An Instagram compilation, published in late June, pans across beautiful blue skies and pretty, fluffy little clouds – just like how the sky used to look like when we were children. The cause of such idyllic vistas? Each clip in the montage starts with the camera resting on a bucket on the ground, sometimes showing steam gently rising from it, or sometimes with a diffuser spraying light mists several inches high. This is the work of the chemtrail busters at VinegarIT, and those buckets of gentle, steaming mists contain warm vinegar – which conspiracy theory activists have come to believe can clear the skies of suspicious water vapour.
VinegarIT posted the Reel with a range of indicative hashtags: #whitevinegar #geoengineeredweather #geoengineering #chemtrails #chemtrailawareness #chemtrailspraying #chemtrailclouds #stopsprayingourskies #wedonotconsent #geoengineering (a second time) #weathermanipulation – and superimposed over the video is the text “Video from Vinegar Blue Sky Telegram group”.
Never one to turn down the opportunity to peek inside conspiracy circles, I took the group up on their Telegram invitation, becoming one of their 3,693 subscribers. The group acts as a clearing house for advice on how to simmer white wine vinegar to dispel chemtrails, DIY instructions on making your own vinegar, and a surprising number of Pepe the Frog memes (1. Small Pepe, ‘Do we have to do the vinegar today?’, large Pepe, ‘You want sunshine with that ice-cream don’t you?’ 2. [watching a sunrise] The fruit of your overnight vinegar labour 3. [going to sleep] ‘Well at least I did one good vinegar deed today’):
One YouTube video shared in the group shows two women using a fog machine to spit simmered vinegar fog into their garden, determined to fix the sky. Surprisingly, the sky they’re sitting under isn’t what I’d describe as a classic chemtrail sky – crisscrossed with trails left by planes; instead, it seems to be just a regular cloudy day. Nevertheless, after just half an hour of sitting in their garden spitting out vinegar vapour with a fog machine, the skies begin to clear.
Elsewhere in the channel, I come across “Clearing Geo Engineered Clouds Fact Sheet – How To do It” – which, despite it’s name, isn’t a fact sheet, but a YouTube video featuring a series of text slides.
In it, they explain that “White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]. It eats Alkaline Metals which is what they spray to create the geo engineered clouds”, and that while supermarket white wine vinegar is heavily watered down, you can turn it into a chemtrail-busting solution by simmering (but never boiling) it. Once you have your reduced, warmed vinegar, you merely need to decant it into some dark bowls – “dark bowls attract the sun’s heat” – and you’re ready to enter the “battle for our skies”. According to the video, vinegar solution in a humidifier is capable of clearing clouds in a 10-mile radius within a few hours… or a couple of days.
Notably, the video is watermarked with the name of the channel that created it: Divine Truth. We don’t know what other ideas Divine Truth promotes, because their channel has been banned by YouTube for some time. As a long-time chronicler of the flat-earth movement, it’s hard not to see some parallels – “now, but it’s fascinating to me that this odd belief – that you can bust clouds by simmering and releasing vinegar – has these red-flag details.
“Divine Truth” feels like exactly the kind of channel name that would publish flat-earth content in the 2018 heyday of the modern movement. Throw in Pepe The Frog memes – a cartoon whose image was adopted as an irony-shielded avatar of the alt-right – with a busy Telegram presence, and it all feels rather familiar. While I’ve seen no overt signs of worrying extremism in the Telegram channel, there are enough red-ish flags to suspect there could be something of concern simmering beneath that vinegar surface.
Chemtrails
Chemtrails, as readers are no doubt aware, are not real – they sit alongside tinfoil hats as quasi-cartoonish illustrations of pseudoscientific beliefs in popular culture. In reality, the trails that linger in the wakes of planes are contrails or vapour trails, produced by changes in air pressure when planes are cruising at high altitude. They’re not made up of sinister chemicals, they’re mostly ice crystals and water droplets. They’re essentially clouds, caused by evaporated air condensing following the intrusion of a metal tube, with a surface temperature of around -50°C, travelling at several hundred miles per hour.
