HAMPTON, Va. - The conspiracy, those wise to it suspect,
was hatched by the government. Probably in a building like those at
NASA Langley Research Center, down a predictably nondescript
hallway, by a scientist eyeing the world's atmosphere through
powerful satellites.
Pat Minnis sat at his desk last week, his eyes skittering after
the cursor on a huge-panel computer screen. He zoomed in on a
recent day, at a certain time, then clicked to a different
satellite angle to look at the clouds.
Minnis looks like a regular guy, from his subtle-yet-snazzy blue
sweater down to his Rockport slip-ons. His silvery hair is cut
short and stylish and is thick enough to hold his reading glasses
when he glances up.
He doesn't look like someone who would help poison the
population, like someone who would turn blue skies gray, or like
someone involved in the cover up.
But that's what some people think.
Minnis is a senior research scientist at Langley, where he
studies the atmosphere. His satellite tracking, analysis and
explorations over the past 15 years have made him a top expert in
cirrus clouds and contrails, the wispy lines formed in the sky by
aircraft exhaust.
Therein, often to Minnis' amusement, lie the seeds of
conspiracy. Some people look at contrails and instead see
``chemtrails,'' telltale marks of something suspicious.
``There are tanker planes leaving airline terminals all over
this country every day,'' one person wrote to counter Minnis'
explanation that contrails are frozen water vapor. ``They are
loaded with chemicals, which they spray in the skies over heavily
populated areas.''
``Why do some planes fly by and the contrails disappear while
others leave those long contrails that expand and stay?'' another
wondered. ``The strange thing if you watch closely is that it's the
same planes making what looks to be some kind of grid.''
Thursday night, the Discovery Channel was to explore the
conspiracy theory behind ``chemical contrails,'' and they
interviewed Minnis to shoot it full of holes. He's slightly anxious
about the show and, because of that, watched a similar special
about radioactive fallout from bomb tests in the 1950s.
``It looked like they treated the scientists pretty straight,''
he said. ``They came on to me like you're going to be believable,
but who knows.''
Minnis and NASA study contrails for the same reasons they study
the clouds and the weather: NASA flies things, and if something
affects the skies, they need to know how.
During the course of his research, Minnis and associates have
discovered that airplane contrails the non poisonous variety
actually create cirrus clouds on days they wouldn't usually exist.
Because of this, he calculates that cirrus-cloud cover over the
United States is increasing by 1 percent each decade.
Minnis spun around in his chair. ``That's one of the things we
found out from the 9/11 experience: After 9/11, there were no
planes, and the astronauts on the space station noticed, 'We don't
see any contrails over the United States. That's really strange.'
``
Minnis clicked around his Web site, showing satellite shots of
chalky white slashes blanketing the sky, covering in one shot the
entire state of Kansas. What happens, he explained, is that when
the airplane exhaust injects water into the already cold, moist
atmosphere, ice crystals form and then grow.
``Here's another one,'' Minnis said, turning back to his
computer. ``This is over the East Coast. You can see there are just
hundreds and hundreds of these things.''
Such an explanation that contrails are innocently formed by
commercial planes is enough to rile ``the chemtrailers,'' as
Minnis calls them. But some of the experiments he's been behind?
Those are like smacking a hornet's nest with a stick.
One interesting thing Minnis has learned about contrails is
that, on some days, they stay in the sky for a long time, wind
comes through and swirls them, and they turn into what look like
regular cirrus clouds.
With the skies so full of contrails, it can be hard to see how
long they last or how far they move. So the government found a way
to do some checking. Imagine what the chemtrailers thought the day
they flew a DC-8 off the coast of Northern California, in perfectly
clear air, and went round and round over the same area to make a
racetrack pattern for Minnis and others to watch.
They tracked the massive oval as it passed over Northern
California, floated over the Sierra Nevada mountain range and
disappeared. Another time, a plane nicknamed the NASA Vomit Comet
made a figure-8 in the sky off the Texas coast.
Minnis tracked the contrail for 14 hours as it oozed over the
Gulf of Mexico, then across Florida, before it turned into an
amorphous blob.
``Again,'' he said, ``if you had been sitting in a fishing boat
down in the Gulf, you would have just thought this thing was a
cirrus cloud.''
Unless you were a chemtrailer then you would be even more sure
that something was up. For the record, even though the government
has planes and the government can make clouds, ``There is no real
truth to weather modification,'' Minnis said. ``That is not going
on now. What we're able to do now is inadvertent.''
Minnis knows this is tantalizing stuff to some, and he grinned.
A direct question, from the chemtrailers: Is it true that
contrails are really part of a soft-kill weapon program in which
the government is spraying chemicals on its own people?
Minnis looked up. His mouth curled into a smile.
``Not that I know of,'' he said.
He paused.
``No comment,''
He laughed.
(Original headline: Langley scientist takes the conspiracy out of contrails )
