The frustrating thing about woo-woo ideas is that they never really go away permanently.
Take, for example, the Ancient Aliens thing. It really came into the public eye with Erich von Däniken's 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods. Buoyed up by his book unexpectedly catapulting him into fame, he followed it up with a number of sequels, including: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Fucking Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else For A Change.
Ha! I made the last one up, of course, because von Däniken is currently ninety years old and still talks about The Gods all the time, raking in huge amounts of money from conferences and keynote speeches (as well as book royalties). And that's the difficulty, isn't it? When there's money to be made (or clicks to be clicked -- which in today's social media world, amounts to the same thing), you can never really be confident of saying goodbye to an idiotic idea.
Which, unfortunately, brings us to "chemtrails."
Chemtrails -- known to us Kool-Aid Drinkin' Sheeple as ordinary jet contrails -- got their start in 2007. A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail. The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations. The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux). But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup. The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said. And it came from the contrail. Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.
And thus were "chemtrails" born.
Since then, the Evil Government has been accused of putting all sorts of things into jet fuel, with the intention of spraying it all over us and Causing Bad Stuff. Mind-control chemicals, compounds that can alter our DNA, pathogens (anthrax seems especially popular), chemicals that induce sterility. Notwithstanding the fact that if you want to get Something Nasty into a large fraction of the population, sneaking it into jet fuel and then hoping that the right people are going to be outside when the jet goes over, and then will inhale enough of it to work, has to be the all-time stupidest Evil Plot I've ever heard of. I mean, this one makes Boris and Natasha's Goof Gas thing seem like unadulterated genius.
And not even special magical vinegar; ordinary white vinegar that you can buy from the supermarket. You're supposed to "gently heat (not boil)" it, and the vapors rise and do battle with the poisonous chemtrails. How this supposedly works adds a whole other level of facepalming to the discussion. "White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]," said one YouTuber. "It eats alkaline metals which is [sic] what they spray to create the geoengineered clouds."
The problem here -- well, amongst the myriad problems here -- is that dissolving a chemical element doesn't destroy it. If there really were alkaline metals in jet contrails, vinegar might react chemically with them, but the metals would still be there (and presumably, still be just as toxic). It's like the claim I've seen about pillbugs (isopods) being our friends because they "remove heavy metals from soils." Now, isopods might well be tolerant to soils with heavy metal contamination -- I haven't verified that possibility -- but if they do consume plant material laden with heavy metals, where do you think those contaminants go after they're eaten? They're now inside the isopod's body, and when they isopod dies, the heavy metals leach right back into the soil. Barium, cadmium, lead, arsenic, and so on are elements, and if you are unclear on why that point is relevant, I refer you to the definition thereof.
Notwithstanding, the anti-chemtrail people claim that simmering vinegar in your back yard can "clear contaminated chemtrails in a ten-mile radius in a few hours." Which would be a pretty good trick, if it weren't for the fact that jet contrails themselves always disappear completely on their own in fifteen minutes or so.
The whole issue hasn't been helped by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in between sessions of Congress seems to spend her time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, proposing a bill prohibiting "geoengineering and weather modification," which includes chemtrails.
But of course, the bill conveniently says nothing about the carbon dioxide released by burning jet fuel, which actually is modifying our climate. Can't mention climate change and piss off the corporate donors, after all.
So once again, we're confronted by a conspiracy theory that keeps rising, zombie-like, from its shallow grave. At least in this case it'll keep the woo-woos busy simmering (not boiling) vinegar in their back yards, which is fairly harmless. And it'll give a boost to the vinegar manufacturers. Me, though, I'm kind of pining for the Ancient Aliens to come back around again. At least they keep people interested in stuff like history and mythology and archaeology, even if their conclusions aren't any more grounded in reality than the vinegar/chemtrail people.
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