Wayne Hall identifies some flying objects.

Like many, if not all, I suppose, residents of Athens I have in the last months at all times throughout the day (and also at night) noticed aircraft flying at high altitudes and discharging something which is denser and more long-lasting than the familiar condensation trails left behind by commercial passenger jets. The difference is easily perceptible by comparing these trails to what you see coming out of planes taking off or landing at the local airport.

 

I have noticed these emissions, and these trails, over central Athens, the northern and southern suburbs, Mount Pendeli and the Saronic Gulf. I would be very interested to find out in how many other parts of Greece they are being observed. The trails these planes leave behind often remain visible for a long time. They gradually disperse and become clouds which again do not look like the natural cumulus clouds we see at lower altitudes in the sky. Often on clear days a few hours of the these planes flying backwards and forwards is enough to spoil the whole appearance of the sky. Sometimes, too, they can suddenly give off increased amounts of emission, forming very dense white clouds with “tails” underneath. On 24^th December 2002 at around two in the afternoon I saw a huge cloud of this kind over the town of Aigina. It was unlike anything I have ever seen before in my life, and it got me wondering what we would be breathing when the contents of that cloud got down to ground level.

 

By chance last summer I discovered that these emissions in the United States are popularly called “Chemtrails” and that anyone interested can learn quite a lot by just typing the word into a relevant Internet search engine such as Google. (One particularly good source of information is http://hamilton.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=1793

 

There is now a discussion on the aerosol spraying over Athens at:

http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001629.html )

 

One of the first things I discovered is that the aircraft involved in this activity include military KC-135 and KC-10s. They are planes used as tankers by the United States Air Force. There have also been certain unmarked white jets participating in aerosol operations, and in fact I saw such an anonymous white plane flying at a low altitude over Pendeli on Saturday 22nd December 2002 at a time when spraying was in progress. It was not itself discharging white plumes and was possibly coming in to land.

 

This information on plane types is from the writer Toni Thayer and dates from 2001. At that time no governmental agency of any country would confirm that spraying activity was occurring. In mid- 2002 the countries in which eyewitnesses had reported seeing this type of aerosol spraying included the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Croatia, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand and Haiti. As of late 2002 it is clear that the spraying is now also taking place in Greece.

 

What is its purpose? A book written by the investigative journalist Will Thomas called Probing the Chemtrail Conundrum puts forward three theories, only one of which, the least macabre, I will mention. It is indeed possible that more than one purpose is being served and more than one substance sprayed. According to the first of Will Thomas’s theories, the spraying is part of a strategy for countering the destructive effects of global warming.

Of the scientists carrying out computer simulations of the effects of aerosol spraying as a possible means of slowing global warming, Ken Caldeira of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shares the view of the ecological movement that curtailing of greenhouse gas emissions, as set out (very conservatively) in the Kyoto Protocol, would be “the most prudent and least risky option for mitigating global warming”. But the approach that seems to have prevailed has been that recommended by Edward Teller, “father of the H-bomb” (and of the Star Wars “missile defence” programme) in a 1997 paper entitled Global Warming and the Ice Ages: Prospects for Physics-based Modulation of Global Change. What Teller has advocated is a programme for spraying minute aluminium particles all over the planet so as to deflect the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays but still allow the Earth’s heat to rise through them. Teller’s report emphasizes the negative economic implications of imposing limitations such as the Kyoto Protocol on fossil-fired energy production and notes how much cheaper it would be to lace the skies with light-scattering particles.

 

Teller has powerful supporters for this view. In 1994, apparently in the context of lobbying by petroleum companies for “solutions” to global warming that would allow continued burning of fossil fuels, a patent was issued to the Hughes Aircraft Company for “Stratospheric Welsbach seeding for reduction of global warming”. The patent describes how tiny particles of aluminium oxide and other reflective particles could be added to the fuel of jet airliners and emitted from the jet exhaust.

