HOSPITALS JAMMED AS BANNED PESTICIDE IS SPRAYED FROM THE SKIES

SEATTLE, WA.... As formations of unmarked tanker aircraft continue to
criss-cross American skies on a mission authorities refuse to disclose, an
environmental laboratory has identified an extremely toxic component of the
spray drifting over cities and countryside.

ENS has learned that samples of oily fallout collected by farmers, truck
drivers and pilots in Maryland and Pennsylvania were tested by Aqua-Tech
Environmental of Marion, Ohio in September, 1997 and found to contain
ethylene dibromide (EDB). An extremely hazardous pesticide, EDB was banned
by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1983.

But in 1991, the composition of jet fuel used by commercial and military jet
aircraft in the U.S. was changed from JP4 to somewhat less flammable JP8. A
Department of Defence source says the move "has saved some lives" in air
crashes. Ethylene dibromide is a key component of JP8.

The 1991 Chemical Hazards of the Workplace warns that repeated exposure to
low levels of ethylene dibromide results in "general weakness, vomiting,
diarrhea, chest pains, coughing and shortness of breath, upper respiratory
tract irritation" and respiratory failure caused by swelling of the lymph
glands in the lungs. "Deterioration of the heart, liver and kidneys, and
hemorrhages in the respiratory tract," can also result from prolonged
contact with JP8.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's hazardous materials
list: "Ethylene dibromide is a carcinogen and must be handled with extreme
caution." A seven-page summary of this pesticide's extreme toxicity notes
that EDB may also damage the reproductive system. According to the EPA,
"Exposure can irritate the lungs, repeated exposure may cause bronchitis,
development of cough, and shortness of breath. It will damage the liver and
kidneys". 

Mark Witten, a respiratory physiologist at the University of Arizona in
Tucson where an official US Air Force study on JP8 was carried out, told
Scientist in March, 1998 that crew chiefs "seem to have more colds, more
bronchitis, more chronic coughs than the people not exposed to jet fuel."

EDB is 6.5-times heavier than air. Unlike normal contrails, the thick white
streamers being sprayed from downward-pointing tailbooms over at least 39
states does not dissipate, but spreads into an overcast that refracts a
purple color in sunlight and appears suddenly as an oily film in puddles and
ponds.

Hundreds of photographs and videotapes made by ground observers show pairs
or larger formations of aircraft spreading a white mist that thickens and
drifts toward the ground. More than 200 eye-witnesses - including police
officers, pilots, military and public health personnel - have provided
detailed accounts of aerial spraying in characteristic "X"s and east-to-west
grid patterns, followed by occluded skies - and acute auto-immune reactions
and respiratory infections throughout affected regions.

"I keeps coughing phlegm that tastes bad," 50 year old Mary Young of
Sallisaw, Oklahoma told ENS after an aircraft sprayed her home at rooftop
level one night last January with something that struck the windows like
sand. "My eyes hurt, my joints hurt. I'm not catchin' my breath right. I
can't get rid of this cold. I've had this bad headache - it's not just a
headache. My eyeballs hurt so bad - way in the back - I just wish they would
fall out."

Severe headaches, nosebleeds, shortness of breath, joint pain and a dry
hacking cough "that never leaves" are being reported by countless Americans
jamming hospital Emergency Rooms from coast to coast. While December and
January are traditionally bad months for asthma sufferers, patients, doctors
and nurses across the U.S. report hospital wards filled to overflowing with
bronchitis, pneumonia and acute asthma admissions at up to twice normal
winter rates.

Early last month, The News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina reported
that respiratory admissions to Durham regional hospital jumped from the
usual 184 patients a day to 247. Ambulance drivers were told that the
hospital was not receiving any more patients.

In New York City, doctors are calling a flood of respiratory cases an
epidemic. "We have people double- and triple-parked in the ER on
stretchers," Dr. Elliot Friedman, associate director of emergency medicine
at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, told the New York Times on
January 31. "And there have been times when upwards of 40 people have been
admitted but are waiting for someone to be discharged," Friedman added.

"This high fever is not typical of other flus," Dr. Sigurd Ackerman, the
president of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center told the 'Times shortly
after a TV cameraman panned up to frame lingering "X"-shaped contrails over
Times-Square. Dr. Robert Saken, a partner in the Soho Pediatrics Group, told
that newspaper,  "It was surprising to me how sick they got and how quickly
it happened."

