What They Spray In The Air
Biology & Survival, Part 4 - Chemtrails aren't a conspiracy theory
Over six days in late September 1950, a U.S. Navy minesweeper positioned off the coast of San Francisco sprayed a fine mist of bacteria into the wind.
The bacteria were Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii. The operation was called Sea-Spray. The Navy wanted to know whether an enemy could launch a biological weapon from a boat offshore and effectively blanket a coastal city. So they tested it on San Francisco. The Navy exposed 800,000 people over six days. Nobody was told. The navy was the enemy.
The Navy had positioned 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area to measure how far the bacteria traveled. Answer: 23 miles, carried by the wind deep into the East Bay. The mist drifted directly over Stanford Hospital, which was still located in San Francisco at the time. Eleven patients developed Serratia marcescens infections. One of them, a 75-year-old Irish-American immigrant named Edward J. Nevin who had checked in for a routine procedure with a full recovery expected, died when the bacteria reached his heart.
Stanford’s doctors were baffled. They had never seen an outbreak of Serratia marcescens before. They were so puzzled that they published an academic paper about it. They wouldn’t learn the actual cause for another 26 years.
On December 22, 1976, Nevin’s grandson, Edward Nevin III, a trial lawyer in his early thirties, was riding BART to work when he read his grandfather’s name in the San Francisco Chronicle. The U.S. military had just been forced to disclose its biological weapons testing over American cities. Nevin III had been nine years old when his grandfather went into the hospital and never came out. His family had never understood why.
He sued the United States government. Sixty-seven members of the Nevin family were listed as plaintiffs. An Army general challenged him to a fistfight outside the courtroom.
The court ruled that the government had legal immunity from the suit, that spraying bacteria over a civilian population without consent fell within its sovereign authority. The family lost.
Edward Nevin, the immigrant who kept his citizenship papers framed on the living room wall, was killed by his own government’s experiment. The court said that was fine. This is why expecting justice from a government that owns both the military and the courts is futile.
The 239 Tests
Operation Sea-Spray was not an isolated incident. It was one entry in a catalog.
In 1977, at Senate subcommittee hearings triggered by the wave of Cold War-era disclosures, Army witnesses made an admission under oath: between 1949 and 1969, the U.S. military had conducted 239 open-air biological and chemical tests over populated areas across the United States. In 80 of those tests, the Army used live bacteria it classified as “harmless.”
Twenty years. Two hundred and thirty-nine tests. Complete secrecy from the population being tested on.
The Nuremberg Code, written in 1947 after the world saw what happened when governments treated people as test subjects, states its first principle plainly: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The U.S. military began spraying American cities three years later. Nobody consented.
A Priceonomics investigation put the broader count at 293 populated areas intentionally doused with bacteria. The test sites read like a tour guide written by someone who hates you: San Francisco. The New York City subway. Greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii. Washington D.C.’s national airport. The Pennsylvania Turnpike. Cities in Texas and the Florida Keys.
The New York subway test, conducted on June 6, 1966, deserves its own line in the record. Army agents carrying air sampling machines in boxes and lightbulbs packed with approximately 175 grams of Bacillus subtilis (roughly 87 trillion organisms per bulb) dropped them onto the tracks at stations in midtown Manhattan. The purpose was to test whether the wind from passing trains would spread a biological agent through the tunnel system. It did. Bacteria deposited at 14th Street were found miles away throughout the subway network. Millions of commuters served as unwitting test subjects.
The word “simulant” did the heavy lifting in the Army’s defense. It implied safety by definition: a harmless stand-in, not a real weapon. But Serratia marcescens killed Edward Nevin. A “simulant” that kills people isn’t a simulant. It’s a biological agent tested on a nonconsenting population. Bacillus globigii causes infections in immunocompromised individuals. And the third major agent, zinc cadmium sulfide, contains cadmium, a known carcinogen.
