Normally I wouldn’t post about this but since I recently published a post examining how the minds of conspiracy theorists work, I thought this was an interesting case study.

Alex Jones’ nutbar website Infowars thinks they have just gotten a big scoop on the “chemtrail” conspiracy while also exposing CNN as being complicit in it.

Airplanes traveling at high speeds often leave a vapor trail behind them. This is caused by air pressure changes which force water vapor to condense into what are in effect long skinny clouds. Conspiracy theorists believe that some if not all of these trails are actually a secret government project which is spraying chemicals in the sky for nefarious purposes which range from “geo-engineering” to mind control.

A NASA experiment that was scheduled for today involved distributing several chemical compounds into the atmosphere using a rocket. The purpose was to track particle movements in space. CNN reported on the launch which ended up being  postponed until later in the month.

 If you live along the Eastern Seaboard and wake up early Sunday, you could be treated to a colorful sky hours before sunrise.

Blue-green and red clouds could be visible in the predawn sky from New York to North Carolina, thanks to a NASA rocket due to be launched from Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern shore of Virginia.

NASA had hoped to launch the rocket early Saturday, but had to scrub the attempt because of boats in the area where the payload is expected to fall back to Earth.

The Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket isn’t even the coolest part of the mission.

Four to five minutes after launch, the rocket is expected to deploy 10 canisters about the size of soft drink cans, each containing a colored vapor that forms artificial, luminescent clouds.

The clouds, or vapor tracers, are formed “through the interaction of barium, strontium, and cupric-oxide,” according to NASA.

Since the canisters will be released about 100 miles (160 kilometers) above the ground, the space agency says they “pose absolutely no hazard to residents along the mid-Atlantic coast.” Sounding rockets have been used for more than 40 years to carry science payloads on missions that last just five to 20 minutes.

The vapor tracers will allow scientists on the ground to view the movement of the particles in the ionosphere, a part of the Earth’s atmosphere that stretches to the edge of space, to learn more about the movement of the air currents at that altitude.

The whole mission will last only about eight minutes before the payload lands in the Atlantic Ocean, about 90 miles out to sea from its launch point in Virginia.

The folks at Infowars read this story as a confirmation that chemtrails are real and presumably CNN is in on it.

It doesn’t matter that the chemtrail conspiracy theory is primarily an explanation for an aircraft related phenomena, not rockets. Nor does it matter that the chemicals to be used in this experiment are expected to produce a colorful light show rather than just the white condensation trails they obsess over.

https://twitter.com/RealAlexJones/status/871806779952377856

All that matters to the conspiracy theorist is that the story involves chemicals and the sky. No other logical connection is necessary for them to proclaim that this is “proof” of something completely unrelated to their wild theories. Not only that, they are claiming that CNN reporting on NASA’s experiment is equivalent to admitting that all the chemtrail nonsense spewed by Infowars for years is reality based.

The funniest, and yet most troublesome, part of all this is that they are encouraging people to believe in their fantasy while decrying CNN for being “fake news.”