Dr. Ilya Spigland, Montefiore hospital's director of virology, doesn't know
the reason for the sudden epidemic of respiratory cases. It is, Spigland
told the New York Times, "very possible that the increase in respiratory
infections may not be due to the flu." 

That same day in Lake Havasu, California, headlines in Today's News Herald
announced: "Victims curse unnamed bug, but can't call it the 'flu'." MD Mary
Lou Callername told the Herald "that a nameless virus is bringing at least
10 patients a day into her office and driving some into the hospital, but
laboratory tests show only a few are suffering from Type A or other
identifiable strains of influenza."

The previous weekend, after San Francisco resident Curtis Schumann noticed
"sky grids in the making," and Melanie Zucker watched nine contrails being
woven over Berkeley, local TV stations reported Bay area emergency rooms
inundated with flu-like cases.

In Seattle - where a resident reports "I've lived here for 26 years never
seeing this number of contrails at once" - pneumonia patient Lowell Barger
told ENS that in the hospital where he was admitted in late January, "their
respiratory ward was overflowing with people, and they were having to put
respiratory patients in other wards." At that time, a resident of Spokane
listening to a police radio scanner told ENS he heard "many rescue calls for
people with breathing difficulties."

In Palmyra, New Jersey, shortly after Lucrecia Moon watched unusual
lingering contrails from a McDonald's restaurant, a nurse reported "many
people ill." In Las Vegas, Nevada, TV news coverage told of area hospitals
being filled with people experiencing breathing problems.

After a resident of Lexington, Kentucky watched helicopters circling the
city for several days, flying low overhead at 3 a.m., "the sky looked like a
giant checkerboard from the planes criss-crossing it, and the air still had
the steel mill smell." According to this eye-witness, "Everyone here is
sick. So far six counties have closed all the schools because all the
students were sick with 'flu-like symptoms'.  I've been having headaches, a
sore throat, and an annoying, hacking cough for the past four months and it
seems to get worse after I see these aircraft circling the area."

Similar "chem trails" sightings continue to be reported over Phoenix,
Arizona. The January 28, 1999 edition of Arizona Republic reported that "The
incidence of bronchial problems in Phoenix this month is 237
hospitalizations vs. last year at 160 or so."

At the same time, hospitals in Portland, Oregon; Marietta, Georgia; 
Chandler, Arizona, Bakersfield, Santa Cruz, Redding and Salinas, California
- and other cities across the nation - were jammed with bronchitis,
pneumonia and other acute respiratory cases after repeated spraying and
cobweb-like fallout was reported in those regions. 

"We're getting sprayed real heavily with the contrails," a south
Pennsylvania resident told ENS. "It's just total saturation." As overfilled
Pennsylvania hospitals were forced to divert respiratory emergencies to
other facilities with bed space, another south-central Pennsylvania
resident, Deborah Kammerer, looked out her window and watched aircraft
"flying and dispersing over the city. It was supposed to be a clear sunny
day. It became more overcast as the day progressed. I observed how the white
trails widened out and settled down creating a haze over everything."

South Florida resident Karen Okenica told ENS she has watched on several
occasions as contrails "criss-crossed or ran parallel to each other. They
did not dissipate but got thicker and stayed in the sky for quite a while."
Okenica says she became frightened after gazing through Nikon binoculars and
noticing an all-white jet with "plumes" coming from the rear of the plane.
In early December, local newspaper reported that Bethesda Memorial and
Delray Community hospitals were full and could not accommodate any more
patients.

The January 7 Philadelphia Daily News reported that "Emergency Room 
patients overflowed into the hallways at West Jersey Hospital in Berlin, 
New Jersey, and ambulance crews were temporarily diverted to other 
institutions as a wave of respiratory illnesses swept the area." At 
Northern Westchester County Hospital, "there was a 24 hour waiting 
period to get in."

In Manitou, Michigan, Registered Nurse Kim Korte was driving north on 
M52, when she noticed "stripes" in the sky. "It appeared as if someone 
took white paint on their fingers and from north to south ran their fingers 
through the sky. These contrails were evenly spaced and covered the 
whole sky!" from east to west.

