Lies in the skies: how chemtrails went mainstream
Why has a UK aviation firm been receiving a torrent of threats on social media? The answer is a toxic combination of paranoia, misplaced environmental concerns and social media algorithms that reward recreational outrage
IT’S THE most innocuous of pictures. Forty or so smiling Scouts and Guides pose in wonky lines in a drama hall. In the front row, three of the children proudly hold up a cardboard cheque for £2,000 bearing the logo of a local company. Beside them are two women from the business that has just donated funds to help stage future junior theatre productions.
Underneath this wholesome scene, the first comment on Twitter comes as something of a shock. “IS THIS YOU ..POISONING OUR SKIES..US..SOIL ???”, together with a collage of dramatic photos of skies crossed by aircraft trails. The replies continue: “Scumbags”… “terrorists”… “I hope they take you for every penny you’ve got”… “How do you have the audacity to donate to these children, when you are poisoning them every day, you sickos!!”
How did a feelgood social media post about a small act of corporate community giving attract such an avalanche of abuse?
The clue is in the logo on that big cheque: it belongs to 2Excel Aviation. This East Midlands-based company is the latest to feel the effects of an internet mythology that has been around for more than a quarter of a century, but has recently hit the mainstream: chemtrails.
Most people will have at least heard of the chemtrail theory. For the past decade or so, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of myself, I’ve been a bit obsessed with it. And it seems like in 2024, it is having a renaissance.
In a nutshell, the chemtrail theory is the idea that the trails that form behind high-flying jets are not clouds of condensed water from the exhaust but chemicals sprayed, probably by the government, for some nefarious purpose.
The proposed purpose of chemtrails has ranged from pacifying the population, to spraying viruses, to controlling the weather
Exactly what these chemicals are supposed to be, and what they are supposed to achieve, depends on whom you ask. Over the years, suggestions for the former have ranged from “desiccated human red blood cells”, “radioactive thorium” and “sharp titanium shards” to the current favourite, “aluminium, barium and strontium”. The proposed purpose, meanwhile, has ranged from pacifying the population, to spraying viruses (or vaccines — the theories are nothing if not adaptable!), to controlling the weather.
Interest in chemtrails has ebbed and flowed. The modern version began in the late 1990s in America (where else?) and gained popularity when Art Bell interviewed early chemtrail proponent William Thomas on his radio show “Coast to Coast AM” in 1999. In those days, the idea was spread on internet newsgroups and a few early websites, some of which are still preserved on the Wayback Machine.
Then came social media. When I first took a deep dive into the world of chemtrails in 2014, Facebook was still the daddy. Facebook groups with names like Chemtrails Global Skywatch had thousands of members, sharing photos of trail-heavy skies, discussing theories and planning demonstrations, marches and petitions. These groups were heavily policed. Anyone daring to ask awkward questions or doubt the reality of the theory would be rapidly ejected.
As Twitter took over, so the chemtrail theorists moved there. I opened an account in July 2016, naming it Take That Clouds in homage to Take That Darwin, a humorous creationist-baiting account that had inspired a clutch of other accounts poking harmless fun at the fringes of social media. One thing that didn’t alter with the change of platform was the dedication to preserving echo chambers. Question their beliefs, however politely, and you face an instant block.
But the believers seemed few and far between. Chemtrails seemed to die down a bit. (Maybe part of this is that I was busy with two young children and didn’t spend too much time on social media to observe them, but Google Trends shows a substantial decline from 2016 to 2020.)
Then came Covid. Suddenly the sort of people who were ranting about chemtrails were ranting about lockdowns, vaccines and fake viruses instead. And, of course, air traffic fell dramatically as global air travel almost collapsed.
Since the pandemic, the chemtrail theory has gained a new lease of life — with the help of prominent antivax campaigners
Since the pandemic, however, the chemtrail theory has gained a new lease of life — with the help of prominent antivax campaigners. Many of the social media influencers talking about Covid vaccines have also made posts asking people to “look at what is going on in the sky”. Among them is the British GP David Cartland, who has 217,000 followers and has repeatedly posted photos of aircraft trails.
