Chemtrails?
www.earthisland.org/eijournal/new_articles.cfm?articleID=585&journalID=64
Summer 2002
Vol. 17, No. 2
Stolen Skies: The Chemtrail Mystery
Jet Trails in the Sky Used to Disappear. Now they Linger.
by William Thomas
It was around noon on March 12, 2000 when S.T. Brendt, the late night reporter for WMWV Radio, entered the kitchen of her country home in Parsonsfield, Maine. Her partner, Lou Aubuchont, was puzzling over what he had seen in the sky a half-hour before. The fat puffy plumes arching up over the horizon were unlike any aircraft condensation trails ("contrails") he had ever seen.
Instead of dissipating like normal contrails, these intersecting sky trails grew wider and began to merge. Looking towards the sun, Aubuchont saw what appeared like "an oil and water mixture" reflecting a prismatic band of colors.
Ordinarily, contrails flare briefly in the stratosphere as hot moist engine exhaust flash-freezes into a stream of ice-crystals. These pencil-thin condensation trails are short-lived, evaporating into invisibility as exhaust gases cool quickly to the surrounding air temperature.
As National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) meteorologist Thomas Schlatter explains, the formation of condensation trails requires temperatures lower than about minus 76 F and humidity of 70 percent or more. Because the Federal Aviation Authority requires military tankers and transporters to cross continental airspace at altitudes below 30,000 feet, ensuring safe separation from airliners flying between 35,000 and 39,000 feet, these military flights should leave no contrails at all.
But in late 1997, Aubuchont began to notice thicker trails extending from horizon to horizon. Hanging in the sky, these expanding white ribbons would invariably be interwoven by more thick lines left by unmarked Air Force jets, white or silver in color.
As Brendt glanced out the window, it looked like another gorgeous, cloudless day. But not quite. She spotted two jets laying billowing white banners to the north. Turning her gaze due west, Brendt saw two more lines extending over the horizon. She called Lou. Within 45 minutes, the couple counted 30 jets. "This isn't right," Brendt thought. "We just don't have that kind of air traffic here." While Aubuchont kept counting, Brendt started calling airports.
Alerted by a call from Brendt, Richard Dean, WMWV's assistant news director and the WMWV news staff filed outside and counted 370 lines of persistent contrails in skies usually devoid of aerial activity.
Brendt phoned a number of Air Traffic Controllers. They all stated that nothing unusual was going on. After several calls, Brendt reached one ATC manager who offered a different story. He told Brendt that his radars showed nine commercial jets during the same 45-minute span. From her location, he said, she should have been able to see only one plane.
"What about the other 29?" Brendt inquired. The ATC official confided off-the-record that he had been ordered "by higher civil authority" to re-route inbound European airliners away from an airborne "military exercise" in the area. "They wouldn't give me any of the particulars and I don't ask," he explained. The controller (who insisted on being identified only as "Deep Sky,") subsequently repeated his statements on tape before witnesses at the WMWV studio.'It's a Military Exercise'
On December 8, 2000, Terry Stewart, the Manager for Planning and Environment at the Victoria International Airport, responded to a caller's complaint about the strange patterns of circles and grids being woven over the British Columbia capitol. Stewart left a message on an answering machine tape - a message that later was heard by more than 15 million radio listeners. Stewart explained: "It's a military exercise, [a] US and Canadian Air Force exercise that's going on. They wouldn't give me any specifics on it."
Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Comox on Vancouver Island is Canada's biggest radar installation. CFB Comox is easily capable of tracking the US formations coming up from the south. When asked for a response to Stewart's statement, the base information officer at CFB Comox replied tersely that: "No military operation is taking place." Stewart later told the Vancouver Courier that his information had come directly from Comox.
By the summer of 2001, pictures of contrails were being circulated by the Associated Press and the word "chemtrails" could be overheard in coffee shop conversations across the continent'It's a Hoax'
In an April 20, 2001, letter to a US senator, Col. Walter Washbaugh, chief of the Congressional Inquiry Division for the Secretary of the Air Force in Washington, DC, called chemtrails "a hoax." Washbaugh blamed the increased number of contrails on "significant civil aviation growth in the past decade."
He is right on that score. A National Science Foundation study has found that in certain heavily trafficked corridors, artificial cloud cover has increased by as much as 20 percent.