Within 24 hours, Korte became very weak and feverish. After her 
boyfriend told her that "many in his family started coming down with the 
same complaints," the RN "started noticing alot of my patients and 
their family members were coming down with these symptoms at the 
same time." On checking with her colleagues, the former hospital 
supervisor learned that other nurses and physicians were complaining 
"of being extremely busy with respiratory diagnoses." 

In Austin, Texas - where Richard Young reports that "The skies here are 
filled almost daily with trails crossing each other" - a school nurse 
told a worried parent that she had seen over 100 sick children in a single day.

Where is the mass media's reporting of this mass phenomenon? Indications of
a concerted cover-up came on February 11, when a retired Southern Baptist
preacher named Everett Burton finally succeeded in reaching C-span. After
voicing his opinion on the Clinton impeachment trial, this former minister
told Americans to get a copy of the Constitution and read it to realize what
they have lost. Rev. Burton then advised viewers not to take his word for
what was happening in the US -  but to "just look up in the skies as the
planes regularly spray contrails across the skies, spraying people and
making them ill." At this point, Rev. Burton was cut off. The screen flipped
from C-span to the Tennessee state seal, remained silent for several minutes.

Americans are not alone in their anxious bewilderment and suffering. In 
England, after lingering contrails and cobweb-like fallout were reported 
over London and Birmingham, the BBC reported on January 14 that 
more than 8,000 people - mostly elderly - died from pneumonia and 
other respiratory complications in the last week of December and the 
first two weeks of January, 1999. 

According to the BBC, in early January of this year, more than 97,100 people
in England and Wales were stricken with respiratory ailments in a single
week - almost double the usual rate. Ambulances in the Greater Manchester
and Mersey region were each dealing with more than 1,000 calls every day -
almost twice the norm. Norfolk and Norwich suffered such an unexpected
increase in deaths, a refrigerated semi-trailer capable of holding 36 bodies
was pressed into service as a temporary morgue. [see BBC photo]

The ENS investigation continues.
 
 

SEATTLE, Washington, January 8, 1999 (ENS) - Contrails spread by fleets of jet aircraft in elaborate cross-hatched patterns are sparking speculation and making people sick across the United States. 

Washington state resident William Wallace became ill with severe diarrhea and fatigue after watching several multi-engine jets spend New Year's day laying cloud lines in an east to west grid pattern. A neighbor working outside came down with similar symptoms. But their wives, who remained indoors, suffered no ill effects from the inexplicable maneuvers which observers liken to high-altitude "crop-dusting" by unidentifed multi-engine aircraft. 

Condensation trails, called contrails, are generated at altitudes high enough for water droplets to freeze in a matter of seconds and not quickly evaporate - typically where the temperatures are below -38 degrees Celcius.

Contrails can form through the addition of water vapor to the air from the jet engine exhaust. Even tiny nuclei released in the exhaust fumes may be sufficient to generate ice crystals, and hence, condensation trails.

Wallace wonders if ethylene dibromide, a highly toxic component of JP-8 jet fuel, is making people sick. Similar incidents over Las Vegas last year prompted a US Air Force spokesman to explain that the military aircraft were "dumping fuel" before landing. 

But the strange spray patterns are being reported repeatedly over towns in Tennessee, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, Nevada, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma, Washington state and California.

Wallace has been watching formations of high-flying jets weave grid-like contrails above his home since last summer. Each time, "We get a taste in our mouth," he reports. He and his wife Ann get "kind of tired and sick," having "no energy to do anything." 

After plants began dying around his mountain cabin, "I got real sick for about three weeks," Wallace relates. "My eyes watered. Fluid came out of my nose. I could hardly move my arm up above my head to comb my hair for about a week."

Wallace and his wife are not alone in their plight. In March, 1996, Dr. Greg Hanford bought an expensive camera and binoculars to keep an eye on jets spraying white bands above his Bakersfield, California home. Hanford has counted 40 or 60 jets on some "spray days." 

"Everybody seems to be getting sick from it," Hanford told ENS. "Hackin' and coughin' when you really get nailed with this stuff." The dentist, many of his patients and two receptionists have repeatedly contracted severe respiratory infections. Hanford's illness lingered for five months despite courses of four different antibiotics. 

