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Chemtrails: Still Haven't Blown Away - Skeptoid

The more years go by, the more Americans believe that ordinary airliners are secretly spraying chemicals for some hidden nefarious purpose.

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The more years go by, the more Americans believe that ordinary airliners are secretly spraying chemicals for some hidden nefarious purpose.

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The more years go by, the more Americans believe that ordinary airliners are secretly spraying chemicals for some hidden nefarious purpose.

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The more years go by, the more Americans believe that ordinary airliners are secretly spraying chemicals for some hidden nefarious purpose.

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Text preview: Members Portal Support Us About Support Us About Skeptoid Subscribe to the Podcast Episode Guide Sponsor an episode What People Are Saying... What Is Skepticism? Press Room Help…

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Members Portal Support Us About Support Us About Skeptoid Subscribe to the Podcast Episode Guide Sponsor an episode What People Are Saying... What Is Skepticism? Press Room Help Subscribing Contact Privacy Topics Aliens & UFOs Alternative Medicine Ancient Mysteries Conspiracy Theories Consumer Ripoffs Cryptozoology Environment Fads Feedback & Questions General Science Health History & Pseudohistory Logic & Persuasion Natural History Paranormal Religion Urban Legends Store Community Podcast Companion Email Private Discord Channel Sponsor an episode Teachers Toolkit Answering Student Questions Help with Skeptoid Research Events Calendar Information Skeptoid Adventures Chemtrails: Still Haven't Blown Away The more years go by, the more Americans believe that ordinary airliners are secretly spraying chemicals for some hidden nefarious purpose. Skeptoid Podcast #1039 Filed under Conspiracy Theories by Brian Dunning May 5, 2026 Sponsor an episode! “Spray ops today, keep your kids inside,” said a message posted to a Facebook group for people in my town. Accompanying it was a photo of the beautiful clear blue sky, striped with three airline contrails, thin white lines way up in the stratosphere. “Spray ops,” they called it. This was, of course, a person who believes the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory: the idea that airlines worldwide, perhaps working with other military or commercial aircraft fleets, have been engaged in a decades-long campaign to spray toxic chemicals of some kind over populated areas. Secretly equipped with spray nozzles and loaded with massive tanks carrying tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals, these aircraft and their operators have refueled and reloaded their tanks in plain view at airports worldwide since the 1990s at least. Some believers say the chemicals are drugs intended to keep the population docile. Some believe it is a mass vaccination program. Some believe it is a vaguely defined program to control weather so that violent storms or earthquakes can be used as weapons of war. And as more attention has shifted toward climate change mitigation, some believe it is a geoengineering project to combat warming. But no matter what version of it you believe, the entire concept is perhaps the most wildly implausible of all conspiracy theories. I first did a Skeptoid episode on chemtrails back in February 2007. I have a 2007 Jeep, and it’s got rust on it, is beat up all over, and has gone through two suspensions — that’s how old the chemtrails episode is. It was episode #27; this is episode #1,039. It came out over a thousand weeks ago; that’s nineteen and a half years. Here is a brief snippet from it: I read a fair amount of skeptical, paranormal, and conspiracy websites, but I don't recall ever reading so much vituperation, anger, and name calling as when I read a few forums discussing chemtrails. If you're not familiar with the term, chemtrails are what some conspiracy theorists call aircraft condensation trails. Most of them don't believe that conventional contrails exist, and that when you see one, you're actually seeing a trail of mysterious airborne chemicals sprayed from the aircraft. Those who do concede the existence of contrails often claim subtle differences in appearance or behavior between a condensation trail and a chemical trail. At the time, I figured a strange belief like this could never last very long. It would have been so trivial to prove that even a single plane was equipped to do this, and yet that has still never happened: not a single spray nozzle or gigantic tank has ever been found on a plane that’s not a crop duster. And the claim usually involves big commercial jets, often regular airliners, doing double duty flying passengers and spraying whatever evil chemicals one chooses to believe. In decades, not a single Airbus or Boeing employee, airport mechanic, luggage worker, food service employee, or other tarmac worker has ever broken silence to break what would be perhaps the news story of the century. The most rational explanation for this is simply that no such personnel have ever encountered such equipment. A major 2016 study presented shocking findings: Fully 10% of Americans believed it was “completely true” that tens of thousands of commercial airliners a day are deliberately spraying some kind of mixture of toxic chemicals, and a further 20-30% considered it “somewhat true.” That is an incredible percentage of otherwise intelligent, functional adults to believe something that is completely false, and even trivial to disprove. And this was only in 2016, long before full-spectrum conspiracy theorist and anti-science zealot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was made Secretary of Health and Human Services. Since then, belief has skyrocketed in the United States. Kennedy has been a firehose of misinformation on the topic. He has said chemtrails are being sprayed by “Department of Defense or the intelligence agencies” and that workers in the program sign confidentiality ag