Colonel Washbaugh ascribed widely reported grid patterns to overlapping aircraft flying north-south, east-west airways. The only thing wrong with this explanation, a Texas air traffic controller told me, is that US airways do not run north-south.
The colonel told the senator: "The Air Force is not conducting any weather modification and has no plans to do so in the future." In fact, the Pentagon has long been interested in using weather as a weapon of war. Attempts to steer hurricanes by spraying heat-robbing chemicals in their paths date from the 1950s. The recipe for creating "cirrus shields" was outlined in a 1996 US Air Force study subtitled "Owning the Weather by 2025." The report explained how "weather force specialists" were dispersing chemicals behind high-flying tanker aircraft in a process called "aerial obscuration."
Official denials reached new altitudes of absurdity when another colonel claimed: "The US Air Force (USAF) does not conduct spraying operations over populated areas." Apparently the colonel had forgotten how USAF air tankers dispensed thousands of tons of "Agent Orange" defoliants over the land and people of Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the Internet was abuzz with chemtrail conspiracy theories ranging from aliens leaving messages in the sky to government agencies dumping mind-control chemicals on an unsuspecting populace. The only problem was none of the theories were plausible.The Welsbach Patent
In 1994, the Hughes aerospace company was issued a remarkable patent. The Welsbach patent "for Reduction of Global Warming" proposed countering global warming by dispensing microscopic particles of aluminum oxide and other reflective materials into the upper atmosphere. This "sky shield" would reflect one or two percent of incoming sunlight. The patent suggested that tiny metal flakes could be "added to the fuel of jet airliners, so that the particles would be emitted from the jet engine exhaust while the airliner was at its cruising altitude."
Computer simulations by Ken Caldeira at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) calculated that employing Welsbach's chemical-sunscreen technology could stop warming over 85 percent of the planet, despite an anticipated doubling of atmospheric carbon within the next 50 years. LLNL estimated the cost of creating thisso-called Sky Shield at $1 billion dollars a year - a cheap fix to avoid threatening the massive profits of the oil industry.
At the 1998 International Seminar on Planetary Emergencies, Edward Teller, the "Father of the H-bomb," presented his Next Big Idea. Teller called for spreading reflective chemicals over the Earth to act like a mirror-shade. If it was impossible to protect the entire planet, these chemical sky shields could, at least, be extended to cover allies who secretly agreed to allow this unprecedented geo-engineering experiment to be carried out over their territory.
In the July-August 1998 Science and Technology Review, Teller argued that the Sky Shield offered a more "realistic" option for addressing global warming than drastic cutbacks in CO2 emissions.
When asked if the technology was being pursued, Teller replied: "To my knowledge the answer is negative.... My recommendation was a tentative one depending on further evidence whether expecting global warming is realistic."
In fact, the technology already exists. In 1975, the US Navy patented a device for producing "a powder contrail having maximum radiation-scattering ability." The powder contained a mixture of 0.3 micron-sized titanium dioxide pigment particles coated with 0.007 micron hydrophobic colloidal silica and 4.5 micron particles of silica gel. The purpose of the apparatus was "to generate contrails or reflective screens for any desired purpose."
The Welsbach Patent proposed using "very fine, talcum-like" powder of 10 to 100 micron-sized aluminum oxide to produce a "pure white plume" in the sky.
In a May 2000 draft report submitted to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an expert panel chosen from among 3,000 atmospheric scientists, concluded that Teller's scheme might work. But the IPCC warned against unpredictable upsets of the atmosphere. The panel also warned against angry populaces reacting to "the associated whitening of the visual appearance of the sky."
Caldeira was so concerned that he went public. Deflecting sunlight would further cool the stratosphere, he warned, and this could intensify icy clouds of ozone-gobbling CFCs that could destroy the ozone layer - the Earth's already damaged solar radiation shield.
Was Teller's Sky Shield experiment already underway? During his interview with WMWV reporters, Deep Sky hinted that it was. Were the tankers observed on ATC radars involved in climate modification? Our FAA source hesitated before responding: "That approximates what I was told." Similar military activities were ongoing in other regions, he stated.Chemtrails and Health Problems
The Internet buzzes with conspiracy theories about chemtrails being used as part of a secret government biological experiment. But after more than three years of intense investigation, I have found no proof that chemtrails constitute a deliberate biological attack. (To be effective, bio-attacks must conducted close to the ground and never in daylight, in order to avoid ultraviolet sterilization of toxins.)