"It's really weird," Hanford says. "You think two jets are going to hit each other - and then they make an X." The dentist says he has sometimes seen "furry globular balls" spread downwind in a long feather from the high-flying aircraft.

Unlike normal contrails, which dissipate soon after a lone jet's passage, video taken by Wallace and Hanford show eerily silent silver jets streaming fat contrails from their wingtips in multiple, criss-cross patterns. But instead of dissipating like normal contrails, these white jet-trails coalesce into broad cloud-bands that gradually occlude crystal clear skies. 

"Passenger jets don't make contrails that stay and become clouds," Wallace observes.

Government officials deny that anything unusual is taking place. When Hanford called the local airport, tower personnel told him there was nothing going on." The jets were "just commercial" undergoing "international flight training."

But a skeptical Hanford responded, "Is the FAA going to allow two jets to come at each other?"

Pseudo-color, multispectral images taken April 20, 1994 by a NOAA satellite, reveal a number of contrails over Oklahoma and Kansas. X'es, overlapping W's and the Roman numeral XII are among the patterns flown by the mystery aircraft. Last June, Hanford watched four aircraft spraying in circles to form a perfect bulls-eye. Through his Swaroski binoculars, Hanford could see what "looked like a 737" painted all-white on top with an "orangish-red" underbody and red engine cowlings. Another 727-like aircraft was painted "all-white with a black stripe up the middle of fuselage." None of the planes carried identifying markings. 

Pat Edgar has been watching the jets spraying over eastern Oklahoma since a sunny day in October, 1997 when as many as 30 contrails gradually occluded the sky. "They look like they're playing tic-tac-toe up there," he says. "You know darn well it's not passenger planes." 

Edgar says he has watched "cobwebbing stuff coming down" from the zigzagging jets flying "all day long, line after line, back-and-forth, like furrows in a farm field."

Edgar adds that "There is a lot of Lupus in the area now. A lot of women have come down with it."

Edgar's father-in-law, a former judge, and three or four other close friends were hit hard in their immune systems. Symptoms include swollen hands and legs, night fever and shortness of breath. 

Retired Oklahoma state judge Bill Ed Rogers now runs out of breath after walking 20 feet to the bathroom. Climbing stairs, he says, "is directly out of the question."

Rogers, does not attribute his strange malady to the mystery jets. But neither he nor his doctors can explain his breathing difficulty, which began shortly after spraying began in November, 1997, and is getting worse. The 57 year old former judge says he thought he was experiencing congenital heart failure when he was admitted into the Mayo clinic last January. But after being diagnosed with severe inflamation in his right lung, a team of top surgeons were unable to pump an unidentified "jello-like" fluid from his lung.

Edgar, Wallace, Hanford and other eye-witnesses are uneasy over the ongoing aerial "experiments and the secrecy surrounding them. "They're gettin' ready, practicing," Edgar believes, for some kind of mass population cull.

Before Edgar sold his restaurant, customers came in complaining of airplanes "flyin' around all night" over a remote area of Oklahoma. In the morning, they could see "stuff comin' out of their wings." Edgar says he knows four-dozen witnesses who have "come down violently ill, coughin' up blood for two weeks - or [with] real bad nosebleeds." As far as he's concerned, "it had to be something in that doggone plane that was spillin' out in the middle of the night." 

Edgar joins witnesses across the U.S. who worry that whoever is behind the mystery spraying just has to "come up with something a little stronger later on. It's just a guess," he says. "But it sure seems weird. They have a mission. They go back and forth all day. Hey man I'm talkin' hundreds of contrails in a day! It's unbelievable." 

U.S. Air Force aerial tankers may be causing and seeding clouds to modify the weather. The condensation trails and chemicals spread by these aircraft could be what is making some people sick in Tennessee, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, Nevada, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Washington state and California.

Tommy Farmer, a former engineering technician with Raytheon Missile Systems, has been tracking patterns of jet contrails phenomena for more than a year. Farmer has "positively identified" two of the aircraft most often involved in the aerial spraying incidents as a Boeing KC-135 and Boeing KC-10. Both big jets are used by the US Air Force for air to air refueling. A Boeing T-43 used for navigation training and mapping may also be involved.

Confirming reports from eye-witnesses across the United States, Farmer reports that all aircraft are painted either solid white or solid black with the exception of two KC-135s which were in training colors - orange and white. No identifying markings are visible. 

