Claim about airline admitting to chemtrails originated as satire | Fact check

Nate Trela, USA TODAY
·3 min read

The claim: Company admitted having contract with Air Force to spray ‘chemtrails’

A June 22 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) shares a screenshot of what is presented as a 2013 article from Global Elite News. The headline reads “Evergreen Aviation Admits to Chemtrail Contracts with USAF.”

“Evergreen Aviation, one of the worlds (sic) largest private aviation companies admits to weather modification service,” the article begins. “On their own website in the Markets section for their New Super Tanker they state Weather modification among other interesting service (sic).”

The post was shared more than 1,000 times in a week.

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Our rating: False

The claim is stolen satire, having originated on a humor website. The company named in the post did have a supertanker aircraft and identified “weather modification” as a potential future market, but it never claimed to have a contract spraying chemtrails, which do not exist.

Aircraft was real, but chemtrails were not

The Evergreen Supertanker went into operation in 2004, providing assistance fighting fires around the world. The converted Boeing 747 was also expensive to maintain and was phased out before Evergreen Aviation effectively shut down in 2013.

The company had a large aircraft fleet and multiple government contracts, but none of them were for “chemtrails.” The “article” screenshot in the post comes from iFunny, a Russian humor site. The purported publication, Global Elite News, does not appear to have ever existed.

The Facebook post is an example of "stolen satire," where content posted as satire and presented that way originally is captured and reposted in a way that makes it appear to be legitimate news. As a result, viewers of those subsequent posts are misled.

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Evergreen Aviation had strong ties to the CIA, though founder Del Smith never publicly acknowledged a connection to the agency before his death in 2014. The company had former CIA employees in executive positions, and in a profile of the company, officials said as much as 60% of revenue for some of its subsidiaries came from government contracts, with clients including the Forest Service, Air Force and Postal Service.

A website with information about Evergreen Aviation still operates with contact information showing an address in London instead of the company’s decades-long home in Oregon. That website has a page for the Supertanker that mentions weather modification as a potential future application for the aircraft. It does not define weather modification, nor does it say anywhere that it performed such functions or sprayed chemtrails.

The company, of course, could not spray something that does not exist. USA TODAY has previously and repeatedly debunked the existence of chemtrails. False conspiracy theories hold that the white streaks of water vapor in the sky created by airplanes are actually made up of chemicals intentionally sprayed on the public or used to alter weather.

USA TODAY could not reach the social media user who shared the claim for comment.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Airplane fought fires, did not spray chemtrails | Fact check