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Gurney HalleckChemtrails was a rumor amplified by a radio show. Interestingly, this chemtrail stuff overlaps my doctoral dissertation research from about 15 years ago when chemtrail conspiracy theory was about half its current age.My PhD is in artificial intelligence, communication networks, and autonomic systems like self-driving cars and UAVs. My area of research was basically all things automated, particularly self-adaptive things.My dissertation talks briefly about the history of "online" and early automation attempts using built-in brains or via communications networks. I needed to find out when the first UAVs were developed and it led me back to the papers the United States Air Force was putting out in the mid 1990s. One of those papers was called "Weather As A Force Multiplier: Owning The Weather In 2025" (published 1996). It was about how the military might use weather to exert power over enemies that we were at war with, an extension of our attempts during Vietnam. This is how the entire chemtrail thing started. But the rumor mill decided that somehow the entire planet was the target of such an idea, not enemies of the State, and the paper and idea certainly wasn't about the different nations *getting together*, since it was supposed to be about *defeating* other nations (we were at war at the time!)So similar to how flat earthers misread and NASA paper from 1989 that contained the phrase "Flat non-rotating Earth" because they needed to ignore all the other words around it about linear algebra and differential equations, some people that don't have scientific brains read this military report and misinterpreted the words that they understood and ignore the words they didn't. I highly suggest anyone interested in this topic to go read that paper and see what happened. They came out with another fact sheet in the early 2000s to try to dispel the rumors.At the time, there is a call-in radio program on overnight called "AM Coast to Coast" hosted by Art Bell. This is where people call to talk about ghosts, flat earth, vaccines as weapons, Area 51, shapeshifting reptilians, time travel, remote viewing, ghosts, etc. Essentially, AMC2C was the equivalent of the supermarket tabloid stories and their splashy headlines from the 1980s and 1990s, now in radio program form. The more the stories were repeated, the more they were embellished. (It's kind of interesting that chemtrailers haven't really evolved their particular theory much since then)I used to listen to this radio program when I was coding in the late hours or posting on bulletin board forums. Eventually the rumors and theories of the conspiracy spread to those online forums, and we were in the middle of transitioning from dial-up based platforms to internet based platforms. And here we are today. My hypothesis is that the World wide Web is the very reason why all of these old rumors and conspiracy theories grew legs and became movements or clubs or even actions. If you believe there are chemtrails in the sky and are new to the topic, perhaps you forgot to check to make sure that the thing wasn't based on nonsense to begin with. I want to point out that this was also around the time that the movie "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" with Johnny Depp came out, West Benicio Del Toro playing the part of the doctor that was harvesting ADENOCHROME from humans. It was based on a novel written by Hunter s Thompson in 1971. QANON folks forgot to check to see whether one of their theories was based on fiction or not, similar to what happened with chemtrails. (I'm wondering how many other people here have been following like myself the entire arc of this theory from its origin, spanning 30 years((If you've read this far, you're probably among the smarter folks here, and I appreciate your time, and these are the kind of things that would destroy the worldview and groups like this if people stopped believing in the topic so I recognize some people will forget to read all the words and we'll attack me or this post instead))https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory#:~:text=In%20the%20early%202000s%2C%20the,%2C%20and%20major%20media%20publications%22.