Farmer has collected samples of what he calls "angel hair" sprayed by the mystery aircraft on six occasions since February, 1998. Four samples have been taken since November, 1998.

Farmer says that globular filaments resembling ordinary spider webs, "usually fall in clumps or wads ranging from pencil eraser size to the size of a balled up fist."

Winds often whip the cobweb-like material into filaments as long as 50 feet (15.3 metres). Farmer told ENS that the sticky substance "melts in your hands" and "adheres to whatever it touches." 

Farmer urges caution to collectors after becoming ill after his first contact with the "angel hair." Like Bakersfield, California dentist Dr. Greg Hanford and other ground observers exposed to the spraying, Farmer's ensuing sore throat and sinus infection lasted several months. 

After repeatedly observing aircraft spraying particulates "in front of and into cloud systems," Farmer is "fairly certain the contrail phenomena is one part of a military weather modification weapons system."

He notes that because the chemical contrails allow much more moisture to form inside cloud systems, severe localized storms result from the aerial seeding while surrounding areas that have surrendered their moisture to the storm cells experience drought. 

The huge Xs being traced by formations of tanker jets in the sky can be tracked by satellite and coordinated with the crossed-beams of ionospheric heaters to heat the upper atmosphere - changing its temperature and density and enhancing the storm's effects. 

Based in Gakon, Alaska, this unclassified joint U.S. Air Force and Navy project known as the High Altitude Auroral Research Project (HAARP) has for the past several years been using phased array antennas to steer powerful beams of tightly-focused radio waves "to stimulate," heat and steer sections of the upper atmosphere.

Awarded in 1985 to MIT physicist Bernard Eastlund, HAARP's commercial patent claims that directed energy beams of more than one-billion watts can be used for "altering the upper atmosphere wind patterns using plumes of atmospheric particles as a lens or focusing device" to disturb weather thousands of miles away.

In an interview with this reporter, Eastlund admitted, "I had looked at using this intense beam, which can be angled, to do some experiments in terms of guiding the jetstream, moving it from one spot to another. I presume it is possible, which might lend credence to these other things."

In a U.S. Air Force research study, "Weather as a Force Multiplier" issued in August, 1996, seven U.S. military officers outlined how HAARP and aerial cloud-seeding from tankers could allow U.S. aerospace forces to "own the weather" by the year 2025. Among the desired objectives were "Storm Enhancement," "Storm Modification" and "Induce Drought." 

According to the Air Force report, "In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications." 

Within 30 years, the Air Force foresees using Weather Force Support Elements with "the necessary sensor and communication capabilities to observe, detect, and act on weather-modification requirements to support U.S. military objectives" by using "using airborne cloud generation and seeding" techniques being developed today, the 1996 Air Force report says.

But on its HAARP website, the U.S. Navy says, "The HAARP facility will not affect the weather. Transmitted energy in the frequency ranges that will be used by HAARP is subject to negligible absorption in either the troposphere or the stratosphere - the two levels of the atmosphere that produce the earth's weather. Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near-vacuum of the rarefied region above about 70 km known as the ionosphere."

Still, according to the Air Force's 1996 report, other routine weather-modification missions will deploy "cirrus shields" formed by the chemical contrails of high-flying aircraft "to deny enemy visual and infrared surveillance."

When it is completed, the HAARP antenna array will consist of 180 antennas on a total land area of about 33 acres. The final facility will have a total transmitter power of about 3,600 kilowatts. 

When the HAARP facility is completed, the transmitter will be able to produce approximately 3.6 million watts of radio frequency power, the HAARP website states. The Air Force says HAARP transmitters have been designed to operate "very linearly so that they will not produce radio interference to other users of the radio spectrum." 

Farmer guesses that besides its obvious tactical military applications, aerial-seeding of contrail-clouds aligned in HAARP's characteristic grid-patterns could be part of a secret U.S. government initiative to address the global weather crisis brought about by atmospheric warming. 

The aircraft spraying that has sickened Americans across the country may not be confined to the United States. On August 11, 1998, "USA Today" reported dozens of residents of Quirindi, Australia "swearing they saw cobwebs fall from the sky" after unidentified aircraft passed overhead.