10 Conspiracy Theories People Actually Believe

Are the trails of vapour that passenger planes leave behind full of harmful chemicals being deployed over the United States? No, but that doesn't stop a huge number of people claiming exactly that.

This in spite of the fact that trails of water vapour inevitably appear once an aircraft gets above about 7,500 metres because of the temperature of the air and the impurities in engine exhaust that cause ice crystals to form.

In addition, any chemical dumped out of a plane more than seven kilometres up cannot possibly have any effect in the concentrations that would reach the ground.

Along with the non-starter of chemtrails even being a thing, no one seems to agree what the 'chemtrails' are actually for. Mind control? Mass poisoning? Climate engineering? There's no consensus about how chemtrails would benefit the shadowy cabal presumed to be in charge of them, but that doesn't stop the theory from spreading because a conspiracy theory doesn't need to be internally consistent to do its job.