Government Tightlipped About Carolina Contrails

• What are these strange condensation trails that are filling our skies? Citizens are getting concerned.

Reports of aircraft leaving strange condensation trails or "contrails" in the sky are unlikely to cause great alarm until they are seen over one's own home.

On March 9, I photographed several planes producing what appeared to be such "chemtrails," i.e. non-water vapor trails, over Gaffney, in upstate South Carolina.

Several planes, sometimes flying in tandem, left suspicious contrails across the clear blue sky, which did not disappear like the usual short-lived contrails being left by other planes in the same area. These thicker trails appeared to come from the tail of the planes and gradually spread out to become cirrus-like clouds.

However, these clouds displayed some unusual characteristics quite unlike naturally occurring clouds. when the afternoon sun shone through this artificial haze, a halo with an oddly colored rainbow could be seen around the sun but the colors of this so-called "chembow" looked more like an oil rainbow seen on water that a true rainbow.

Moreover, planes flying back through these clouds left an unusual dark smudgy track as they passed through the cloud.

Questions about these peculiar contrails posed by The SPOTLIGHT to government environmental officials eventually produced some reasonable explanations for these phenomena.

Ron Garret of the South Carolina department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) explained that Air National guard and other military aircraft are active on Saturdays and fly between 25,000 and 30,000 feet, while commercial aircraft fly at higher altitudes, between 35,000 and 40,000 feet.

Therefore, the difference between the contrails, according to Garrett, could be the result of high-performance military aircraft flying at lower altitudes with greater humidity producing heavier trails that persist and grow while commercial planes flying 10,000 feet higher in less humid zones produce the short-lived trails.

All "chemtrail" questions to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are directed to Jana Goldman who told The SPOTLIGHT that she "can't comment" on chemtrails.

Goldman did respond by sending the "Aircraft Contrail Factsheet," a six-page brochure produced jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, NOAA, and the Federal Aviation Administration in September 2000 to deal with "public inquires regarding aircraft contrails."

The fact sheet says that persistent contrails "do affect the cloudiness of the atmosphere" and "might affect atmospheric temperature and climate." However, it says, "there are no regulations addressing contrails and their atmospheric effects."

South Carolina's DHEC said there are "no state regulations on emissions from mobile sources."

Independent chemtrail researcher Clifford Carnicom and others have reported that barium salts have been detected in chemtrails using spectroscopy. However, Garret said evidence of barium sulfate in "chemtrails" could be the result of normal cloud-seeding activity to produce rain.

Many readers have expressed suspicion of particular chemtrails that may have contained pathogens and desiccated red-blood cells and caused upper respiratory diseases, "flu-like" symptoms, even bacterial meningitis, and inflammation of the membrane around the brain and spinal cord. One person in Texas wrote of seeing yellowish-orange trails in the sky that caused him to hall ill with "the worst flu" he had ever experienced.

Marion Herz of the EPA's Office of Clean Air said, "There is no government program that creates this spraying." There is little hope of clearer skies in the future. The EPA says "persistent contrail cover is expected to increase between now and the year 2050."