Woman says plane vapors make her sick

[Guest guest]

The Associated Press

September 13, 1999

Woman says plane vapors make her sick

COEUR d'ALENE, Idaho

Meg believes that plumes from the back of jet airplanes are

making her sick.

The plumes are called " contrails " - short for condensation trails - and some

people believe they cause flu-like symptoms and worse.

Most officials dismiss the claims.

A worldwide network of people connected by the Internet insist the trails

come from military planes on covert sorties.

The truth is up there, depending on which of a growing number of Internet

sites you dial up, or what night you tune in to nighttime talk radio's

conspiracy king, Art Bell.

On one particularly " heavy spray day " over Plummer in June, said

she watched particulate matter fall out of the clouds, " like the black stuff

in a diesel truck stopped at an intersection.

" I experienced a numb mouth and burning sinuses - in an area that is

generally pollution free, " she said.

Military and most government officials scoff at the contrail conspiracy

theory.

" The Air Force doesn't do anything that emits anything other than a normal

contrail, which is vapor, " said Margaret Gidding, a U.S. Air Force

spokeswoman at the Pentagon.

Most people have seen the puffy white contrails from commercial jets, frozen

water particles released by combustion into the frigid climes of the upper

atmosphere. The trails disappear quickly.

But the contrails in question are said to be much wider than usual and stick

around for hours, filling the sky with tic-tac-toe patterns.

Contrail watchdogs use Oakville, Wash., as a poster child. As chronicled by

the TV show " Unsolved Mysteries, " in 1994 a rain of gelatinous goo fell from

the sky onto the small town. Tests revealed a combination of white blood

cells, two strains of bacteria and bits of coral reef, according to a

transcript of the television show.

Most of the theories link contrails to military planes, often white,

unmarked planes flying below the 18,000-foot altitude where the vapor trails

normally start forming.

This year, Air Force headquarters started getting monthly calls on the

issue, many of them from Washington state, Gidding said. She thinks the

sudden interest stems from publicity on the Internet.

" It's challenging because I empathize with people when they're ill and

looking for the cause, " she says. " But the Air Force is just not what's

causing it. "

Forecasters say contrails are a meteorological phenomenon caused when water

from jet engine exhaust freezes fast without evaporating, typically

below -38 degrees Celsius. Most contrails break up quickly, but sometimes

upper level winds can spread the trails apart, forming a large sheet cloud

that lingers.

People who associate health problems with the trails describe strange

X-shaped clouds - said to aid satellite location of spraying operations -

and checkerboards not produced by commercial jets on parallel flight

patterns.

A Kootenai County resident who gave his name as " " on a popular

contrails Web site in June reported black particles similar to those Meg

had reported. " By the time it was dark, my nose lining was burning

and my mouth was numb. I had a sore throat at bedtime and next morning sore

glands in my neck and fatigue. "

Dr. Leonard Horowitz, an anti-immunization crusader who lives in Sandpoint,

suspects chemtrails in a nationwide outbreak of upper respiratory infections

last winter that didn't respond to antibiotic treatment.

But " it's virtually impossible to link it definitively, " Horowitz

acknowledges.

Health officials in Idaho and Washington say they've received no reports

from concerned citizens of contrail-linked illnesses.

" We're hooked up to Hanford to see if anything happens there, " says

Guillierie, a spokeswoman for the Washington Department of Health. " That's

about as weird as we get. "