I've been watching chemtrails for over a year now and still don't know much more than on that fateful day in the spring of 2000 when I met William Thomas, the Canadian investigative journalist who brought the chemtrail issue out in the open. On that day, the sky above Vancouver was blanketed by a surreal layer of chemtrails that turned a clear blue day into a hazy, murky mess. Since then, I have seen hundreds of strange trails in the skies over Vancouver, and, of course, thousands more on the web.

At this stage of the chemtrail investigation, the question is no longer whether or not something out-of-the-ordinary is happening. That, to anyone who has been paying attention, is obvious. The formations of parallel lines, cross-hatched patterns and X's have been documented in North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa. The question now is why? Most importantly, are chemtrails of a benign or a sinister nature? That question opens a nasty can of worms that unleashes endless speculation.

Take your pick and believe what you want. There are almost as many theories as there are researchers, including chemtrails as mass inoculation against biowarfare, population control, weather modification, mind control, a global sunscreen, atmosphere manipulations, bioengineering, military radar jamming tests, gene therapy and DNA manipulation. Yikes! Where should I start?

I suppose the leading theory still belongs to William Thomas, who has been at this longer than anyone, and who has gathered some pretty good evidence to substantiate his claims that the chemtrails are laying an aluminum oxide "sunscreen" into the atmosphere in order to deflect enough sunlight to mitigate the effects of global warming.

At first this idea sounds a bit impractical - until you realize that the Hughes Aircraft Company actually patented this "sunscreen" plan in 1991. The idea was formulated by the infamous Edward Teller, who did the math and announced that a one per cent drop in UV radiation reaching the Earth would save the the global economy over $98 billion from global-warming-related weather havoc. His cunning plan, to lay an aluminum oxide sunscreen over the planet, was estimated to cost $1 billion per year.

Other circumstantial evidence to support weather modification of some kind includes a taped interview with a senior air traffic control manager in the northeast United States who was told to re-route commercial air traffic in order to allow military experimentation in weather modification. The term 'military exercise' also pops up on a taped message from the Victoria Airport Authority who reportedly was told the chemtrails were caused by U.S. and Canadian air force exercises (check out lifeboatnews.com for the details).

An article by Mike Blair in The Spotlight claims that a dozen researchers, having spent the past year studying chemtrails, concluded similar military experimentation, including the cloaking of aircraft and radar jamming, with the ultimate goal of controlling rain, storms, tornadoes and hurricanes to use as weapons in future wars. This experimentation is called Project Cloverleaf, and follows a U.S. Airforce study entitled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025. In this scenario, chemtrails are being used not to change the climate, but simply to create another weapon of mass destruction. Charming.

When the chemtrail story first broke, one of the leading theories was of some sort of mass aerial vaccination of Americans to guard against a biowarfare terrorist attack. This theory seems to have morphed into a far more sinister one that has the chemtrails themselves as the biowarfare agent being dumped on an unwitting populace.

According to several researchers, including conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Stan Deyo ( millennium-ark.net ), chemtrails contain genetically engineered biological agents which have caused a huge increase in flu-like illnesses in the past two years. Depending on who you believe, this means either some kind of mass gene therapy is occurring (more on this later) or, more simply, that chemtrails are designed to control population growth by killing off the weak and elderly, and particularly the "useless eaters", a phrase which is attributed to Henry Kissinger and refers to anyone not contributing to the capitalist system. Kissinger, according to Deyo, was one of the contributors to the Global 2000 report assembled by the Carter Administration in the late 70s, a report which includes the recommendation to figure out a way to bring the world's population down to two billion by the year 2050, in order to sustain the lifestyles of "first world" citizens.

Sound farfetched? Perhaps. So did a lot of other covert operations that have come to light in recent years, including, but not limited to, the Gulf War Syndrome, the MK-ULTRA mind-control projects, and the testing of biological and pyschotropic agents on unsuspecting citizens. And don't forgot America's unwritten history which includes at least 50 years of systematically bringing down any third world government that refused to buy into the American economic model. Unfortunately, anything is possible.

Did I just say anything is possible? Then let's not forget the possibility that our entire planet is nothing more than a penal colony or slave labour camp for another race of beings entirely (check out davidicke.com). If you've read any of Zecharia Sitchin's interpretations of the old Sumerian myths you know they can really upset the old psychological balance. The Sumerians blatantly stated that they were genetically-modified by their alien gods (the Annunaki) in order to mine gold, which was to be used to help fix the atmosphere of the Annunaki's home planet. Sounds strangely similar to the aluminum oxide sunscreen proposed by Edward Teller, doesn't it?

The Hopi Nation was another race who openly claimed to be descended from aliens, and the Hopi continue, to this day, to await the Day of Purification, when all this environmental muck-raking we've been doing will come to a quick end. So what does this have to do with chemtrails? The Hopi Prophecies include the ancient prediction that "as the Day of Purification approaches, cobwebs will criss-cross the sky." See where this is headed?

Local chemtrail researcher Purple Crow ( www.vcn.bc.ca/~aurora27 ) turned me on to the news that the "cobwebs" or "chem-webs" that sometimes fall to the ground after heavy chemtrail spraying have an ancient history dating back at least to the 14th century, when they were called Angel Hair - a white, fibrous substance resembling spider webs which floats down to Earth and generally coincides with UFO sightings.

The website theforbiddenknowledge.com claims that a Bubonic Plague-era woodblock print shows an airborne craft spraying germs on the population below. Other researchers claim that outbreaks of the Plague in Europe and Asia were preceded by reports of "foul-smelling mists... that frequently appeared after unusually bright lights in the sky." Initial reports from Asia, where the Black Plague began, included descriptions of "meteors and comets trailing noxious gases that killed trees and destroyed the fertility of the land." (This nugget is from magonia.demon.co.uk ).

So why would aliens spray poisonous chemicals on us? Apparently, as the Hopi Day of Purification approaches (the Mayan calendar puts the date at about 2012-13), human DNA has begun evolving to help us break out of our zombie-slave-trance. In order to counter this, those in control of this planet have devised a scheme to genetically modify our DNA in order to keep us docile and complacent. Is this the happiest news you've heard recently, or what?