The truth is up there

If you were addicted to the innovative television show "The X-Files" as I was in the 1990s, then you know that "The truth is out there." You also know that you should "Trust no one."

Week after week starting in 1993, that series followed FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as they investigated the so-called X-File cases, things so bizarre that they could not be talked about publicly. Indeed, it looked like the government was ultimately responsible for half of the strange phenomena that Mulder and Scully tracked down, and was covering up the rest. The show divided its time between the paranormal, the extraterrestrial and the just plain weird.

One thing you learned from that show was that if you embraced the possibility of unconventional thinking such as Mulder did, you would be marginalized, mocked and humiliated. That came with the territory.

Yet Mulder became a cult hero in an America that had grown suspicious of its government, and "The X-Files" helped to make the fledgling Fox Network a commercial success. What we discovered, as Mulder slowly peeled away the levels of secrecy, was that there was a shadow government running things, that the American people and the world were being manipulated and deceived, and that we really did "want to believe."

But that was TV; this is real life. Try talking about vampires, UFOs, dark angels, government conspiracies, or ghosts with your friends down at the corner bar (or in the newsroom for that matter) and they will lock you up with the crazies who still think Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who killed JFK.

But real life does have its mysteries, and they really are worth talking about. They probably don't legitimately include vampires, but they very likely could include UFOs. Dark angels are a matter of speculation, but government conspiracies are a matter of fact.

Which brings us to chemtrails, the mysterious lines in the sky which show up over populated areas - typically on sunny, cloudless days - and exhibit a strange pattern of criss-crossing or parallel lines as jets make pass after pass overhead.

Some people say it's crazy to ask what those lines in the sky represent. The argument from the "my government would not lie to me" crowd is that chemtrails are nothing but contrails, the condensation trail made by the exhaust of jet engines or by the drop in air pressure near the wings of aircraft. Maybe, just maybe that is true - and maybe there are weapons of mass destruction buried under the sand in Iraq. Anything is possible, even the federal government telling the truth.

Of course, don't get me wrong. Contrails - plain old contrails - do exist and have existed for as long as there were high-altitude aircraft to create them. But it does seem to strain credulity to think that the particular vapor trails which seem to dominate over populated areas, and create a variety of geometric patterns, are merely the result of regularly scheduled commercial or military jets.

Last Monday, June 23, for instance, I counted more than 20 vapor trails above the Flathead Valley here in remote Northwest Montana at approximately noontime. At least 12 of those were parallel lines traveling from east to west in the southern sky, another six or so were parallel lines traveling east to west in the northern sky, one was an east to west line directly overhead, and the rest were intersecting lines traveling north to south at about a 90 degree angle from the others.

Am I really supposed to believe that the Flathead Valley suddenly became an air traffic hub for east-west traffic? Maybe so. But how many planes are flying to and from Spokane and Seattle each hour? Twelve? Do they really all fly over the Flathead? Hmmm. Maybe. But then why do similar lines appear over Missoula? Just how many planes are going to Spokane anyway?

A similar assemblage of trails appeared on Wednesday, June 25, although earlier in the day at around 9 a.m. except that almost all of the 20 or so lines that morning were grouped in a V structure that had its point in the west and spread out across the sky toward the east. Apparently the jets that travel to and from Seattle and Spokane on Wednesdays follow a different route than those on Mondays.

Both days were clear and sunny in the morning, until the trails appeared in the sky. Rather than dissipate, the trails spread out so that by early afternoon a large portion of the sky was covered with cirrus-like cloud formations.

Most people probably did not notice the trails in the sky on either day, and they probably didn't notice that on Tuesday, June 24, a slightly cloudy day, there were no vapor trails in the sky at all. Apparently, air traffic between the East Coast and Spokane and Seattle comes to a halt on Tuesdays, or maybe just on cloudy days. That's interesting, isn't it?

Now, I really don't know whether these vapor trails are simply contrails or whether they are so-called chemtrails, an intentionally distributed chemical spray whose purpose is unknown. But I do think they are evidence in plain sight of some kind of operation which goes well beyond standard air traffic in its scope.

Here are some of the reasons why:

- Chemtrails as a phenomenon were unreported before the early to mid-1990s. Coincidentally, this was virtually contemporaneous with the debut of "The X-Files," but perhaps more ominously it was just a year or two after a 1992 National Academy of Science study entitled "Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming," wherein it was proposed that airborne technologies could be used to "mitigate" global warming.

Even if you lived in an area near airports or military bases, as I did, in the 1960s and '70s, you never saw any sign of long-lasting contrails, or geometric patterns in the sky, the way you do today. Sure, there were jets overhead, and when we kids saw them leaving their cloud behind we followed them closely with boyish enthusiasm, thinking we too would someday be pilots making our mark on the sky - but because we followed them closely we also saw that the vapor trail behind an ordinary jet tends to disappear quickly, often within a minute or two. Chemtrail formations of the type we know today simply didn't exist in those days.

It's also easy to confirm for yourself that quite often the trails in the sky are made by one or two aircraft traveling back and forth. You can do this by actually paying attention, with or without binoculars, and seeing how jets will swoop above the valley leaving behind their trail, then shut off the trail when it gets over the mountains, make a wide turn and return on a parallel course, with the trail mysteriously resuming. If these contrails are just a naturally occurring result of jet flight at a certain altitude, how is it that the trails can start and stop on command? And why exactly would someone spend thousands of dollars on jet fuel to play tic-tac-toe at 25,000 feet?

I don't pretend to have the answers; I'm just willing to ask the questions, to keep my mind open. In the spirit of the quote widely attributed to Herbert Spencer, "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation."

It seems like too many people either haven't even noticed anything going on above their own noses, or they haven't bothered to ask any questions about what they are seeing. Perhaps the answers would just be too disturbing.

Are chemtrails a dangerous plot by the government? I don't know. Are they a beneficent plot to save us from global warming? I don't know. But I do know one thing - the truth is up there somewhere, and there's no Fox Mulder to help find out what it is. This time, it's up to us.

. Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com