I’m watching a special on the Discovery Channel about chemtrails. I thought this was squarely in the realm of pure conspiracy-nut insanity. What the hell?!
I have not seen it. You have the actual name of the program so I can look out for it? I’m always up for some happy horseshit.
Turn on the TV. It’s on right now, and boy, is it horseshit. HAPPY horseshit.
Errr…assuming you’re in the CST zone.
…and the show is called Best Evidence: Chemical Contrails.
The US gummint spraying chemicals over residential areas again, are they?
Discovery Channel isn’t a very objective channel, is it? They have a series on hauntings and that one about psychic detectives and they present it as fact. Sceptical opinions is verboten!
Though to their credit, they do have Mythbusters.
Yeah, discovery has a lot of psuedoscience on area 51, ghosts, crop circles, etc.
It has gotten better over the years as they’ve developed more non-stupid content. A lot of the really stupid stuff got pushed onto The Learning Channel, which is the worst misnaming of a channel in the history of television.
That’s why it’s not called the Learning Facts Channel. You’re still learning…stuff.
Discovery channel schedule:
Monday: Weapons?
Tuesday: Dirty Jobs
Wednesday: Mythbusters and other engineering shows
Thursday: Paranormal and medical
Friday: Outdoors
Mostly I’ve Discovered that their programming sucks. Even *Mythbusters *has been pretty stupid lately.
Dirty Jobs is awesome though. And it all works out: If every night was great, I would have more TV than I want to watch.
From what I can tell, unlike Discovery, the National Geographic Channel has maintained consistently high standards and hasn’t slipped into pseudoscience.
Okay, here is where whatever factual reputation I have on this board might seem to get shot in the foot.
I have seen a suspicious chemtrail-type thing once. I tried to get the local news to go out and get some footage, but they wouldn’t take me seriously (it was right over their head, but they wouldn’t come out and even look at it).
“Contrails” is short for “condensation trails,” which are commonly seen behind high-flying jet aircraft. “Chemtrails” is short for “chemical trails,” and used by the conspiracy folks who want to believe that We the People are being sprayed with God-knows-What by the government or someone else with no accountability.
I’ve no opinion on the issue, personally; what I can tell you is what I saw:
About four and a half years ago (it was summer), I stepped out the front door of my residence about 10:00am, and saw a cloudy trail through the sky going from the eastern horizon (my left) to the western horizon (my right).
This was not a normal contrail from a high-flying jet, but was much lower and much wider. In fact, if I held a ruler at arm’s length (which I did), it was about 6 inches wide by comparison. At a point almost directly in front of me, it stopped. The end of the trail was perfectly square and precise. About three ruler-lengths further west, it resumed (again with perfectly square end), went further west for about 1 and 1/2 ruler lengths, then stopped altogether.
I’m not claiming this was a “chemtrail” or anything else; but it obviously wasn’t a condensation trail unless the plane was shifting in and out of dimensional rifts. I didn’t have a camera, but if I had, I would have been convinced that the pictures were photoshopped if I had seen them on the internet.
Staring at something that shouldn’t be there right in front of you in the sky is rather disturbing. I would not believe it if I hadn’t seen it. Whatever was causing that trail certainly looked as if it was being sprayed over downtown, and being turned on and off as the plane flew over.
I don’t have any other explanation. I’m not saying what it was (because I don’t know), but it was the first time that I considered the possibility that those chemtrail kooks might be onto something.
I don’t get it. Of course “They” spray stuff. There’s a reason I’ve never gotten a mosquito bite within the city limits, and it ain’t for want of standing water for breeding grounds. “They” will even tell you when they’re spraying, if you call and ask, but “they” don’t publicize the program much. Where’s the conspiracy?
As for the quality of the shows on TLC/Discovery/History, I suppose we all have our moment when we snap and go, “WTF?” Mine was with their recent show on Freemasonry, where they spent an hour and thirty minutes telling us all the conspiracies that “some say” the Freemasons are part of, and the last 30 minutes saying, “but they’re not”. At no time was anything approaching evidence presented to support either stance. Ridiculous pseudo-reporting. My husband was hoping to have something usable from it for his class on occultism, but we both agreed the only thing it’d be useful for was a journalism class - as an example of what *not *to do if you want to be taken seriously as a journalist.
Just get yourself some orgone generators and you’ll be fine.
This is disappointing news. On the show last week they went after the claim that John Wayne died because he got cancer from radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the soil on the set of one of his movies. They tested props from the movie and soil samples for radioactivity and any elements with a long enough half life to still be detectable. They found that there was no radiation and no isotope traces, so they concluded that it was just a myth and that the Duke probably got cancer from the 3-4 packs of cigarettes he smoked every day.
I was impressed because they took down a conspiracy theory, not to mention the fact that they ran with an episode that didn’t find anything. I get the impression that these uncovering-the-truth-style shows always make some dire speculation about something there that we couldn’t see?! to expertly undermine anything worthwhile they’d done in an episode, but that didn’t happen here.
Are you sure they didn’t dismiss the conspiracy nuts? There was a show they had on around 6:00cst a few months back where the narrator openly ridiculed UFO conspiracists and such. Seems weird that they’d be inconsistent like tha–oh wait. Nevermind :rolleyes: 
The Master spoke about this one 23 years ago, and although he didn’t come out and say that Wayne died because of the exposure, he suggests that others on the set of The Conqueror (1955) may have. Of course, Cecil didn’t have the opportunity to test the props.
But then again, the show’s asserting that because the props and soil aren’t still radioactive therefore radioactivity didn’t cause Wayne’s death might be a bit of a stretch. I’m no nuclear scientist, nor did I see the show, but I’m skeptical that that conclusion can be drawn from that evidence.
(BTW, appropriate that you should bring this up, Khan!)
In terms of conspiracy theories, that sounds like the Aurora, the supposed next-generation spyplane that supposedly uses pulsed detonations for propulsion, although Aurora is supposed to fly at very high altitudes.
IMO one of their best shows is It takes a Thief.
- I’ve learned to keep stuff locked up.
- I’ve also learned that a lot of people aren’t to privy to securing their home, or caring about it either.
It’s not The Learning Channel; it’s TLC. Discovery dropped “The Learning Channel” in favor of TLC in 1998.
The only reason that the chem-trails people get any play is because the idea isn’t that far fetched. They released Zinc cadmium sulfide in cities before.