Aeroplanes have always created contrails, despite the insistence of chemtrail conspiracy theorists that their childhood didn’t contain such trails in the sky. I even distinctly recall being a child, lying in the field behind my infant school one sunny playtime, and looking up at plane trails in the sky. I might have been five or six at the time, and I used to refer to them as skyscrapers; I’d heard the word before, but had never seen a particularly tall building, so I figured “skyscraper” obviously had to mean planes that go across the sky, scraping a line of cloud as they go. That would have been around 1989.
Perhaps for the generation older than me, who grew up in the 1970s, it may be true that they didn’t really see many trails in the sky – not because the high altitude physics worked differently, but simply because there were fewer flights back then. In 1950, there were 195,000 air transport movements (take offs or landings) in the UK. By 1970, that number had trebled to 607,000 and, by 1990, it was 1,369,000. In 2019 it reached 2,214,000.
On top of that, we have confirmation bias – I happened to remember specifically noticing aeroplane trails when I was a child but if you didn’t, your memory might instead be filled with the memorably sunshine-y days of your youth, which you compare not to the sunny days of today, but to the days that aren’t sunny. Why is it so cloudy today, when I remember a sunny day from 30 years ago? It must be chemtrails.
Similarly, when it comes to the vinegar simmerers, we’re almost certainly looking at a huge slice of confirmation bias – ‘Whenever I notice the clouds go away, it must have been because of my vinegar. And if they don’t, well I clearly haven’t vinegared for long enough’. There is also the action of time; clouds move, all the time. We don’t always notice it, because they’re big and high and comparatively slow but, over time, clouds will move and change significantly. That’s going to be especially the case for contrails, created by the movement of an airplane, noticeable for their non-naturally occurring shape. Activists spot a chemtrail as plane goes past, reaches for the vinegar, and when they check again 20 minutes later, hey presto they have cured the sky. Or… the cloud dissipated, as clouds eventually do.
Chemtrail conspiracies
Chemtrail fears are nothing new, of course. In the December 2014 episode of Be Reasonable I interviewed Harry Rhodes from Chemtrails Projects UK, whose fear at the time was that the UK government was spraying us with chemicals that would give us Alzheimer’s and shorten our lifespan. I pointed out that spraying the whole country means also spraying the government and their friends and families, but he explained that the people in charge had access to the cure. I asked him who in the government at the time knew about it, and he told me that Prime Minister David Cameron knew about it, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown knew about it and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was also in on it. Which I pointed out was a bit short sighted for Nick Clegg, given that he’d be out on his ear once the coalition crumbled, and so it proved.
But we can look back even earlier than that. One good way to see what people associated with a conspiracy theory over time is to see what people have asked about using the Freedom of Information laws. By going to the website What Do They Know, which logs FOI requests and their responses, I found one question posed to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2008:
For sometime now I, and many others, have observed trails left by low-ish flying aircraft. These trails do not disperse rapidly as do those ice-crystal vapour trails from high-flying jets.
Will you please be so kind as to tell me:
1) The chemical composition of these slowly-dispersing trails.
2) Who authorises them.
3) What know effects they may have on the population of the United Kingdom.
To which came a polite response: “Thank you for your email. Unfortunately Defra does not hold this information. We believe it is an issue for the Department for Transport.” The inquisitive correspondent, however, was not to be put off by a simple ‘this is nothing to do with us’:
Are you suggesting that the environment is not affected? That whatever is in these trails does not fall to the ground and enter the food/water chains?…
[I] would still like to know your reasoning as to how something man-made, that is falling from the sky, has been given the all-clear as far as earthbound living organism is concerned. (As far as the environment is concerned, if you wish to put it like that).
Is the air we breathe being continually monitored? If so, what are the results? Do the air, water, and food supplies contain any unusual substances, referenced back (say) to 30 years ago.
Again, DEFRA responded to explain that the request was a matter for the Department for Transport, but did confirm that air quality is continually monitored and assessed throughout the UK in accordance with EU air quality legislation. Unsurprisingly, this still wasn’t sufficiently reassuring:
Dear Defra UnHelp Line,
Thank you very much for your stone-walling, and attempts to divert this FoI request.
However I have (in the meanwhile) had the good fortune to be told, via a friend, to check up on “Chemtrails”. When I did that I saw many, many pictures, from all over the world, looking exactly like the sky markings I tried to describe.