In the spring of 1998, rain falling through heavy chemtrails over Espanola, Ontario was found to contain concentrations of aluminum particles seven times higher than permitted by Canadian health safety laws. Provincial health officials ordered tests after residents began complaining about severe headaches, chronic joint pain, dizziness, sudden extreme fatigue, acute asthma attacks and feverless "flu-like" symptoms. The results of the test were not released.
The reports of illness all came from residents inside a 50-square-mile area who complained that they had been subjected to "months of spraying" by photo-identified US Air Force tanker planes. The USAF denied the intrusions.
On November 18, 1998, Canadian Opposition Party Defense Critic Gordon Earle petitioned Parliament on behalf of the people of Espanola. Speaking on behalf of Canada's New Democratic Party, Earle stated:
"Over 500 residents of the Espanola area have signed a petition raising concern over possible government involvement in what appears to be aircraft emitting visible aerosols. They have found high traces of aluminum and quartz in particulate and rainwater samples. These concerns combined with associated respiratory ailments have led these Canadians to take action and seek clear answers from this government. The petitioners call upon Parliament to repeal any law that would permit the dispersal of military chaff or of any cloud-seeding substance whatsoever by domestic or foreign military aircraft without the informed consent of the citizens of Canada thus affected."
A Harvard School of Public Health team determined that particulates with a diameter less than 10 microns (one-tenth the thickness of a human hair) pose a serious threat to public health. On April 21, 2001, the New York Times warned: "These microscopic motes are able to infiltrate the tiniest compartments in the lungs and pass readily into the bloodstream, and have been most strongly tied to illness and early death, particularly in people who are already susceptible to respiratory problems."
On December 14, 2000, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that inhaling particulate matter of a size 10 microns or smaller leads to "a 5 percent increased death rate within 24 hours." Teller's sunscreen calls for spraying 10 million tons of talcum-fine reflective particulates of 10 to 100 micron sizes.Congress Addresses Chemtrails
On October 2, 2001, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced the "Space Preservation Act of 2001" (HR 2977), which called for the elimination of "exotic weaponry" from space. Among the weapons to be banned were weather-modifying weapons such as HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) and chemtrails. Though HR 3616 was later amended to remove the section that would have banned chemtrails, the original bill acknowledging the existence of chemtrail technology remains on the pages of the Congressional Record.
With "chemtrails" now officially admitted by the US government, an even bigger trial is set to begin in the court of public opinion.
An earlier version of this report appeared in the October-November 2001 issue of Nexus Magazine [PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. www.nexusmagazine.com].Edited reprint. Not available for distribution.
Chemtrails Go Global
Sightings of oddly lingering plumes sometimes resembling rocket trails are not confined to North American skies.
While on leave in Italy in the summer of 1999, the US Navy's Kitty Chastain sat on her hotel balcony and watched aerial grids being laid all day just offshore over the Bay of Naples.
In Spain, on April 27, 2000, American tourist John Hendricks dashed off a quick email from El Café de Internet: "Were we surprised to see that the chemtrails are as bad here as they are anywhere, both in Mallorca and in Barcelona."
"Add Sweden to the list," a Swedish resident wrote after spotting eight to 10 parallel contrails. "I know the commercial routes, and we have a bunch of them, but not where these trails were."
Chemtrail activity has been reported in at least 14 allied nations including Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Scotland, Sweden and the United States.
Chemtrail photos from France, Australia, Scotland and Germany may be viewed on the author's website [www3.bc.sympatico.ca/Willthomas].Another Scary Scenario
According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co., the only way to form artificial clouds in warm dry air is to introduce enough particulates into the atmosphere to attract and accrete all available moisture into visible vapor. If repeated often enough, the resulting rainless haze can lead to drought.
Patrick Minnis, an atmospheric researcher with California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES) and ardent chemtrails critic at NASA's Langley Research Center, reports that cirrus cloud cover over the US is up 5 percent overall because particulates in engine exhaust are acting as cloud-forming nuclei. As the number of flights currently exceeds 15 million annually worldwide, artificial clouds will intensify as air travel continues to climb.