Cadmium Over the Projects
Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage) was the Army Chemical Corps’ program for testing how chemical and biological agents disperse across wide areas. Running through the 1950s and 1960s, it sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide particles over 33 or more American cities, including St. Louis, Minneapolis, Corpus Christi, and Fort Wayne.
St. Louis received the heaviest treatment, and the details revealed in declassified documents are as blunt as a police report on a crime that nobody was ever charged with.
The Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide via motorized blowers mounted atop the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex, at schools, from the backs of station wagons, and from planes. The testing covered 20 residential areas, 13 downtown locations, and two 5-square-mile sections of the city. Men in protective suits regularly sprayed a mysterious mist into the air while residents went about their lives. Nobody was told.
The residents were, as the National Research Council later confirmed, predominantly Black and predominantly poor. St. Louis was chosen as a test site because its population density and terrain made it an ideal analog for a Soviet city the military wanted to simulate attacking. The Pruitt-Igoe complex sat at the center of the targeting arc.
Sociologist Lisa Martino-Taylor’s research suggests the Army may have mixed radioactive particles with the zinc cadmium sulfide it spread through the neighborhood. In her writing: “Appearing as central targets within the field of sampling arcs stood the imposing Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Complex.”
The Missouri State Legislature acknowledged the testing in House Resolution No. 58. Acknowledgment. Not accountability. Not prosecution.
It Never Stopped
The U.S. government secretly sprayed its own population with biological and chemical agents for two decades. It denied it. When it was caught, it testified before Congress, expressed regret, and said the programs had ended.
If that sentence sounds familiar, it should. The NSA secretly surveilled its own population for over a decade through programs like PRISM and XKeyscore. When Edward Snowden exposed it in 2013, the government expressed regret, passed the USA FREEDOM Act, and restructured the programs. Mass surveillance continued under different legal authorities. Section 702 collection, Executive Order 12333, and a dozen other mechanisms kept the infrastructure running. The capabilities didn’t shrink. They reorganized.
The pattern is: do it secretly. Deny it. Get caught. Apologize. Restructure. Continue.
After the 1977 Senate hearings, the U.S. military said it had stopped testing biological agents on domestic populations. What it didn’t stop was spraying things from the sky. It just moved to programs that had better public relations: cloud seeding, mosquito control, geoengineering research. These are legal, documented, and happening right now. They also involve dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere over populated areas, sometimes at night, sometimes without meaningful notification, and always without the consent of the people breathing the air below.
Whether the government is capable of spraying things over your neighborhood without telling you is not a question. That’s congressional record. The question is whether the programs running today are as benign as the agencies claim. Given the track record, skepticism is not paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
What’s in the Air Right Now
Cloud Seeding: Silver Iodide from Coast to Coast
As of 2024, nine U.S. states operate active cloud seeding programs: California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. Only two states (Florida and Tennessee) have explicitly banned the practice.
Cloud seeding involves dispersing silver iodide (AgI) particles into clouds from aircraft or ground-based generators to trigger precipitation. The programs have run continuously for over 70 years, as Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. testified before the House Subcommittee in 2025: “weather modification activities have been widely implemented in the United States and around the world for 70 years.”
He also testified to something the public might find less comforting: “the effectiveness of weather modifying activities for actually modifying the weather is unknown.”
Seventy years of spraying, and the scientists brought before Congress to discuss it cannot confirm it works. So why keep going? Is it really to alter the weather?
The health and environmental implications are treated with a similar level of rigor, which is to say, not much. Silver iodide carries an NFPA 704 health hazard rating of 2, meaning it can cause temporary incapacitation or possible residual injury with intense or chronic exposure. A 2016 study published in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety found that AgI at reference monitoring concentrations caused 80% inhibition of respiration in phytoplankton and a moderate decrease in soil bacteria viability. The official line from most cloud seeding advocates is that the concentrations are too low to matter. The studies that say otherwise get filed somewhere quiet.
The regulatory framework, if you can call it that, is the Weather Modification Reporting Act of 1972. It requires anyone conducting weather modification in the U.S. to notify NOAA at least 10 days in advance. That’s it. No approval process. No safety review. No health impact assessment. Just a heads-up.
