WHY THE
Like
many, if not all, I suppose, residents of Athens Greece 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. You can also see what part
of the plane these denser emissions are coming from by visiting
http://hamilton.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=1132#mark2
and
scrolling to the bottom.
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
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 21st
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.
Will Thomas’s second theory, which as stated I
don’t propose to go into here, has to do with reasons for spraying the even
more toxic heavy metal barium over large areas of the earth’s surface.
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?”
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. .
Just
as a matter of interest, 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.
Aigina, 26th
December, 2002