Political leaders love an empty statement or proclamation, but when Louisiana’s state house of representatives moved against “chemtrails” last week, they were literally seeking to combat something that does not exist.
It was an act of political symbolism that delved deep into the sort of anti-government conspiracy theories that have flourished under Donald Trump and are taking rooting in some US legislative chambers across the US.
Known to less conspiratorially minded as aircraft contrails, or the white vaporous lines streaming out of an airplane’s engines at altitude, chemtrails are a longstanding conspiracy theory.
Believers in chemtrails hold that the aircraft vapor trails that criss-cross skies across the globe every day are deliberately laden with toxins that are using commercial aircraft to spray them on people below, perhaps to enslave them to big pharma, or exert mind control, or sterilize people or even control the weather for nefarious motives.
Despite the outlandishness of the belief and the complete absence of evidence, a 2016 study showed that the idea is held to be “completely true” by 10% of Americans and “somewhat true” by a further 20%-30% of Americans.
At least eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have now introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana’s bill, which must pass through the senate before reaching Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, orders the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard.
While there are no penalties for violations, the bill calls for further investigation and documentation. Opponents fear it could be used to force airlines to re-route flights, challenge the location of airports and bring legal action against carriers.
The US Environmental Protection Agency states that the plumes of aircraft exhaust vapor are a natural result of flight and pose no risk to weather patterns, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has publicly denied undertaking or planning any weather modification experiments.
But the theories abound, including that last year’s Hurricane Helene stalled over and devastated parts of western North Carolina as a result of government weather interference that was designed to force North Carolinians off their land and then exploit it for rare earth mineral mining. Federal emergency managers set up a webpage to dispel false information.
But government weather programs have existed in the past.
For two decades, from 1962 to 1983, Project Stormfury conducted experiments to releases a silver iodide compound into “the belt of maximum winds” to reduce the strongest winds. And cloud-seeding occurs in western states to induce rain or snow fall.
“It’s increasingly clear that humanity isn’t merely subjected to whatever weather a cloud portends – we also create and influence it through our everyday actions,” says Nevada’s Desert Research Institute. “Scientists now regularly harness their moisture and pull it to Earth, bringing water to parched communities and landscapes around the world.”
Nor has the government always been entirely straightforward in its use of aerial-dispersed chemicals. The US military dropped 19m gallons of herbicide, including the cancer-linked Agent Orange, during the Korean and Vietnam wars, leading to potential long-term health problems related to exposure and spina bifida in children of veterans.
Efforts to stop geo-engineering are gaining support in the administration where conspiracy-minded politicians now hold office or wield powerful influence.
“We are going to stop this crime,” the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, posted on X in August. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said in a post before Hurricane Milton struck in October: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Even Donald Trump has spread the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden is dead and has been replaced by a robotic clone.
A recently published book, The Ghosts of Iron Mountain, traces at least some responsibility for current conspiratorial thinking to 1960s radicals, including the 1967 anti-war satire Report from Iron Mountain by Leonard Lewin, written at the suggestion of future Nation editor Victor Navasky, which posed as a leaked government study about the necessity of continuous war for social stability.
In The Ghosts of Iron Mountain, author Phil Tinline traces how a leftwing hoax was adopted by the right, absorbing much of the former’s anxieties about a military-industrial complex and elite control and repurposing it around “the deep state” with its attendant spin-offs in QAnon and militia thinking.
This mischief-making, Tinline writes, act as a “warning about the consequences that await if you don’t keep an eye on the line between your deep story and how power works, and what the facts support”.
Timothy Tangherlini, a professor at the Berkeley School of Information who studies the circulation of folklore, says the chemtrails conspiracy theory has a potent history because, like all folktales, it begins with a kernel of history truth – programs like Agent Orange – and speaks to potent contemporary fears.
“There are certain things that were sprayed by airplanes that did have a massive impact on the environment and on people’s health,” he says, pointing out that Vietnam veterans had fallen sick and the US was revealed as having exposed them to cancer-causing agents and then covering it up.
“Fast-forward 50 years, there’s a deep suspicion of the government and things that fly,” he said.
Fear of things in the sky was evident in the hysteria late last year in the panic over drones that appeared over New Jersey, close to a nuclear power station and a military arsenal, which prompted a federal investigation that has yet to release its findings.
Tangherlini called the cross-fertilization of theories, whether around chemtrails, vaccination hesitancy or any number of other fringe beliefs that have made their way into the American mainstream via the internet and social media, “the wall of crazy”.
“Jets flying though the air and contrails of condensed water should not in any way be linked to disease, viruses, mind control, but you look at some of the extractions we get from our mining social media, and if it wasn’t real you’d think your code wasn’t working or in hysterics.”
But narratively, Tangherlini pointed out: “It’s a very interesting thing to do – you can create this totalizing threat everywhere you look. What is the strategy for dealing with it? Call the FAA. No, the FAA is in on it. What can we do to protect our health? Well, the doctors and big pharma are in on it. So there is a siege mentality.”