In June 2023 he claimed to be “on the fence” about the issue, but by September he seemed to have toppled firmly into the chemtrail field, posting an image of a lone aircraft flying through a hazy sky with the comment “Hope this scumbag is being paid well to spray the skies!”
And it is Cartland who sowed the seeds of the abuse currently being heaped onto 2Excel Aviation. In June — the same month he claimed to be undecided about the reality of chemtrails — he posted an “exclusive” video titled “Commercial Pilot reveals the truth behind Chemtrails”.
This “pilot” repeats the myth that is the root cause of the belief in chemtrails: that condensation trails should evaporate and that a lingering trail is therefore suspicious
In this video, a man who claims to be a commercial pilot speaks from behind a blocky mask of pixelation, his voice distorted to hide his identity. If he truly is a pilot, he shows a worrying lack of understanding about aircraft condensation trails. He repeats the myth that is the root cause of the belief in chemtrails: that condensation trails should evaporate and that a lingering trail is therefore suspicious. (The reality, which I explained in a lengthy post on Twitter and will expand on in a future article, is that the trails will persist and spread if the surrounding air contains more than a critical amount of water vapour.)
The pixelated pilot specifically identifies two aircraft, which he claims are involved in spraying operations around the UK. These are Boeing 727s, fitted, he explains, with “a lateral boom… about 5.5 to 6 metres long” fitted with “16 very large nozzles”.
“And then inside the cargo bay, strapped down, there are seven tanks. Collectively they hold about, just under 4,000 gallons. What duration that gives them, I don’t know, but obviously this is specialist equipment.”
He outlines an elaborate plan involving closing off large expanses of British airspace so that these planes can spray the skies
The pilot goes on to claim that the official purpose of these planes — spraying detergent to clean up oil spills — is a cover story for their true purpose. He outlines an elaborate plan involving “the Scottish military”, closing off large expanses of British airspace so that these planes can spray the skies.
He also states that these spray planes are “not on any of the [flight] tracker apps that you or I can get”. (A claim that can easily be shown to be untrue, as he names the planes and their full flight histories are available to anyone on sites such as Flightaware.)
The two aircraft responsible for spraying the UK skies with chemtrails, he says, have the registration numbers G-OSRA and G-OSRB and are registered to a company with the “quite satanic” callsign Broadsword.
That company is 2Excel Aviation.
Although the video appeared 10 months ago, it is only in recent days that social media has latched onto the idea that 2Excel is poisoning us with chemtrails. In mid April, a series of high-profile “alternative news” accounts (and David Cartland himself) started posting links to a government webpage with the scary-sounding title “Aerial Dispersant Spray (ADS) Service”, and the 2Excel Aviation “Special Missions” page which also lists “aerial dispersant services”.
As anyone who reads beyond the headlines will see, “aerial dispersant spray” is simply the name given to the oil spill response service. This is operated under contract to the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), which is required by law to have the capability to respond to oil spillages at sea around Britain.
In fact, 2Excel’s aerial dispersant spray aircraft are not used for this work. The MCA oil spill response contract is held by RVL Aviation, which uses two Boeing 737–400s modified to spray oil dispersant on oil slicks.
The existence of two aircraft whose spraying activities help protect marine ecosystems has been twisted into an evil plot to poison the environment
The two 2Excel Boeing 727s, registered G-OSRA and G-OSRB, are painted in the livery of Oil Spill Response (OSR), an international body operated by the oil industry to respond to leaks and spills. 2Excel has a 10-year contract with OSR, which runs until 2028.
It is a good indicator of the way the conspiracy mindset works that the existence of two aircraft whose spraying activities are confined to low-altitude passes over the ocean, to help protect marine ecosystems, has been twisted into an evil plot to poison the environment.
