“Chemtrails” are supposedly long lasting contrails that are being deliberately created by the government for some sinister purpose. In reality, these contrails just look like normal contrails. It’s a fringe conspiracy theory that spread over the internet, mutating as it goes for survivability. But where did it begin? What is the origin of the word “chemtrail”, and who started this particular conspiracy theory?

The folowing link takes you to an archived copy of a conspiracy theory web page from 2000:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000817011330/azwest.net/user/slim/

On it is a link to a file entitled “GENOCIDE.TXT” containing emails from 1997, the first part of which originally came from the BIOWAR-L mailing list dated 9/18/97.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000818173333/azwest.net/user/slim/GENOCIDE.TXT

(9/18/97)

[…]

The lines filling our skies are not contrails. The lines are dispersed and may linger for hours

[…]

We now have proof that our goverment is using chemical agents on populated areas they are adding it to military jet fuel. Have you ever looked up at a vapor trail behind military aircraft flying so high a symbol of Americas power. Look again!! Commerical jets also leave a lovely (non-toxic) vapor trail when the heat from the turbines come in contact with the cool air condencing the water droplets into steam. Softly the lines defuse into the blue sky. So what is different about the military aircraft, the answer is simple, It’s the Fuel JP-8+100 is some really bad stuff. When you look up over the skys of New York City on a clear, sunny morning you see the military aircraft making patterens across the sky with their vapor trails. The smoke is thick and does not go away. When it comes in contact with the sunlight it turns to a purple color, then desipates into a over cast Purple Haze.

[…]

this whole thing stinks of a Goverment DePopulation Program.

Here you have the key elements of the chemtrail theory, that there are two types of contrail, one that goes away, and one that does not. Further more the one that does not will make you sick.

The earliest dated actual article I could find on this theory was from January 8, 1999, by William Thomas, which recounts the suspicious of three people about contrails, dating them to well before 1999

http://web.archive.org/web/19990503013500/ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-08-05.html

Wallace has been watching formations of high-flying jets weave grid-like contrails above his home since last summer [summer 1998]. Each time, “We get a taste in our mouth,” he reports. He and his wife Ann get “kind of tired and sick,” having “no energy to do anything.”

[…]

Series of aircraft contrails in a high traffic region over the northern Gulf of Mexico 1992 (Images courtesy NASA)

[…]

Wallace and his wife are not alone in their plight. In March, 1996, Dr. Greg Hanford bought an expensive camera and binoculars to keep an eye on jets spraying white bands above his Bakersfield, California home. Hanford has counted 40 or 60 jets on some “spray days.”

[…]

Pseudo-color, multispectral images taken April 20, 1994 by a NOAA satellite, reveal a number of contrails over Oklahoma and Kansas.

[…]

Pat Edgar has been watching the jets spraying over eastern Oklahoma since a sunny day in October, 1977 when as many as 30 contrails gradually occluded the sky. “They look like they’re playing tic-tac-toe up there,” he says. “You know darn well it’s not passenger planes.”

[…]

Rogers, does not attribute his strange malady to the mystery jets. But neither he nor his doctors can explain his breathing difficulty, which began shortly after spraying began in November, 1997, and is getting worse.

It seems pretty clear that this article is the beginning of the Chemtrail as a popular internet phenomenon, as it was shortly after this article that William Thomas was invited onto Art Bell’s radio show on January 25th. It’s also very clear from the article that individual suspicions regarding contrails did not suddenly start in 1999. In fact the article dates it back to 1977 (although later version of this article change it to 1997). Of course, paranoia has been going on for a lot longer than that, see

https://contrailscience.com/contrail-confusion-is-nothing-new/

There’s a follow-up article later

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508051059/ens.lycos.com/ens/apr99/1999L-04-22-01.html

Sky Samples Analyzed By William Thomas with Erminia Cassani VICTORIA, British Columbia, Canada, April 22, 1999 (ENS) – As unmarked tanker-type aircraft continue spraying sky-obscuring chemtrails over regions of the U.S. and Canada, this writer and American journalist Erminia Cassani have obtained laboratory tests of fully-documented samples of aerial fallout. The samples were tested by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) licensed facility.

And see this take on the original article from Feb 23, 1999 (read the full article continuing on page 12)

http://www.phoenixarchives.com/contact/1999/0299/022399.pdf (mirror)

It contains a very interesting depiction of the power of suggestion:

Art said that after Mr. Thomas’ first program he went out to observe how the jets were flying over his Pahrump, Nevada studio/home. Art was shocked to see aerial spraying, and both he and his wife got sick.

Interesting he never noticed this before, but simply talk to William Thomas for four hours, and you start o notice things.

Google Groups archives internet news-groups back to 1981, but the earliest mention of chemtrails was from May 8th, 1999: on alt.fan.art-bell

This cartilage gel that Art’s plugging could be used for the joint ache

that chemtrail victims complained about last night…say…wait a

minute…maybe chemtrails were deployed to boost cartilage gel sales…!

Here we have mention of chemtrail victims, and “joint ache” as a symptom.

In May of 1999, we have this from William Thomas:

http://www.carnicom.com/will0416.htm

CHEMTRAILS OVER AMERICA

Issue #2 April 7-16, 1999 Dear Friends and concerned sky-watchers, A March 17, 1999 radio interview going out to 15 million listeners

“rang the Bell” on an investigation financed entirely by your efforts.

During this third four-hour segment with Art Bell, I mentioned recent

breakthroughs in an investigation undertaken by a small team of

dedicated associates. My warmest thanks to Richard and Samantha Young,

D, Joe, Erminia, DJ, Karal Ayn, Ken, MB, Barbara, Mark and John for

sharing their valuable time, attention, research and insights.