Perhaps the appearance of chemtrails is a "sign from on high" that our atmosphere has become dangerously burdened with pollutants.Copyright Earth Island Journal
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004
NEAR-DEATH FROM THE SKIES
By Asante Riverwind and Jean Eisenhower
Jean: Monday morning two weeks ago, I walked outside with a mug of tea to enjoy what I thought might be the year's first beautiful, clearly-spring morning in the desert. The Towhees had just returned, and I was anticipating the return of the Phoebes and Hummingbirds. As I stepped out the door, I heard a plane close overhead and saw six trails in the sky, all having been made shortly before, all heading eastward, three in the distance reaching over the north end of the Chiricahua mountains, and three more nearer, all in progress. Five were straight lines and parallel. The sixth and nearest plane was, at that very moment, roaring directly over our house (far lower than the Air Force admits they do), emitting a fat, snowy plume that hung in the air only a moment before I could see it precipitating something that looked like a series of up-side-down mushroom clouds as the plane arced gracefully northeast, then tilted back southward, making an S in the sky -- an unusual sight.
Asante: Taking my morning walk around the land, I heard crashing in my art studio tipi and dashed over to find two large hounds, one white and muscular, the other reddish and slightly smaller, exiting my art studio tipi after having wreaked havoc within. Fortunately all the paintings and sculpture pieces in various stages of completion were not harmed, but one of the hounds had made a large rip in the tipi‚s southern side. Metis, my dog-wolf friend, fiercely chased them off. Afterward, Jean called various neighbors to find where these "hounds from hell" had come from, but no one in the area had ever seen them before.
To make everything just a little more strange, just before I heard the crash, six ravens had flown overhead, heading west.
J: We'd had a sunset conversation interrupted the evening before by, maybe, the same six ravens flying directly over our heads, low and cawing in a manner we thought portentous. So the six planes, six ravens, and hounds from hell all happening at once that morning was quite amazing. Ravens have long been considered a sign of warning by many peoples, from our ancestral Celts to many indigenous peoples of this continent. They were a powerful sign we may have done better to heed.
As the last plane was about to disappear behind the Chiricahuas, I urged Asante to photograph the contrails -- or "chemtrails."
Months ago, I'd thought the idea of chemtrails was probably nothing but another "conspiracy theory," and Asante admitted that he too had first thought it a far-fetched claim. But I began to notice that sometimes a dozen parallel lines would appear, spread, and remain in the sky for many hours, on days when commercial jets and military jets didn't leave any contrails at all. When I finally saw the strange, broken "dash" patterns they sometimes emitted, I had to agree that jet engines could probably not be turned off and on like that, so it seemed that something was probably being emitted.
I‚d also seen a mainstream news story a decade ago, about someone studying normal contrails and how they caused unnatural clouds that were probably affecting our weather. With growing concern over global warming, it seemed reasonable that our government might be experimenting with contrails to see if indeed they could create more cloud cover and perhaps reverse or mitigate the effects of the thinning ozone layer. I finally accepted that this was what we were seeing in the sky, even though the government has been denying it hotly.
Asante's research turned up other speculations that it is not just weather tampering going on up there, but maybe even germ warfare experiments. This I had a hard time accepting. People were writing on the internet about biological agents like bacterium and viruses being "captured" in the air behind chemtrail planes, but I didn't know how to verify that information. Tampering with the weather seemed enough to explain them.
Whatever they were, we were interested, and thought these particular ones, so low over our house, would make a great photograph. Since Asante has been harassed by the government for years, and his former partner and land-mate Karen Coulter discovered her well had been poisoned last year with mercury (most certainly intentionally), it made sense to document strange happenings. Asante took a half-dozen photos, showing the precipitation over the house from different angles. This one shows the chemtrail's early mushroom form most clearly, and we have others that show its strange spreading pattern and that it fell directly over the house.
A: About three years ago, while living on 40 acres in eastern Oregon, I'd begun to notice repeated patterns of parallel and intersecting contrails which criss-crossed the skies from horizon to horizon and, unlike familiar contrails, seemed to last most of a day. Often these patterns occured on sunny, clear, blue-sky days, then spread outwards, merged, and turned much of the sky into a gray haze -- unless high winds moved them farther off into the mountains, away from the area‚s rural residences. As part of my work, I hiked extensively throughout eastern and central Oregon's forests, spending most of my time outdoors. I also traveled throughout the Northwest, and took winter forays to the Southwest and Mexico. Throughout these travels I'd notice contrails, more prevalent on sunny days, which usually became hazy whenever high winds did not disperse the trails.
