a gap (of varying size) between the engine and the trails. There’s one contrail per engine so you typically will observe two or four (or occasionally one or three) quite distinct trails that eventually merge. By contrast, persistent aerodynamic contrails form along the entire wing, and therefore start out as a single wide sheet. Different shaped parts of the wing have slightly different pressure effects, which can result in multiple stripes forming across the trail. These stripes are sometimes interpreted by chemtrailers as spray coming from nozzles, but it’s just variations in the trail coming from the entire wing. The trail forms in a thin layer and the condensing water particles sometimes interact with the Sun creating odd rainbow colors. These colors are sometimes interpreted by chemtrailers as evidence of chemicals being sprayed, but it’s just pure water from the atmosphere. It’s all ripe for misunderstanding if you don’t know what you are looking at.

Contrail Persistence

The root claim of evidence, the foundational belief that nearly all Chemtrail believers have, is that normal contrails cannot persist. In reality, contrails are a type of cloud, so they do just whatever clouds do, which obviously includes staying in the sky for a long time. For the Chemtrail believer, contrails are simply “condensation” and therefore should quickly evaporate. The misconception can be traced back to the writing of William Thomas, who said in 1999:

He did not provide the names of any of these qualified observers. He’s actually flat wrong, but the claim somehow stuck and has persisted to this day.

The very first thing to do when talking to your friend about their Chemtrail belief is to directly address this false claim. You could start out by asking them how they know that it’s true, how did they discover this fact, did they read it in a book? This question tends to lead to some circular thinking—they know the Chemtrails persist because when they see Chemtrails in the sky they persist, whereas the contrails fade away. It’s always worth a shot, and if they seem receptive and want to explain how they know, then that’s a good opener. Understanding where they got one false idea gives you a great follow-up for when you explain that false idea. What other ideas did they draw from the same source? Maybe some of those ideas might not be as solid as they once thought. Here we’re employing the ‘exposing the source’ method described in Part 1 as a means of supplying useful information, and beginning to sow doubt in a unreliable source.

Another potential approach is to discuss the science of contrail persistence. Ideally one should be able to point out relatively simple things from the previous section (like contrails being clouds, so why can’t they last as long as clouds do, or the temperature being well below freezing so why do they think contrails would evaporate instead of freezing?), but this approach can be tricky. Unless they are willing to learn a few new concepts (like ice supersaturation and homogenous ice nucleation, for example) then this approach can lead to confusion. If they can’t grasp the concepts, then it’s going to boil down to you asking them to simply trust you. Diving into the science might not be the best thing to open with—especially if you yourself don’t have a firm grasp.

An effective approach is to show your friend that historically contrails have persisted. There’s a number of ways you can do this. You can show them old photos dating back to World War II where contrails are seen to be persisting and spreading. Since the Chemtrail theory dates back to 1997, I created a thread on Metabunk titled “Pre–1995 Persistent Contrail Archive,”11 which contains approximately a thousand images and videos predating 1995 (going back as far as the 1930s).

The thread (which started in 2012 and is still expanding to this day) contains a wide variety of images. These include people’s personal photo albums from the seventies and eighties that have been scanned and uploaded to sites like Flickr. Another very effective type of evidence for persuading your friend is images of persisting contrails in older movies and TV shows like Terminator (1991), Irma La Douce (1963), and Spartacus (1960). Since these are films that your friend may have watched before, and can certainly watch again, they are forced to either admit that the contrails were in the old films, or that somehow the films were all remastered later to add the contrails.

A thousand images of old contrails from hundreds of different sources should be enough to sway them somewhat. But the most compelling evidence comes from a relatively small subset of that collection—the images and descriptions of persistent contrails in old books on clouds.

When I first started to write about contrails (and the Chemtrail theory) I used resources like NASA.gov and current scientific papers as references. The problem with that is that anything post-2000 is suspected by the conspiracy theorists as being part of the cover-up. I started to use older books that I’d found scanned on Google Books. I was then told that since they were on the internet they were probably forged, again as “part of the cover-up.”

I went analog. Ignoring the internet, I started to acquire physical books on the weather, anything that described how clouds worked. I found that invariably any weather book would include a section on clouds, and there were also many books that were entirely devoted to clouds. These books varied from simple collections of pretty photos to more involved discussions of the physics of the weather. But something that almost all of them had in common was photos of contrails that looked pretty darn persistent, often accompanied by a description of the varieties of contrail (persistent, non-persistent, persistent spreading, exhaust, and aerodynamic). Often these discussions would provide explanations for factors that the Chemtrail people find suspicious, like gaps in the contrail and contrails with rainbow colors.

Eventually I collected over thirty books on the weather and clouds. Many of them are available for a few dollars from secondhand booksellers over the internet, using sites like Amazon.com, eBay.com, and alibris.com. Some I found in physical bookstores or in library sales. Since these books are all at least a few decades old, many have been supplanted by newer versions and may be outdated. But what I wanted to use them for was to show people actual, physical proof that, like they still do today, contrails were recorded as persisting over the course of many decades.