And, guess what! The answers to my questions are already known!
These ‘trails’ contain such substances as barium (radio-active? Barium Meal given to X-Ray patients?), and aluminium.
I’m breathing, eating, and drinking barium & aluminium?
And the Department of the Environment doesn’t mind?
This is within ‘EU guidelines’?
Well, I certainly mind, even if you & the EU don’t.
But then apparently, it gets worse. This chemtrail soup also contains nano-technology-sized pathogens … and that these can accumulate, and link together to destroy the electro-chemical balance of any living creature.
Or, to put it another way “they are *very* not nice at all”…
Or, to put this another way “The EU Guidelines are obviously a very sick joke, devised by some very sick people”
Eventually, the Department for Transport does respond, explaining that the trails in the sky are ice particles and water vapour, and that the planes are commercial flights, and that there is no scientific evidence for any health concerns from contrails, though there is exploration as to their contribution to climate change. Which is all very reasonable and patiently explained… and inevitably ignored:
Than you for the documentation on Contrails, which is totally irrelevant because my question was about CHEMTRAILS … which have been analysed to contain barium and aluminium, etc, and also some for of nano-particles which (possibly) create Morgellon’s disease.
I am not in the slightest bit interested in Contrails left by high-flying aircraft … even where these ice crystals may contain a small amount of unburned kerosene (paraffin).
The ‘unusual markings’ of this FoI request relate to CHEMTRAILS (Google it!) left by LOW-FLYING aircraft, in various shapes … such as “V”s and “X”s, parallel lines, etc. Sometimes these cover the entire sky as they spread out.
According to independent Analysts these CHEMTRAILS comprise such substances as barium (which is, of course, radio-active), aluminium, and other materials. There is good information on the Internet to state that these CHEMTRAILS also contain nano-particles (Google it!) which cause Morgellon’s Disease (Google it!).
And so it goes on. That’s just the oldest FOI trail I could find on the website, but it’s by no means the only one. In 2009, John FOI’d the Ministry of Defence over “the chemical spraying of the public”. In 2011, “Freeman Kev” – who signed off his FOI “Kevin, as commonly called” – asked the Department for Transport:
“about the high altitude spraying which has been going on overhead in Britain, and other countries for some years now. I am NOT referring to contrails, please do not make the mistake of referring to any ‘ice crystals forming around unburned jet fuel’ or other such reference to contrails, which i am quite aware of and i understand just fine.”
The FOI requests to public bodies have continued, undeterred by factual information, for almost 20 years. One of the most recent was a Feb 2025 request from “John”, which included no fewer than eighteen exclamation marks, plus a bitchute video, and the final question “Don’t you care about humanities future do you have kids?” – which, in fairness, is somewhat beyond the scope of the Met Office.
Relatively harmless?
I suspect the chemtrail conspiracy theorists, and their vinegar-simmerer offshoots, are relatively harmless, posing no threat other than to the productivity of governmental Freedom of Information departments. However, the same could be said of the flat-earth movement, yet they undoubtedly kept the paranoiac fires burning and the conspiracy cauldrons bubbling, ready for a bigger crisis to exploit their fears and mobilise them into Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers.
It feels like there is a rise in geoengineering chemtrail conspiracy theories of late, particularly as the Covid ‘forever lockdowns’ didn’t happen, the 5G towers were forgotten about, and the vaccine didn’t kill us all.
This kind of rhetoric and fear can have serious effects. Recently, eight states in the US introduced legislation to outlaw chemtrails. Florida and Tennessee legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana ordered the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard. Despite chemtrails not existing. It’s unclear how much those legislators believe in the cause, and how much they just want to pander to the conspiracist base that got their team elected, while tainting by association any efforts to mitigate climate change that might be passably mischaracterised as chemtrail geoengineering.
Thankfully, we’re not seeing that in the UK just yet, but I do know there are people talking to their local MPs about it, at a time when those MPs have lots of more-pressing matters to attend to. I hope it stays that way, and the most we have to fear from these chemtrail cloudbusters is the whiff of warm vinegar on a cloudy afternoon.