I'd heard various reports of "chemtrails," and couldn't deny what my eyes were so often seeing. I was also familiar with past government experiments on US military personnel and other citizens which occurred from 1948 to 1968, which became the subject of intense public Congressional hearings in the 1970s. Doing research in the late 1980s, I'd read some of the files on these hearings, including Senator Edward Kennedy's questioning various generals under whose command these biological experiments occurred. I knew it was possible that the US military might again experiment on US citizens and others across the world -- they'd done so in the past, and though their experiments had resulted in several well-documented deaths, only the biological portions of the experiments were officially discontinued. Indeed, one general was quoted in the hearings as stating, "The problem with biological agents was that they did not stay with their target populations. What we needed was a chemical agent which would mimic biological viruses." Speculation among some activists had grown since those hearings, about whether the government was still experimenting on inner-city US populations with chemical agents of this type, but this remained unproven speculation.
In 2002, a friend gave me a copy of the summer issue of the Earth Island Journal, which contained an article entitled "Stolen Skies: The Chemtrail Mystery" by William Thomas. The article had enough information to pique my curiosity about what was actually occurring in our skies. I felt that, as co-director of a biodiversity project which advocated on behalf of natural ecosystems, wildlife species, and native biodiversity, it would be negligent of me not to look into what was potentially being spread across the skies only to fall upon living organisms everywhere. I was no stranger to taking on the federal government, exposing its frequent tangle of misinformation and often outright lies, and litigating successfully against them in federal court. At this point the project I co-founded and co-directed had won several lawsuits against the federal government, protecting thousands of acres of forests while setting environmentally beneficial legal precedent. I began photo-documenting what I was seeing, and making occasional forays, winnowing through the misinformation and disinformation littering the internet. I also initiated communication on this subject with several other environmental organizations, broaching the idea of a lawsuit against the US military for failure to disclose to the public and Congress what it was conducting in the skies, and for failing to undergo a legal process on this apparent program as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
The day after my email and phone conversations on this subject, a US military helicopter flew to my remote land and hovered for a short while above my office tipi. When I emerged, the helicopter took off, spiraling away in expanding loops, as if surveying the area. Unfortunately, I was out of film to document the dramatic event. I made a series of calls to see if anyone knew what they were up too, and to check on regulations concerning invasions of privacy. I spoke with the FAA, a neighbor, and local sheriff, but no one had any explanation for what the military was doing flying over my land, much less hovering over my tipi.
I continued to read the research and speculative articles, and finally concluded that to really address this issue would require a significant expenditure of funds and time which I just did not have available -- funds for extensive lab tests of fallout samples, to monitor the planes themselves -- Where were they coming from? How were they refueled and restocked? Who flew them? Would it be possible to charter a jet to fly alongside them and photo-document what they were doing? -- all things which required a bigger budget and better connections than I had. I already had my hands full with more than full-time work advocating for the wild ones of eastern Oregon. My research became little more than occasional photographing of chemtrails, and the preparations for writing the article which would later appear in the Wildcat paper. With my move to Arizona, and focusing more on my art, efforts towards chemtrails had been shuffled by the wayside for now. (See the accompanying article "Chemtrails? What Is happening In Our Skies?" first published in the 2003 issue of the Pacific Mountain Wildcat.)
Jean and I talked about staying inside all day, but I'd been waiting for a day to work outside, and waiting for a stretch of time to paint in the tipi studio. Rain was coming on the 'morrow, which usually arrives with strong winds from the southwest, necessitating the mending of the large diagonal rip in the south side of the tipi or the entire studio would be at risk of severe damage. Yet, we could also see clearly that our home and land was about to be hit by the descending plumes from the contrails overhead. Staying outside in this fallout -- if the research I'd read was to be believed -- posed very serious potential health risks. Caught in this dilemma, intuition lost out to necessity, as it so often does in our culture: the tipi had to be repaired before the wind and rains arrived. I'd also been in the midst of chemtrails before, documenting them on my land in Oregon, and never felt any ill effect. So I rationalized away the danger, and proved to be very dangerously wrong. By evening I had begun to develop what would soon become a piercing headache, heralding the onset of an illness which would put me in a severe crisis for most of a week.
J: One thing especially bothered me, though, and that was the strange S-shape of the last chemtrail. I'd never seen anything but straight lines before, or dash patterns. That this "S" just happened to curve directly over our home, was noticeably lower in elevation than usual, and then curved away made me wonder if it was targeting us -- especially considering Karen's experience. The S might have been an attempt to spare our neighbors and not look as suspicious as it would if it had been a simple curve with its apex at our house. The plane's second curve took it back into line with the other planes, just beyond the last home on our lane.
