Gaze up at the sky on a regular basis: you’ll likely glimpse them every once in a while. Long, wispy cloud-like lines that span the horizon. Captured across Earth in scores of videos and photos, the white trails, too straight to be natural and increasingly sighted by the public, have become fodder for debate. Significant numbers of people — US polls taken in 2016 and 2017 suggest somewhere between 20 to 40 per cent of Americans for instance — believe the sky trails are chemtrails har-bouring harmful chemicals covertly used for purposes that include weather manipulation. The official story — backed by governments, media giants and most scientists — insists that what we are viewing are condensation trails (contrails) emitted by high-altitude jets. Whether or not you’ve already chosen your camp, what’s the evidence? More importantly, do the trails pose any threat to your health or the planet?
Jet contrails
As the trails can persist and expand into cloud cover, public speculation has been inevitable. In 2000 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a position statement on the topic: the . Dismissing chemtrails as a “conspiracy theory”, it states that the trails are a normal effect of jet aviation. They pose no health risks, we’re