And even that minimal requirement isn’t being met. A January 2026 GAO report found that NOAA is “not fully meeting its statutory responsibilities.” Over half of all filed reports likely have errors, including missing required information like maps. NOAA has no written guidance for reviewing the reports it receives. The agency tasked with oversight doesn’t have a written procedure for how to oversee.
Mosquito Spraying: Organophosphates Over Your Neighborhood
If you live in the southeastern United States, or anywhere that mosquito-borne disease is a concern, the chemical naled has likely been sprayed over your home.
Naled is an organophosphate insecticide registered since 1959 and one of the most widely used pesticides in the country for aerial mosquito control. ULV (ultra-low volume) sprayers mounted on planes or helicopters dispense it over residential neighborhoods, typically at night.
The EPA’s own 2020 draft risk assessment identified “potential risks immediately following aerial application for wide-area public health mosquito control.” Translation: if your child plays outside in the hours after spraying, there’s a documented risk. The EPA applied a 10x FQPA safety factor in its assessment, indicating elevated concern. Naled degrades into DDVP (dichlorvos), another organophosphate.
The notification system is a joke. In Dorchester County, South Carolina, in August 2016, aerial naled spraying conducted to combat Zika-carrying mosquitoes killed over 2.5 million honeybees at a single bee farm. The county posted a notice on its website. Many residents and beekeepers never saw it. One beekeeper described her farm as looking “like it’s been nuked.” The spraying happened after dawn instead of at night, when bees were out foraging.
When the CDC tried to push aerial naled spraying in Puerto Rico to combat Zika, the governor refused, citing public outrage and concerns about health effects. Doctors on the island rallied against it. Puerto Rico said no. Florida said yes.
Naled is banned in the European Union.
The uncomfortable pattern: the EPA acknowledges risks, applies safety factors that indicate concern, and then approves continued aerial spraying over populated areas with notification requirements that amount to a post on a county website.
Make Sunsets: A Startup Is Literally Launching Sulfur Dioxide into the Stratosphere
And then there’s the one that sounds like a rejected Bond villain plot.
A company called Make Sunsets, founded by Luke Iseman, has been launching high-altitude balloons filled with helium and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere since April 2022. The idea is solar geoengineering: reflecting a fraction of incoming sunlight to cool the planet. The execution is a two-person startup releasing SO2 balloons from a camper van and selling “cooling credits” to customers who want to offset their carbon footprint.
The company started operations in Baja California, Mexico. Mexico moved to ban geoengineering experiments in January 2023. Make Sunsets moved to Reno, Nevada, launched three more balloons in February 2023, and kept going. As of 2025, the company has launched 147 balloons and sold 128,000 “cooling credits.”
On April 15, 2025, the EPA sent a demand letter to Make Sunsets, “demanding answers from an unregulated geoengineering start-up.” The EPA’s own statement acknowledged the core problem: “It is unclear where the balloons are launched and where the SO2 is from.”
Canada’s War on Its Own Forests
The United States isn’t the only country with a documented track record of spraying its own population. Canada’s history begins with the same chemical the U.S. used to defoliate Vietnam.
Agent Orange at Gagetown
In 1966 and 1967, the Canadian government allowed the U.S. military to test Agent Orange, Agent Purple, and Agent White at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown in New Brunswick. Three days in June 1966, four days in June 1967. Seven days total.
Agent Orange contains dioxin, classified by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer as “known to be carcinogenic to humans.” The same compound that caused cancers, birth defects, and generational health damage among Vietnamese civilians and American veterans was sprayed on Canadian soil, on a Canadian military base, with the Canadian government’s permission.
The testing was hidden for roughly two decades. It became public knowledge in the early 1980s. Ex-New Brunswick Power employees formed the “Sprayers of Dioxin Association” to advocate for compensation.