That turned out to be seven decades. It’s nearly ten decades if you look at online scans of published written accounts of persistent contrails, which go back to the early 1920s. The oldest book I managed to procure a physical printed copy of was published in 1943. In Cloud Reading for Pilots, page 73 reads:

This was accompanied by two photos of contrails, the caption to one photo noted that it had a gap in it (something that Chemtrail theorists also claim is impossible in a “normal” contrail), and explained:

All of this was contained within a delightful little book, a first edition that’s seventy-five years old, and which I got for just ten dollars. There’s no doubt to the item’s authenticity when you see it, bound in fraying and fading blue cloth, the paper slightly yellowed with age, the whiff of musty ink and paper rising from its pages. Seeing this book, we know that A. C. Douglas wrote it in 1943, and that in 1943 experts in the fields of meteorology and cloud formation knew that contrails could persist and spread, and that they could have gaps in them.

If your friend is especially suspicious then he or she might claim your old book to be an incredibly detailed forgery. It’s helpful to look at as many different books as you can. I created a video of my collection.12 I start out telling Chemtrail believers not to trust some guy on the internet (i.e., me). Then I filmed myself opening each book in turn, showing the old contrail photos, and reading the paragraph that described how contrails could sometimes persist and spread. I started with a book from 2002 and went back to the 1950s (the oldest books I had at the time of filming). The whole video is less than four minutes long.

This video has proven to be one of the most useful Chemtrail debunking tools ever created. Many people who were once deep down the Chemtrail rabbit hole have told me that this was the video that started them on the path out. In light of the overwhelmingly positive response, I highly recommend that it be one of the first things you show your friend.

There’s a curious disconnect here between some of the most vocal Chemtrail promoters and the vast majority of regular folk who happen to believe in Chemtrails. Most regular Chemtrail believers think that contrails do not persist. They generally think this is so because of the way they first experienced “Chemtrails.” They either noticed some persistent trails and then while looking up an explanation came across the Chemtrail theory, or they heard about the Chemtrail theory (perhaps from a video or a radio talk show) and then a day or so later noticed persistent trails. Either way they did not remember seeing them before. Because of this, they accept the idea that the persistent trails are a relatively new thing, and that normal contrails should not persist.

The Chemtrail promoters have been arguing about Chemtrails for much longer and have had to eventually consider objections to their theory. Since the case for persistent contrails is inarguable, they have had to modify their theory to a weaker form where contrails shouldn’t persist quite as often as is observed, or they have to double down into an unsupportable version where the Chemtrail plot has been going on since the 1920s, and consequently there must be a vast Orwellian conspiracy in which all the books ever written everywhere in the world are simply pretending that contrails persist.

Part of the Metabunk debunking technique is to demonstrate where the promoters and supposed “experts” are wrong. We can’t always do this with contrail persistence as it’s something the most vocal promoters have moved away from. If your friend is not entirely convinced by the fact that contrails actually do persist sometimes, then they are going to move where the promoters moved, to geoengineering patents, chemical tests, photos of barrels, videos of spraying, and the strange theory of high bypass jet engines.

High Bypass Jet Engines

The slow realization by the Chemtrail promoters that contrails did actually persist created a kind of cognitive dissonance. After all, Chemtrail promoters had always believed that contrails quickly faded away, and then they saw old books, photos, and video, showing them without a doubt that there are many decades of records and explanations of contrail persistence. Their theory relied on contrails not persisting, so was their entire theory wrong?

Some people probably did realize at that point that the theory was actually incorrect, and eventually this led to them escaping the rabbit hole. But those that remained managed to incorporate the persistence of contrails into their theory by a stunning display of doublethink. Historically, contrails did persist, as evidenced by the old books and photos, but in modern times, they claim, contrails cannot persist because jet engines are different now. Not only that, but they also go so far as to say modern jet engines can never make contrails.

For reasons we’ll get into, this is flat wrong. Modern jet engines actually make contrails more often than the older ones. But before we get into why, it’s very important to realize that this is a very seriously made claim that has been promoted by sites like Geoengineering Watch for several years. The fact that this claim has been disproven, and demonstrably so, is a very valuable tool in getting your friend to think about why they trust the claims made by those sites. Shining a spotlight on a single topic like this can be pivotal, as it was for Willie with the ballast barrels.

One recent (2015) article on this topic, titled “High Bypass Turbofan Jet Engines, Geoengineering, and the Contrail Lie,” states:

Jet engines are basically long tubes: air is compressed in the front of the engine (the compressor), then that compressed air and the jet fuel are ignited in the middle of the engine (the combustion chamber), and finally the byproduct passes through the back of the engine (the turbine), which recycles some of the pressure of the burnt gases to power the front compressor. The hot high-pressure exhaust is then shot out the back to provide thrust.

This simple type of jet engine is powerful, but not very fuel efficient and is typically only found on fighter jets. Most passenger jets today have an enlarged fan on the front of the engine; the turbine turns this fan which pushes air into the compressor, but also pushes air past the engine to provide part of the thrust. This makes the engine more fuel efficient. The air that is pushed past the engine is called the bypass air.

The bigger the fan, the more bypass air there is, and the more thrust comes from this bypass air. Fighter jet engines have no extra fan at the front, so are referred to as zero bypass. Older engines, like those used on a Boeing 707, were very low bypass engines. Newer engines such as those you might see on a Boeing 737 or newer are almost all high bypass engines, simply because they are much more fuel efficient.