It is highly likely that many of the accounts posting these allegations know perfectly well that they are nonsense. But in today’s social media landscape, facts are not important. The goal is posting controversial content that will spark reaction, and thus clicks, and thus revenue. In a few weeks, the influencers will probably have moved on to generate outrage on another topic. But the harm has been done.
In one chilling video, a man says: “You can’t reach them up there, you know… but they’re not always up there. There’s a time when they go home”
2Excel’s staff face abuse and harassment. People have been recording themselves phoning the company’s offices. Social media posts are calling for pilots to be tracked down to their homes (in one rather chilling video, a man says: “You can’t reach them up there, you know… but they’re not always up there. There’s a time when they go home, there’s a time when they go to work, and that’s how we get to these. Find the pilots, and sort this s*** out.”)
In the last few days, a Somerset man has been jailed for shining a laser pointer at a passenger plane as it flew over his home town. Twitter user PleiadesProphet highlighted how Andrew Wilson had shared posts on social media about being “relentlessly f***ing sprayed” by aircraft. It can’t be proved that this was the reason for his actions against aircraft, but when chemtrail believers repeatedly post inflammatory comments about shooting down the planes they think are spraying them, it’s hardly a stretch.
The fear of chemtrails, like many conspiracy theories, has a small kernel of truth. There is no doubt that governments have sprayed all sorts of things from planes in the past, whether it’s Cold War tests to simulate enemy bioweapon attacks, or cloud seeding in Vietnam to try to flood out enemy supply lines. More recently, floods in Australia and Dubai have been blamed on cloud seeding operations, although meteorologists say the technology cannot have anything like the effect its critics claim.
Then there is the even more controversial concept of solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management (SRM) or stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). This is an idea to mitigate global warming by spraying reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to block a small portion of the sun’s rays — similar to the way large volcanic eruptions that launch sulfates into the air have a cooling effect on the planet.
These proposals look uncannily like the popular notion of chemtrails. Trails of chemicals blocking out the sun? Isn’t that what we see in the sky already?
On the surface, these proposals look uncannily like the popular notion of chemtrails. Trails of chemicals blocking out the sun? Isn’t that what we see in the sky already? The link is reinforced by lazy newspaper picture editors, and even documents by organisations such as the United Nations, illustrating stories about climate change and geoengineering with images of contrails.
In truth, geoengineering from aircraft is currently entirely untested: the only real-world SAI experiments have used tiny amounts of sulfate launched from weather balloons. More importantly, if large-scale SAI was ever implemented, it would not create trails in the sky, and would be done at an altitude approximately twice that of the passenger jets that make trails in the sky.
That does not stop the believers from claiming that lingering “chemtrails” are somehow different from “ordinary contrails”, despite the science of contrail persistence being well understood for more than three quarters of a century. As far as they are concerned, “their eyes don’t lie”, and something evil must be occurring in the skies.
As it happens, the idea that these trails are some kind of plot to reduce global warming couldn’t be further from the truth. Persistent contrails are a type of cirrus cloud, and as such they actually trap heat and make the planet warmer. A 2011 study suggested that the contrails from aviation actually contribute more to global warming than the carbon emissions in the exhaust. The same researchers later calculated that the effect from contrails is likely to triple by 2050.
There are initiatives to try to reduce this impact. Research projects in America and Europe are looking at ways to reduce the formation of contrails by using weather data to predict the areas in which they will appear, and rerouting flights either above, below or around them.
Such trials have their drawbacks. Rerouting flights could lead to longer and more turbulent flights and increased fuel use. It remains to be seen whether the will and technological capability is there to reduce contrails by a significant amount.
If it is, we might see clearer skies in the future. But as long as air travel in its current form exists, contrails will never disappear — and neither, it seems, will the chemtrail conspiracy theory. It might only be a matter of time before one of those “activists” piling abuse on innocent airline employees on social media takes devastating action in the real world.
