It is not common for me to be able to tie together my now more than seven years of writing 750-plus columns for Colorado Politics and another large part of my life, my work in scientific skepticism. For many years, in addition to being a political junkie, I’ve been interested in how people think about such unscientific things as UFOs, Bigfoot, astrology and other pseudo-science. My great mentor in all this was the late great James Randi, a magician-turned-skeptic who helped expose a number of charlatans who take money from people by claiming to be able to talk to dead relatives, douse for water with a bent stick, and other nonsense. I highly recommend you check out the NOVA episode about Mr. Randi and his work. Please, do watch it now, I’ll wait here…

Pseudo-science can be a dangerous thing. Once when Mr. Randi was ill, I filled in for him as the keynote speaker to a conference put on by the departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security, and spoke about fake bomb detectors the then-Iraqi government was buying from a gentleman in England to use at checkpoints (at tens of thousands of dollars each). It would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic, as these “detectors” failed on a number of occasions and people died from truck bombs as a result.

The key to this “detector” was a plastic slot into which a person would slide a cardboard drawing of whatever was being searched for (I’m not kidding) and this plastic housing — with no other internal parts — was in turn connected by a coax cable to a “divining rod,” also known as a dowsing rod, which contained (we got one of them to examine) a circuit board from an air conditioner that was not connected to anything, and a battery that lit up a small light when you turned it “on.” Again, comical if not so tragic, as on one occasion alone, 157 people were killed by a truck bomb at a market, a truck that had successfully “passed” the dowsing rod examination.

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) put on regular conferences for years, for which I served as emcee. We lost a great deal with Mr. Randi’s death in 2020 at the age of 92, and I lost a dear friend and mentor. I’ve continued to be involved in skepticism through the years, but I did not imagine my political columns here would overlap with that work.

That is, until today.

A recent story in CoPo, in my favorite section, the Out West Roundup, noted the Wyoming state legislature is considering a bill dealing with “chemtrails.” Now, if you are like most folks, you may well have never heard of that topic, but to people in the skeptic community, it is well known.

You know those white cloud-like lines that appear behind airliners flying high in the sky? Like most folks, you have likely understood them to be the result of a well-known process. It is really, really cold up at those altitudes, and when a jet engine’s hot exhaust is expelled to the rear, the water vapor in that exhaust hits that cold air and instantaneously freezes into ice crystals. Those very light crystals hang in the air for seconds, minutes, or hours, depending on factors such as winds and wind shear, and especially the humidity up there. If the air is very dry, the trail will disappear very quickly (as you often see a tiny trail behind a moving jet that vanishes almost at once), but if the air is humid, it can take much longer for those trails to dissipate.

About 30 years ago or so, some whacky people started looking up at the condensation trails (their correct name) and started writing articles about how they were not, in fact, the well understood freezing of water vapor, but rather were part of one of a number of fast governmental conspiracies, although the purveyors of such nonsense couldn’t agree on what, exactly, those “chemtrails” were actually doing.

At the JREF we dealt with dozens of media inquiries from reporters unfamiliar with the phenomenon and learned some silly folks thought the trails were the government seeding clouds to make it rain, the most scientific-ish of the theories. Far more common were people thinking the trails were chemical weapons the government was using to, for example: kill crops in regions of the country opposed to the then-current president; to sterilize black people; to sterilize white people; to lower the intelligence of people in particular regions, and so on.

Dear readers, you can see this is nonsense. From a practical matter, how would the government get a bunch of airline pilots (or even military pilots) to agree to such chemical warfare on the American people without anyone ever letting a word slip? Also, think for a moment about when you have seen, in person or on TV, videos of crop dusters. How high do those planes fly to be able to actually spray chemicals onto plants? They fly very, very low, as too high would disperse and lessen the effectiveness. I could go on but just do a web search on chemtrails to see a full spectrum of the nonsense.

Which brings me to Wyoming.

The debate, if you can call it that, in the state legislature there, is about whether “chemtrails” are to poison people, sterilize soil, or even block the Sun from shining. Falling back on the oft-used “government conspiracy” hobbyhorse, one person testified a decrease in “chemtrails” during the government shutdown was “very telling.” Telling indeed, in that during the shutdown, due to air traffic controller shortages, there have been fewer flights! Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one, folks.

After four hours of, well, they call it “testimony” on the subject, the legislature’s Joint Agriculture, State and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee voted to advance the bill, albeit with an amendment that would explicitly exclude cloud seeding as an issue, since, I guess, they like it to rain in Wyoming.

That’s four hours that committee will never get back. There are experts aplenty on “chemtrails,” myself included, who would have been happy to drive up to Cheyenne, or to point to the dozens of debunking videos and publications available. I admit, when I first read the story, I suspected it was April Fools’ Day, and the Wyoming legislature was kidding. Sadly, not so much.

So, dear readers, please do check out the NOVA on Mr. Randi and feel free to poke around the chemtrail world. It’s amazing what people will believe rather than scientifically verified facts. I guess those are just more fun, and that’s a pity. Were I still a Wyoming taxpayer, I’d be more than a little ticked off at this waste of time and money.

Now, don’t get me started on Bigfoot.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.