Outstanding article. Talking about this stuff tends to generate a great deal of ridicule from those stuck in normalcy bias.

There are so many layers of deception in today's world. Even the notion of "conspiracy" has been equated to "fantasy" (by design?). While teaching some college classes, one of my students asked me about a statement I had made and asked if that was a conspiracy. Here in the Philippines, such concepts are common and there is no social bias against them. But as an American, I noticed my own knee-jerk reaction to the term. I was so baffled by the overwhelming feeling it had generated that I researched the topic and found that conspiracies are Dirt Ordinary. I ended up writing a book by that name.

On the topic of geoengineering, I first encountered the phenomenon in 1997, after moving from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Arizona. At first, I thought it was a peculiarity of Arizona, though I could not remember having seen such things when I had lived there for a few months, 25 years earlier. As an artist and avid amateur astronomer, the sky was one of my deep loves. The sight of these ugly lines in the sky made me uncomfortable and then increasingly angry as they became more frequent and more numerous.

When I moved to the Philippines in 2007, I was relieved to have clear skies once again. For 8 long years, I relished the clean, blue skies. Then, in November 2015, I saw my first persistent jet trail in nearly a decade. It appeared all by itself, in sputtering incompleteness across the sunset sky. I didn't see another one for months. Slowly, the occurrence of these lines began to build—twice a month, then twice a week, followed by several times in a single day.

Summer 2017, I noticed one trail that stretched all across an otherwise clear, blue sky. But this one was different. From the entire length of it, I saw long rivulets of powder streaming down toward the ground. Condensation trails? I think not. This was not condensed water vapor at high altitudes. This was the trail of a commercial jet that had taken off from Mactan airport only 5 kilometers away. Based on a nominal rate of climb, the trail was a mere 300 meters in altitude at my location. And this is the tropics. Fat chance it's cold at 300 meters.

In 2016, I had heard a talk given by then CIA Director Brennan at the CFR. He praised efforts to cool the planet "like volcanoes do" with SAI (stratospheric aerosol injection). Ironically, his talk was on the 200th anniversary of the 1816 year without a summer which killed thousands and turned thousands more into climate refugees from volcanic cooling.

The mad men will lose. And we will have to forgive them for their crimes against humanity. For we are more interested in building civilization toward maturity, instead of tearing it down.

For 44 years, I had watched the skies with a deep interest in the wide open spaces. In nearly all of that time, I had lived close to a major airport and never once saw persistent jet trails. Family photos never showed them, either. Then, in 1997, everything changed. Someone was doing something differently and hadn't told us about it.