Canada’s response, in 2007: a one-time, tax-free “ex gratia payment” of $20,000 to eligible individuals. Twenty thousand dollars for dioxin exposure. A $95.6 million fund was established to compensate Canadian military members. As recently as March 2024, a Maine state commission called for a new investigation into the health impacts, and a federal standing committee inquiry was still underway in late 2024. But crucially, none of the criminals who did this are in prison. They just use taxpayer money to bribe themselves out of responsibility.
The Glyphosate Pipeline
The Agent Orange tests ended (or so we’re told). The spraying didn’t.
Every summer, from July through September, forestry companies in Canada aerially spray tens of thousands of hectares of boreal forest with glyphosate. The trade name is Vision. You probably know it by its consumer brand: Roundup.
The purpose is not pest control. It’s not fighting disease. Forestry companies spray glyphosate to kill healthy broadleaf trees that compete with commercially valuable conifers like spruce and pine. They’re poisoning native forests to make timber monocultures grow faster.
The scale is staggering. In British Columbia alone, over 430,000 hectares have been treated with herbicides (738,000 hectares counting re-sprays). Across northern Ontario, thousands of hectares of “Crown land” are sprayed annually in forests from Sudbury to Temagami to Dryden. Average rates hit roughly 200 hectares per day during spray season.
The World Health Organization’s IARC classifies glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A). Health Canada’s position, last reviewed in 2017: the levels “do not cause any harmful effects when products are used properly.” Four environmental groups, including the David Suzuki Foundation and Friends of the Earth Canada, are challenging that conclusion in court, arguing the federal assessment relies on outdated science.
Jenifer Brousseau, from Serpent River First Nation along the north shore of Lake Huron, told the CBC: “It’s kind of scary because I don’t know where I can gather anymore. I have to be very mindful, of like, has there been forestry here? Are they gonna be spraying here? How close to here have they sprayed?”
In August 2025, roughly 100 people from Serpent River and neighboring First Nations rallied along the Trans-Canada Highway to demand the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources ban glyphosate in forestry. Elder Grace Manitowabi, from Sagamok First Nation, said the spraying kills traditional medicines: sage, sweetgrass, cedar. “And not to mention the blueberries are all dead now.” She reported that moose harvested by community members have been found with various cancers.
The Métis Nation of Ontario called on Ontario to immediately suspend its 2025 aerial spraying programs: “The forests are the gardens that feed and sustain our communities. Their ongoing poisoning through herbicide spraying must stop.”
There’s a brutal ecological irony here. Environmentalists are raising concerns that glyphosate spraying is making forests more vulnerable to the wildfires that have ravaged Canada in recent years. By killing the broadleaf trees that act as natural firebreaks, the spraying creates conifer monocultures that burn faster and hotter. Canada is literally poisoning its own fire protection.
Quebec banned glyphosate use in forestry in 2001. The timber industry predicted economic collapse. The industry survived. The forests survived. Quebec just stopped poisoning them. Twenty-five years later, every other province is still spraying.
The same government that tested Agent Orange on its own soil now sprays a “probably carcinogenic” herbicide over hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest every year. The pipeline from Gagetown to Vision is a straight line, and nobody in Ottawa wants to see it.
What You Can Do
The hardest part of this problem is also the simplest to state.
The first three articles in this series covered exposure vectors where individual action makes a real difference. You can stop eating food grown in sewage sludge. You can stop heating food in plastic. You can filter your water. You can choose what goes into your body.
You can’t choose what goes into the air.
This is the hardest exposure vector to individually mitigate, and unfortunately you can’t eliminate exposure. Nobody can opt out of breathing. But you can reduce your exposure surface, and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is significant even when “doing something” doesn’t solve the problem completely.
Indoor air quality. You spend roughly 90% of your time indoors. A HEPA + activated carbon air purifier is your most cost-effective defense against whatever’s in the outdoor air. HEPA filters capture particulate matter down to 0.3 microns. Activated carbon adsorbs volatile organic compounds and chemical vapors. Run them in bedrooms and main living areas. Seal gaps around windows and doors during spraying events if you’re in a mosquito control zone or near agricultural spraying operations.