By Tuesday night, Asante had very little strength, wrapped himself in a blanket, and apologized that he couldn't do anything as he "hurt all over." I had mild headaches and body aches, slight dizziness and lethargy, and would have something like menopausal "hot flashes" all week, only they came hourly, a frequency I'd never experienced since they'd begun ten years ago, and I'd thought my hot flashes had ended a couple years ago. Since I'd been indoors most of the week, it made sense that my symptoms were mild compared to Asante's. While mild, though, I still suffer headaches, "weird" feelings in my head, and strange hot flashes.
Wednesday, he slept most of the day, clutching blankets around him, shivering against the "cold." He answered my questions with faint, single words, like: "Hurt."
A: My body was wracked with searing, shooting pains, piercing my head, which felt like a spear piercing my brain and exiting through my liver. Fevers raged, Jean told me, but I could not get warm, no matter how many blankets I wore. Much of the next two days I whirled in this state, in a swirling realm of darkness, fever visions, and unconsciousness.
J: By Thursday, Asante came to consciousness for only brief moments about once an hour, often complaining that his throat hurt too badly to speak. I wondered, if he got worse, whether he‚d want me to take him to a hospital or let him take his chances with death. The subject seemed dangerous to broach, possibly introducing a negative idea that could make the difference between life and death.
I helped him drink water and herbal teas, helped him walk when he needed to get up, and tried to attend to his fever, to protect him from what I've always thought was the danger of brain damage; but strangely, while his body felt extremely hot, his head always remained a normal temperature -- it seemed; we didn't have a thermometer in the house.
On Thursday night, I drew three Tarot cards to ask for help in understanding what was wrong. The left card depicted a mighty warrior; the right card was Pan -- two personas Asante carries through this world. The center card depicted a person nursing wounds.
Yeah, but what can I do about it? I asked, and began to lay down another card for more specific instructions. The card was Death. This card doesn't always mean literal death, I know, but usually a metaphoric birth that requires the death of something else metaphoric. Still, the drawing was worrisome, and the motion of my hand toward the cloth and the card slowly unbending and showing its image of the hooded figure with a black, empty space where a face should be, played over and over like an infinite loop I was caught in, as the room spun and faded away, until I consciously stopped it. I was beginning to feel that this was a major event in my life.
Asante opened his eyes, and said something about maybe really dying. I sat beside him, and spoke of his spiritual resources and protection.
I'd laid the Death card up-side-down, but it then occurred to me to bury it in the deck and draw another card to help me respond to our challenge. The card I laid before me was the High Priestess. The message seemed to be for me to draw something more powerful through me than I'd ever been called on to draw before.
I saged the room lightly, so as not to hurt his throat, then engaged in various rituals to move the evil away, out the door, and finally cast it to the new moon with a command to seek its own healing.
He woke again, barely opened his eyes, and whispered, "I don't know if I can beat this." I asked him what he wanted, and he said he didn't want them to determine his death.
I had used my rattle earlier, and now continued until my arms were weary. I kept at it, not with discipline but compelled by the powerful positive energies I could feel stirred up. I had to take rests, but returned to rattling each time he cried out in his fevered sleep.
For the next twenty-four hours whenever he awoke, he would cry out and sometimes describe his headache as a spear that had pierced his head. I was getting visions of something like shards of glass in him, and to a much lesser extent, in me also. Later he'd tell me he saw the same things too, but didn't have the energy to speak it all.
"Can you tell me how you feel?" I asked when he seemed to be waking from bad dreams.
"Rocks," he whispered.
"Rocks?" I wondered. Later he'd "explain" that he "felt like rocks." Many strange descriptions he would give when he could speak more.
A: Rocks, tangled visions of interlaced webs of roots woven amongst endless rocks and boulders enmeshed in dirt just below the surface of the land. In fever "dreams" I was attempting to vision what the source of this sickness was, where it lay within me, so I could do my usual visualizations and, by focusing energy much like fire, burn it out of my body. But my body felt like a tangled weave of rocks and roots, interlaced with tendrils of mycelium sprawling everywhere within me. I saw my cells as wilting, closing up, trying to seal themselves off from what felt like chemical toxins which seemed to be spreading everywhere through me on these tiny tendril-like interwoven webs -- like mycelium.
