As they fly, jets naturally leave behind trails of condensation that are created by the exhaust from their engines. To many conspiracy theorists, though, those so-called “contrails” are actually evidence that “they” are releasing toxic chemicals into the air to do all sorts of illicit things. Depending on who you ask, it could be weather control, mind control or even population control. Not content to sit back and let “them” execute their dastardly plan, Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano has introduced a bill to put a stop to all this, the Daily Beast reports.
Mastriano’s bill would “ban the release of substances affecting the state’s temperature, weather, or sunlight into the atmosphere over Pennsylvania.” To do this, he would update a 1967 law that was passed after amateurs conducted several “unauthorized attempts to suppress hail in central Pennsylvania.” As a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, since the original law was passed, it had yet to receive an application for a cloud seeding license and was unaware of any attempts to illegally cloud seed.
Nevertheless, Mastriano insists that, “Recent developments and new technology have brought forward the need to modernize the 1967 law.”
He also claims that silver iodide, which can be used for cloud seeding, is “known to be toxic” despite the fact that, per the Desert Research Institute, it is “not known to be harmful to humans or wildlife.”
“Spraying unknown, experimental, and potentially dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere without the consent of the people of Pennsylvania is a clear violation of Article 1, Section 27 of the PA Constitution,” Mastriano said.
While the wording of the bill may have a veneer of legitimacy, Mastriano’s past behavior suggests he believes there’s more going on here. In addition to saying his bill “will mirror” a Tennessee bill that claims the government is conducting “geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere,” he also has a history of posting overt nods to the long-debunked chemtrail conspiracy theory.
After losing the governor’s race back in 2022, he posted four photos of contrails along with the caption “Over Franklin County today” before linking to a post about solar geoengineering. And back in November, he posted another photo of contrails with the caption “I have legislation to stop this. I took this at 4:15pm Monday in Chambersburg. Normal contrails dissolve / evaporate within 30-90 seconds.”
According to NASA, most contrails remain visible for between four and six hours, while the National Weather Service has said humidity in the air is an important factor in how long contrails stay visible. Now, contrails are actually harmful for humans, in that about 10 percent of contrails persist past a few hours, trapping heat on the planet and worsening our already dire impending climate change disaster. This, however, is not conspiracy theorists, nor Mastriano’s, concern.
“The most common claim is simply that aircraft contrails look ‘different,’ without any comparative analysis,” David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard told the Daily Beast. “This as convincing as saying that alien beings walk among in disguise as people because some people act very strangely.”
In what we’re sure is a completely unrelated coincidence, Mastriano, a Republican, is also a 2020 election denier who called on Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the results so that states could send fraudulent electors to invalidate the election and re-elect Trump. He also has strong ties to the January 6 insurrection attempt, including organizing plans to bus Trump supporters to Washington, D.C. to attend Trump’s speech before they stormed the capitol.