Grow under cover. Greenhouse or high tunnel growing blocks direct aerial deposition on food crops. If a full greenhouse isn’t feasible, even row covers over raised beds during spray season provide a meaningful barrier between what’s in the air and what’s on your plate. This matters especially if you’re collecting rainwater for irrigation. Air contamination becomes soil contamination, which becomes food contamination.
First-flush diverters on rainwater collection. If you harvest rainwater, a first-flush diverter redirects the initial volume of runoff (which carries the highest concentration of contaminants from your roof and the atmosphere) away from your storage cistern. It’s a simple, inexpensive addition that meaningfully improves water quality.
Reverse osmosis for drinking water. RO systems remove the vast majority of dissolved contaminants. This addresses whatever makes it through the atmosphere into your water supply.
Location selection. This is the biggest lever and the hardest to pull. Rural areas with low population density, far from agricultural operations, military installations, and major flight paths, have lower aerial exposure by default. Prevailing wind direction matters: being upwind of industrial operations or agricultural zones is better than being downwind. This is another argument for rural relocation, some threats require geographic solutions.
Stay informed. If you live in a mosquito control district, find out what your county sprays, when they spray it, and what their notification procedure is. Many districts post schedules. Some take phone requests for notification. You can’t stop them from spraying, but you can close your windows, bring in your pets, and cover your garden beds before the plane comes over.
The government sprayed over 200 biological and chemical tests over American cities for 20 years before anyone found out. And that’s just the ones they admit to. It sprayed a man’s grandfather with bacteria and then told the court it had legal immunity. It sprayed cadmium over a Black housing project from the rooftop and called it a “simulant.” It sprayed Agent Orange on Canadian soil and offered $20,000 in compensation. It sprays glyphosate over Indigenous food forests right now, today, every summer.
And these are just the programs we know of.
You can assume the pattern will continue, and what we’re told isn’t happening today will be revealed in 20 years when the next document dump or senate investigation happens.
Sources
1. Operation Sea-Spray: KQED, “The True Story of the Military’s Secret 1950 San Francisco Biological Weapons Test” (2025). Link
2. 239 open-air tests: “Open-Air Biowarfare Testing and the Evolution of Values,” PMC/NCBI. Link
3. 293 populated areas: Priceonomics. Link
4. NYC subway test: Business Insider (2015). Link
5. Operation LAC / St. Louis: Wikipedia; STLPR (2021); Protean Magazine (2022). Link
6. St. Louis radioactive particles: LiveScience (2012). Link
7. Missouri House Resolution No. 58. Link
8. Nevin lawsuit: Plainsite court records. Link
9. Cloud seeding states: Newsweek / GAO (2024). Link
10. House hearing “Playing God with the Weather”: House Oversight Committee (2025). Link
11. GAO weather modification report (2026). Link
12. Silver iodide toxicity: Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety (2016). Link
13. Weather Modification Reporting Act of 1972: NOAA. Link
14. Naled fact sheet: EPA. Link
15. Dorchester County bee kill: New York Times (2016). Link
16. “Like it’s been nuked”: Washington Post (2016). Link
17. Puerto Rico naled refusal: Fox News / AP (2016). Link
18. Naled kills bees, EU ban: The Guardian (2016). Link
19. Make Sunsets, 147 balloons: InsideClimate News (2025). Link
20. EPA demand letter to Make Sunsets: EPA (2025). Link
21. Make Sunsets Mexico ban: Reuters (2023). Link
22. CFB Gagetown Agent Orange: Canada.ca (DND archived report). Link
23. $20,000 ex gratia payment / $95.6M fund: Canada.ca; CBC (2024). Link
24. Agent Orange, Canadian Encyclopedia. Link
25. Ontario glyphosate spraying / First Nations: CBC (2025). Link
26. Serpent River protest: CBC (2025). Link
27. Métis Nation of Ontario statement. Link
28. Glyphosate and wildfire risk: CBC (2025). Link
29. Project 112/SHAD: VA Public Health. Link