Claims ‘chemtrails’ poison citizens spur Wyoming lawmakers to advance ‘geoengineering’ ban

After fretting for a day over claims the government is poisoning citizens by spraying chemicals in the sky, a Wyoming legislative committee endorsed a bill banning the release of “atmospheric contaminants” above the state.

The federal government is creating poisonous trails of chemicals — known as chemtrails — from nozzles on jet aircraft flying thousands of feet above the earth, witnesses told the Legislature’s Joint Agriculture, State and Public Lands and Water Resources Interim Committee.

Vapor-like trails that appear behind jets — also known as contrails and widely understood to be water vapor from engines — are actually poisonous sprays intentionally released by the Department of War to change the climate, witnesses said.

A University of Wyoming professor, speaking for himself, sought to dismiss those fears.

“The formation of clouds from jet aircraft is a very well understood phenomenon,” said Jeff French, an associate professor and head of the university’s Atmospheric Science Department. “Combustion of jet fuel releases water vapor.”

Unconvinced, the panel advanced the Clean Air and Geoengineering Prohibition Act, prohibiting airborne releases because they “are not well understood and may have harmful consequences.” Snowmaking and cloud seeding would be exempt, although the Legislature earlier this year defunded a Wyoming aerial cloud seeding program.

The committee also backed a resolution to Congress to ban “unauthorized atmospheric geoengineering and weather modification.” The panel failed, on a tie vote, to advance a 10-year moratorium on cloud seeding.

Aerial spraying goes on in plain sight, Casper resident Maria Crisler told the committee.

“You can look outside Cheyenne, Casper — you know over population centers — you can see on any given day,” she said. “I have tons of pictures. They are chemtrailing, trying to block out the sun.”

Dane Wigington, a controversial YouTube sensation and promoter of geoengineering fears, testifying via a video link, said aluminum nano particles, “toxic to all life, period — no exceptions,” are a principal ingredient in the poisonous sprays. Geoengineering is ongoing and there’s evidence of misfeasance, Wigington said.

“It is sterilizing [the] soil microbiome,” he said of the jet trails. “It is affecting root systems.

“We have up-close photographs [of] retrofit nozzles mounted on wing pylons aimed at the exhaust jet stream to make this look like ‘condensation,’” he said.

Snowmaking, cloud seeding allowed

Water users from Wyoming’s portion of the Colorado River Basin and others representing ag interests successfully asked that cloud seeding be exempt from the proposed geoengineering ban. They worried that Wyoming would be seen as flighty in efforts to compromise over overallocated water use from the river.

The Environmental Protection Agency states on its website that “the federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification.” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in July said his agency would no longer dismiss geoengineering fears and would provide an online list “of everything we know about contrails and geoengineering.”

Wyoming committee member Rep. Karlee Provenza, a Laramie Democrat, dismissed worries of government conspiracies that apparently captivated most of the committee.

“I don’t think that there’s a problem,” Provenza said when asked by co-chair Rep. John Winter, a Republican from Thermopolis, for a solution to alleged efforts to alter the earth’s atmosphere and climate.

Wyoming residents are worried about drought, among other things, she said. “They’re seeing a bunch of different impacts on our environment.”

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But they latch onto chemtrail theories “instead of blaming the culprit — climate change,” she said.

Provenza sympathized with Wyomingites who “are just heartbroken … [who] think that chemtrails [are] the reason for all of their ailments.” However, she said there was no sound scientific evidence presented to reach that conclusion.

This geoengineering bill is “picking a fight with the federal government, who is allegedly poisoning the people of Wyoming,” she said before voting against the measure. “So we’re growing government with no actual solution, not really doing anything in here except giving our DEQ office a lot of work to do, to monitor all aircraft, drones, balloons or rockets that enter the state’s airspace, to determine whether atmospheric contaminants are being dispersed.”

She envisioned the bill would see state regulators flying around in a helicopter to “capture particles from whatever is dropping materials on us.”

Defamation denied

With skepticism from only Provenza and Sen. Barry Crago, a Buffalo Republican, the committee accepted Wigington’s testimony. In 2021, Wigington unsuccessfully sued a climate scientist for defamation.

Douglas MacMartin, an associate professor at Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, called Wigington’s beliefs, as stated in a documentary, “pure fantasy,” according to court records.

The federal court for the Eastern District of California granted MacMartin’s motion to dismiss the case and ordered Wigington to pay the professor’s costs as provided by California’s anti-SLAPP law, which guards against meritless suits known as “strategic lawsuits against public participation.”

The parties agreed on a payment figure that was not made public in court papers.

The geoengineering bill and resolution now head to the Legislature, which meets early next year in a session devoted primarily to budget matters. The committee’s endorsement boosts the measures’ chance of passage.