Somewhere during the second day of these fever-wracked pains, I remember telling Jean that I did not know if I would make it through this. Everything I tried, which usually worked in the past -- resting, storing up energy, and then focusing it to burn out the sickness, augmented by various herbal medicines (which I was also taking as teas) -- seemed incapable of working now.
Despite resting for days, I had no energy to focus on healing, the sickness appeared to be eating up all my strength, leaving me weak, feverish and flat -- defeated. Jean intensified her efforts, her presence with me became more tangible, and I willed myself to fight this, to not let whatever this was have its way with my life. I hadn't been able to eat anything for over two days, but on the dawn of that Friday I felt I had to try, that I needed to refuel my depleted body to restore some strength to fight this, whatever it was. I managed to get a bird-like helping of bland oatmeal down, and soon fell exhausted into sleep again. Later I tried some more, and gradually managed to eat two very small portions of food. Jean and I continued trancing, she often accompanying my visioning attempts by rattling and occasional chanting. I too tried to chant a bit, and even tried to sing, but my raspy voice was shot, and words were painful to speak with my very sore upper throat. My throat and lungs felt ripped, as if they‚d been pierced and embedded with countless minute shards and sharp fibers.
Finally it appeared that, whatever the toxins were, they were beginning to move through and out of me. Coughing up bloody mucous, I felt hope move into a growing certainty that I would emerge through this. My urine was also bloody, and Jean first said the precipitate looked like melted orange sherbet. I thought it looked like a bloody fibrous sediment -- pink fiberglass insulation mixed with bubbles, or pink cotton candy.
J: When I looked at it through a ten-power lens, it looked like tiny, baby-pink bubbles or globules clustered around short, straight needles -- congruent with our images of shards.
A: Later Friday I moved from the couch, which had become my daytime world, to a chair and tried trancing into this yet again. I visioned a series of ancient selves -- myself in other times, other lives. I pictured these selves as ancient wise healers -- who'd been through times like this before, and I sought their help in healing.
After five days of cold weather, with blustery winds mixed with rain and snow, Saturday dawned with the first sun we'd had since the Monday of the chemtrails. I felt my health returning.
J: But as we stood outside, enjoying the new warmth and fresh air, we again saw chemtrails off in the distance. Then a plane with no trail behind it suddenly dumped a huge amount of billowing white something over the Chiricahuas (in our watershed) and continued on with a normal, thin chemtrail following. It was distressing, and we talked of leaving the country.
A: I was humbled having endured a sickness I could not burn away with my usual, internal fire energy. My body still felt "poisoned," and I intently began efforts to regain my appetite, refuel by body, and recover my previous health and fire. A package containing powerful hebal medicines had arrived, sent by a healer friend. I began taking these tonics and herbs to aid my recovery.
Almost two weeks later, I am still in the midst of these efforts, still recovering, coughing still wracking my body, and still feeling a mite-bit off, but each day seems to bring more strength and promise of beating this illness -- whether chemtrail-induced or from other sources I can only speculate. The timing of its onset, Jean not getting fully sick herself, the toxins seeming to not respond to our herbal medications, all speak to me of chemical poisoning more than bacterial or biological viruses. I keep seeing the descending plumes of the Monday preceding this sickness, and remember the ominous intuitive warnings and feelings I had watching them drift toward our home.
J: The next Monday, a friend called to tell me she'd become strangely ill the night before. I'd told her days ago about the chemtrails and Asante's illness, and we'd wondered who in the neighborhood worked outdoors and might also have been exposed, and could think of no one for certain. Besides, maybe everyone else would be spared because of the way the chemtrail had veered away. Now she called to say that she'd been inside all week, but on the weekend had worked outdoors and on Sunday had eaten a large green salad from her garden. Sunday night she became so ill, crying in pain, that her husband almost took her to the hospital. Her gastrointestinal problems ended when she passed green mucous and blood. She lives at the end of our lane, nearest to where the plane veered back in line with our homes.
A: As I watch the returning nesting birds, going about the ageless rituals of spring anew, I wonder again, What is this which may be falling from our skies? And even more, What are we going to do about it? And, What will it do to us? These questions hang, unanswered over our days.
Asante Riverwind
Life In Balance Foundation:
Chiricahua-Dragoon Conservation Alliance,
Art & Evolution, Jaguar Journal,
Earth & Spirit Gatherings,
Riverwind Arts, Sunflower Scribe Press