-Caveat Lector- From http://flash.oregonlive.com/cgi-bin/or_nview.pl?/home1/wire/AP/Stream-Parsed /OREGON_NEWS/o1040_AM_ID--AircraftVapors - Woman says plane vapors make her sick The Associated Press 09/12/99 7:31 PM Eastern COEUR d'ALENE, Idaho (AP) -- Meg Anderson 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, Anderson 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 "George" on a popular contrails Web site in June reported black particles similar to those Meg Anderson 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 Renee Guillierie, a spokeswoman for the Washington Department of Health. "That's about as weird as we get." Questions? Comments? Suggestions? We welcome your feedback. �1999 Oregon Live LLC Copyright 1999 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. -- Dan S DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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