A jet leaves a contrail across the sky.Chances are, that you have seen an airplane high in the sky leaving a contrail. Contrails most commonly form as water vapor from jet exhaust pushes the water content of the surrounding air past the point of saturation leading to the formation of water droplets or ice crystals that hang in the sky forming an artificial cloud. These contrails usually dissipate very quickly. However on occasion the contrails left behind a jet do not dissipate. Instead they hang in the sky overhead, slowly spreading, sometimes taking hours to fully disappear. Some people believe that these long lasting contrails are something much more vile than a normal trail of condensed water vapor. They theorize that instead of water vapor these contrails are made up of some sort of aerosolized chemical, purposefully sprayed out of specially designed jets.

Why you ask, would someone want to spray large areas covertly? Well, if you subscribe to the conspiracy theories,
1966 photo of Project Stormfury personnel.the reasons are many ranging from the reasonably plausible to the incredible. On the easier to believe side of the scale, we have weather control – potentially to try and reverse the effects of global warming. Weather modification is something that does happen on a regular basis round the world when clouds are “seeded” to produce rain, though the effectiveness of this technique has never been proven and is hotly debated. It is also a topic that has been extensively researched by the US government which ran Project Stormfury from the early 60′s to the early 80′s in an attempt to discover a means of weakening hurricanes. The project was canceled after it failed to produce any viable results. Though over ten years past since the last official experimental flight and the projects cancelation in 1983, which may lead some to believe that Project Stormfury did uncover something in those intervening years before its cancelation.

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The Seattle Post-Intellengencer is reporting that the FBI has a new lead in the 37 year old D.B. Cooper hijacking case that raises more questions than it answers. A south west Washington resident’s children found a parachute while playing in a rural field he had recently plowed. The FBI believes the parachute is possibly of the same type used by a passenger identifying himself as Dan Cooper during the hijacking of a 727 in 1971. After receiving $200,000 in ransom money and releasing the jet’s passengers, Cooper instructed the pilot to take off, eventually jumping from the jet’s rear stairway mid-flight, ransom in hand. The recent parachute discovery is within the area where Cooper would have landed. If found to belong to Cooper, this new parachute raises some new issues that add to the theory that Cooper was not killed during his escape as the FBI claim. In 1980 a young boy on a picnic with his family found $5,880 of the ransom money along the Columbia River. Experts agree that because of the money’s shallow depth that it could not have been placed on the shores of the Columbia River any earlier than 1974, three years after the hijacking. The lack of a body at the parachute discovery site and its distance from the spot where the ransom money was discovered makes the possibility that Cooper survived the jump quite plausible if the parachute can be linked to the ones given to him in 1971. I personally think that Cooper made the jump, escaping with the ransom and the cache of money found on the banks of the Columbia was a back-up stash placed by Cooper if he felt he needed to run from where ever he settled. While we may never know what happened to D.B., please feel free to share your own theories in the comments.

Possible D.B. Cooper Chute Investigated [via Phantoms and Monsters]
More about D.B. Cooper @ Wikipedia

Last week it looked like Spirit, one of two remote controlled NASA rovers currently exploring Mars, might not make it out of its winter hibernation. The worst part of this robotic near death experience is that it had nothing to do with technical difficulties on the aging rover. Budget cuts at NASA were to blame. Fortunately, NASA rescinded the letter it sent last week mandating budget cuts that would have abandoned Spirit and greatly reduced Opportunity’s (Spirit’s sister rover) exploration of the red planet. Both rovers have long outlasted their intended lifespan of only a few months, sending back valuable scientific data for 4 years. Gimping the rover program at this point would have been an incredibly stupid move. Especially when considering the cost of sending another rover to Mars (one of the reasons for the budget cut) when you have two healthy robots already in place whose yearly operating budget is fractional in comparison. I would hope that NASA came to this conclusion on its own, but I feel that it is more likely that outcry over the incident from the scientific community and the general public caused NASA to reconsider giving Spirit its walking papers just yet. While the loss of an incredible scientific tool is nothing to scoff about, this incident puts a light on a much larger issue: How the US government allocates it’s citizen’s tax dollars.

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