 

One does not need to be a medical expert to imagine the likely effects on human health of such a programme of emissions. In a 50 square mile area around Espanola, Ontario, where months of stratospheric seeding took place in 1998, residents experienced high rates of severe headaches, chronic joint pain, dizziness, sudden extreme fatigue, acute asthma attacks, feverless "flu-like" symptoms and loss of short term memory. Lab analyses of Espanola rainwater found reflective quartz particles and levels of aluminium five times higher than the maximum permissible levels under Ontario’s Health and Safety Standards.

 

The effects of stratospheric seeding have now become very visible in the skies of the United States and, increasingly, outside the United States but, given the media blackout on “Chemtrails”-related information (apart from on Internet), the American public has not yet begun to react.

 

Here is how one contributor to an American discussion forum sees the situation: “Why is it that approximately 98-99 percent of the population does not notice something that is so obvious, so aggressive, so disturbing? Recently I put that question to a good friend of mine who works as a therapist in the mental health profession, and her response was basically the same as what I had been thinking. ..They DO notice them. They DO see them. The only difference between them and us is that they simply cannot acknowledge this whole state of affairs to themselves. It is simply too big, too scary, too unbelievable. So unfortunately, what is now happening is that most people in this country are walking around in a total and complete state of denial, and not acknowledging something that is right in front of them. I can’t think of any other reason why people can walk under a totally weird, science-fiction-like sky that looks like it has come out of some horror or strange fantasy movie, and come up to you and say “isn’t it a beautiful day? However,” he continues, “I believe this strange state of affairs can’t continue like this indefinitely. Sooner or later people will have to acknowledge them (the chemtrails), and when they do, I’m convinced that "the shit is really going to hit the fan”, BIG TIME!!! I mean, how is the average American going to feel when he/she finally wakes up to the fact that the government they loved and trusted for so long is dumping toxic chemicals on us?”

 

Ken Caldeira has warned that apart from producing adverse health effects in humans, stratospheric aerosol seeding could have an unknown devastating effect on the climate. Enhanced stratospheric cooling could accelerate the destruction of stratospheric ozone, which protects the earth from solar and cosmic radiation. The placing of aerosols in the atmosphere could also lead to reverse results of the earth being subjected to extremely rapid heating, potentially causing a run-away greenhouse effect.

 

It is still not too late for us to make a start: we in Greece can start by asking our government what purpose is being served by these increasingly frequent high altitude flights of jet planes over our heads with very dense and long lasting vapour trails. Better some questions now than mass hysteria in the future.

 

The author, Wayne Hall, lives in Greece and is a member of ATTAC-Hellas and Hellenic Direct Democracy Forum (http://pcsi.tripod.com/hddf/index.html)

 

 

Wayne adds: A personal note, which is not really changing the subject: for the last eleven years I have believed that the international ecological movement and the Left had their historic moment of opportunity in 1991, at the time of the Communist coup against Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. The conditions that suddenly arose then gave us the golden opportunity to intervene dynamically, on our own terms, in the insane games that people like Edward Teller had been playing for forty years then and have now been playing for over fifty. Both main tendencies in the European Communist movement were taking wrong positions. Here in Greece we ecologists had our own representative in parliament in 1991 and it would have been possible for us to make our voice heard if certain arguments had been able to move more key minds on the Secretariat of the Ecologists-Alternatives and be heard beyond our parliamentary office. The logic of Teller’s trickery has always been the same. In 1991 both he and we could have demanded the abolition of the Soviet nuclear arsenal as we are now consenting to the abolition of Iraq’s. But instead of abolishing enemy nuclear arsenals, or even trying to, Teller promotes “anti-missile shields”. Similarly, instead of supporting reduced use of fossil fuels, he chooses to fill the entire earth’s atmosphere with light-refracting aluminium particles, at whatever cost in human deaths and environmental havoc. And in neither of the above cases is it even decisively important whether, on their own terms, his schemes will work. .