Again referencing the Art Bell show. The “Chemtrails over America” bulletin apparently had issue #1 on march 9, 1999. That also seems to be about the time people started taking photos of normal contrails and calling them chemtrails.



Judging by the earliest postings, it seems like hypochondria plays a large part. People start to connect the contrails with illness, and suspect they must contain some kind of poison.

Art Bell had a page on contrails, dating back to at least Nov 27th, 1999. Available on Archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.artbell.com/contrails.html

Not a lot of commentary on the first page, but there’s the first usage of the photo of Boeing E6 TACAMO dumping fuel, titled: “The strange contrail mystery continues. (9/30/99)”

Looking at the previous year (1998) on usenet, there is NO mention of chemtrails. The word “contrail” crops up 324 times, mostly in reference to meteors and rockets. There are a few references to the affect of contrails on climate change. But NOTHING about deliberate contrail creation, or anything like “chemtrails”.

The web site chemtrailcentral.com was registered on May 6th, 2000, about a year after the “chemtrail” idea was created. The earliest archived page from there indicates a lot of local media involvement, and their archive indicates nothing before 4/24/2000, which said:

Monday a KHOU crew met with Chemtrail Tracking USA Club co-founders Lorie [Kramer] and Dona of Houston and member Rhonda from Ft. Worth, as well as other local members of the Yahoo! based club for the taping of a story on Chemtrails and public concern over their purpose and health impact. Reporter Ron Travino and cameraman Nathan visited for several hours at the house of Lorie, taping, talking, asking questions, and viewing photos and videos.

On chemtrailcentral, there’s actually a thread about the history of chemtrails. There people give their recollections of how it all started. Most date it to late 1998 or 1999. A few people report earlier contrails (1989, 1991) , and then surmise it must have started earlier.

A post there by 3T3L1 quotes chemtrail debunker Jay Reynolds:

derivation of the word “chemtrails”

Posted on August 26, 2001 at 09:06:54 AM by jayreynolds

was by Val Valerian(pseudonym for Former USAF captain [John] Grace)

in April 1999. Grace/Valerian recognized that the power of suggestion

worked against his claim and proposed coining a new term more suggestive

of his claim

That does not sound unreasonable, since the earliest reference to the word I have is April 1999. This page claims to be reporting from March 29th 1999, but could have been written after the fact, based on photos taken that day. It’s archived back to October 1999.

The original pages from Val Valerian/Valdemar Valerain/O.H. Krill/John Grace, can be found on archive.org. The earliest real mention of spraying on his pages date back to emails 13 Jan 1998. John Grace is a UFO conspiracy theorist who published several books on shadow governments and suchlike, he also faked documents to support arguments in his books.

There are also some early mentions in the archives of CTRL – the Conspiracy Theory Research List, a mailing list for the discussion of conspiracty theories. Here’s the earliest entries:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]&q=date:[19950101+TO+19990301]+chemtrails

I think some of the date stamps on these are wrong, but they do date from around 1999. There are some other early references to contrails in 1999, including one that links to the earliest debunking page, still active, with photos from Feb 11th 1999:

http://users.erols.com/igoddard/contrail.htm

Digging into the CTRL archives a bit more gives us this:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg05861.html

Subject: The Millennium Report - Special Edition: Contrail Reports Increasing Across the US From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Paul Anderson - TMP / CPR-Canada) Date: Thu, Feb 18, 1999 10:43 PM Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Millennium Report - Special Edition: Contrail Reports Increasing Across the US _____________________________ In This Report: Special Edition: Contrail Reports Increasing Across the US The contrail controversy continues to grow; according to William Thomas, the independent journalist who has brought this issue to national attention (yet still not being reported in the mainstream media it seems) the "contrails" have been reported now in at least 40 US states. Many reports and photographs are now available, many on various web sites (see contrail page in Special Research Projects on the TMP web site for links). [...] * *William Thomas: Next Interview on Art Bell - February 18, 1999* * William Thomas: (Previous Interview) on Art Bell - January 25, 1999 http://ww2.broadcast.com/artbell/abell/9901/ab0125.ram (This audio file link requires RealAudio or RealPlayer) William Thomas: Mystery Contrails: Poison from the Sky? - Update http://www.islandnet.com/~wilco/investsky.htm More Contrail Reports and Feedback (Special Research Projects) http://persweb.direct.ca/psa/conrep.html LA Mystery Contrails: Report and Photos http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/lacon.htm Ground Zero: Are These in Your Skies? http://www.heavensake.com/groundzero/~scrc/main.html Horizon http://horizon.worldinter.net The Harbinger http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Keep/4885/contrails.htm Contrail Photo Taken by Art Bell http://www.artbell.com/images/artcontrail.jpg

Which dates things a bit more precisely, the first Art Bell show with William Thomas was Feb 18th 1999

Now, the “LA Mystery Contrails: Report and Photos”, link above seems to go to an early version of Jeff Rense’s web site, with a post by “Marvin Rush”. It has some nice photos of contrails spreading into cirrus, dated 2-13-99

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508124811/http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/lacon.htm

The “Harbringer”, “heavensake” sites are not avaialble.

This “Horizon” page gives a lot of good archived links with dates back to 1/8/99

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508175410/http://horizon.worldinter.net/

Jay Reynolds, a long-time chemtrail debunker, has a page which contains several personal emails the details the early days of chemtrails:

http://goodsky.homestead.com/files/evolution.html