"Look at those chem trails!"

No, the photo of contrails doesn't look like a theory proving chemtrails, it looks like a poorly supported hypothesis. All contrails are *necessarily* chemtrails. So are auto exhausts, and factory smoke blowing in the wind, and the Fukushima radioactivity that has, I hear, now reached even California waters. 

There have been known cases of deliberate spraying to test disease vectors or to seed clouds for rain. And there is chemical fallout from anything like smog from China making it to here, or from LA to Tucson, or Sahara sand making it all the way to here as well! So there are many ordinary things that can account for the alleged chemical fallout from "chemtrails", e.g. acid rain.

I can believe that there might be chemtrails for nefarious reasons. Corporations are known sociopaths. What makes belief, or better, understanding, very difficult is that the vast majority of what I've seen as "evidence" is accounted for by ordinary atmospheric phenomenon perceptible, even by an amateur? So normal things presented as "evidence" detract from the credibility of the argument to very large degree.

What detracts more than that is a very interesting phenomenon, one I have observed many times. A good illustration of this happened the day that flights were resumed in September just after the tragedy (or conspiratorial destruction) that happened in NYC in 2001. I was living in Buffalo and taking a deposit for our store to the bank around the corner. I was passing a coffee shop where folks were having coffee on the patio. As I approached a young lady jumped up from her seat and pointed to the sky. She started screaming "They're going to crash! They're going to crash"

I looked to where she was pointing. What I saw was two jetliners heading, one roughly NE, and the other W. Seeing their configuration and relative size, clearly they were at both different altitudes and distances from us, and way withing any conceivable envelop of safety. Yet she was actually shaking with fear until I walked her through it. She only settled down after the apparent paths crossed, the planes clearly not being near each other. Similarly, I've seen plastic shopping bags aloft in a wind as well as other things, mistaken in all sincerity for flying saucers. And, of course, there is the classic jumping back in fear from a stick mistaken for a snake.

So here is the thing: while it is always prudent to consider possibilities, there is a whole segment of society which interprets nearly *anything* from the standpoint of fear and survival. There are everything from MRI studies to psychological tests, all peer reviewed and public that demonstrate this. Nearly everything is seen by such individuals as a threat or a danger. that element is ferreted out in any situation for these sincere citizens. Of course, there is such an element in nearly everything. But is it in every case the overwhelming factor? Probably not. Statistics and experience belie that stance, whose roots are interestingly laid out in the reports concerning it.

Interestingly, those same folks are participants in another phenomenon. This is the one which happens when there actually is an immediate and present danger, such as a sinking ship. It is called denial. Fear and denial go hand in hand. The denial and fantasy portion is either of the situation itself, the ship, or the mitigating circumstances, the lifeboats, sometimes known as facts.