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Other Maricopa residents have even taken to giving the so-called chemtrails nicknames in hurricane-esque fashion, like a self-styled “conspiracy theorist” who posted a series of images tagged in Maricopa on X, then Twitter, offering names like “The Phoenix,” “Basket Weaving” and “The Drunken Chemtrail.” Seedy business One devout believer in chemtrail theory is Marcy Rosemond, a 52-year-old barista from Santa Rosa Crossing. Her question is this: “What exactly are we breathing in?” Growing up in the 1970s near McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash., Rosemond’s father was an airplane mechanic. She was raised around planes and believes she’s no stranger to how they function. “In my childhood, I never saw multiple planes flying leaving trails at the same time,” she said. “That led me to seriously question if cloud seeding is really taking place, what exactly are the chemicals used and long-term effects of breathing the air.” Unlike chemtrails, cloud seeding is very real. It’s the process of launching silver iodide
fourth “strongly believe the government uses chemicals to control the population.” That means Maricopa residents believe in the conspiracy theory at rates more than triple the national average, according to Statista/ YouGov polling released in February. The nonbelievers laugh off chemtrail theory as a fringe movement. Rancho Mirage resident Brandon Ash conflated two conspiracy theories when he quipped in April, “Thankfully, my 5G service repelled the chemtrails, just like the salesman told me.” But 1 in 4 Maricopans is something more than fringe. Like another Rancho Mirage resident, Danny Martinez, who was driving through Komatke, near Laveen, when he noticed, “There sure are a lot of chemtrails today.” He called them “weather altering.” A Maricopa resident who only identified himself as Jeff last year became a contributor on the website ChemtrailsExposed.com, where he shared his findings after using a 120,000-lumen light near John Wayne Parkway and Honeycutt Road to see “flakes like a snowstorm” in the beam near suspected chemtrail spraying, in his words.
spraying he saw as “heavy.” “I walked out my front door at about 6:50 a.m. and saw lines and a huge X thing in the sky,” he recalled of the morning of March 31. “This day, the entire state was hit extremely hard. The debunkers tell me it’s normal and has to do with weather conditions…Yeah, right.” Choosing to believe It started with a 1996 Air Force research paper: “Owning the weather in 2025,” which came just after London tested more than 750 mock chemical warfare attacks on the public during the Cold War. Researchers found the chemicals used could be cancerous. The research paper’s titular year seemed a far-off, almost futuristic date at the time. More of a concept than a leaf on the calendar, like when George Orwell penned 1984 in 1949. But now it’s not even half a year away, and chemtrails “are one of the most popular conspiracy theories,” CNN declared just four months ago. An unscientific InMaricopa survey of 680 local residents in May found more than half of people think it’s possible the chemtrails theory is true or partially true, while more than one-
Marcy Rosemond, a 52-year-old barista from Santa Rosa Crossing, spots chemtrails in the sky at Copper Sky Regional Park.
Sky chemical romance Chemtrails conspiracy theory took off in Maricopa, where it’s surprisingly mainstream BY ELIAS WEISS
Maricopa’s Pediatric Dental Specialist
HILE RAPID development during the housing bubble kept eyes earthbound, Shawn Brian’s gaze wandered skyward. In 2006, he lived on Rancho El Dorado’s Bishop Drive. MARICOPA’S It was that year, less than six months after YouTube.com launched, when he uploaded the first video to his channel titled “Chemtrails over Arizona.” It was one of a dozen videos filmed in Maricopa that have garnered more than 200,000 views. Fashionably late to adopt his 9/11 conspiracy theories, Brian really was ahead of his time with this one. According to records from YouTube — now the second-most visited website in the world — his was the first video mentioning the word “chemtrails” ever uploaded to the site from America. A previous video referencing chemtrails was published a few weeks earlier by a user in Italy. W
The sky is falling People who endorse the chemtrails theory believe the government or other groups endorsed by the government engage in secret aerial spraying of toxic chemicals for purposes like population control, brainwashing or weather manipulation. They point to visible, linear plumes in the sky, similar to contrails, as evidence. The thick white lines that protract across the sky are actually trails of water vapor that con- dense and freeze around the exhaust from an aircraft, according to the University Corpora- tion for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Contrails look different depending on tempera- ture and humidity. “It just seems silly,” said David Keith, a geoengineering researcher at Harvard University who has publicly debunked chemtrail theory for more than a decade. “I haven’t seen a single piece of evidence suggesting there’s anything real here. I don’t believe there is one person who really works as a normal scientist who thinks that.”
Still, the theory has gained traction in recent years, buoyed by the harangues of respected politicians and podcasters, and normalized by the references that seep into popular culture, like Lana Del Rey’s 2021 album Chemtrails over the Country Club . It’s a global phenomenon and its influence, naturally, is no less itinerant than the aircraft upon which the theory is based. But its roots in Maricopa are conspicuous and undeniable. The Global Chemtrail Report Center in September last year published a map identifying 107 locations with “known chemtrail activity” around the globe. It’s a new resource for subscribers to the theory that was accessed more than 190,000 times by June 10. One of the pins on the map is in Maricopa, near Murphy and Steen Roads. It’s one of two pins in Arizona; the other is in Kingman. Brian, a 48-year-old heavy metal musician, has submitted his Maricopa findings to the Global Chemtrail Report Center, describing the
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InMaricopa.com | July 2024
July 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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