Have you ever noticed, set against the glorious blue backdrop of a lovely Bermuda sky, high-flying jets with long trails of white smoke behind them?Why are they even over our skies, and who is sending them? Certainly it’s not the Bermuda Government.Anyway, I learned something about them last week when I was in Canada.Brace yourselves ... it’s scary.Now, to be accurate, what I learned is a theory, a conspiracy theory actually.We know conspiracy theories need no facts to support them — just a plausible explanation and the willingness of many people to believe in them. Take the New World Order.This conspiracy theory says a group of international elites controls and manipulates governments, industry, and media organisations worldwide through the central banking system.They are said to have funded armies to bring down governments, and caused most of the major wars of the last 200 years. As a result they have a grip on the world economy, causing inflation and depressions at will in part through their operatives, said to be in high positions in government and industry.Genetic modification of most of our foods is another conspiracy theory. Believers think corn and wheat have been changed deliberately, to cause cancer. Theorists believe the US Food and Drug Administration know this yet recommend we still eat GMO wheat. Why? Because they are in bed with the bio techs who make the drugs to keep us alive.As long as the consumer continues to eat at the levels suggested by the FDA, the incidence of obesity will continue to rise and the medical industry will continue to profit. Thus, it would be self-defeating for the medical industry to produce a cure for the many services that they depend on to generate revenue from unhealthy dietary practices of their customers.These theories have nothing to do with the big blue sky and the long line of smoke that spews from those jets. While in Canada last week, I listened to a station that delves into things like UFOs, Roswell, Area 51 and ... chem trails, which is the theorists’ term for those jet planes and their stream of white smoke.My father-in-law is an avid listener.“A lot of people believe it is a controlled population method,” he suggested. “Whenever chem trails are spoken about, the talk back callers light up the switch board.”What exactly is a chem trail and why are so many people absolutely sure they are deadly?When a jet engine is spewing out hot, humid air into an atmosphere that is cold and has low vapour pressure, the result is a long white cloud of condensation. The water vapour coming out of the engine quickly condenses into water droplets and then crystallises into ice. The ice crystals are the clouds that form behind the engine. These are contrails. That’s scientific fact.Chem trails come from those same planes in the same way, and actually look similar to the untrained eye, but the difference is, they last as a trailing tail a little longer. How much longer and where you go to get a trained eye, I don’t know.Nonetheless, the conspiracy theorists believe they are full of poisons deliberately placed there by global entities trying to control things such as the weather patterns and populations due to a fear of global overcrowding.If it’s working so well, the US and Canada would be low on the world’s life expectancy charts. right? Well, I researched that. And of all the countries on the planet on the CIA World Fact Book of 2011, the US comes in a lowly 51st ... about on par with Kuwait!Wow ... these theorists may be onto something.If it’s truly the land of opportunity and greatest on the planet ... why are its inhabitants dying so young?As for Canada, the pure air of the great white north help fight through the poisonous sprays it seems. Their life expectancy places them 13th on the list of 197 nations. By way of comparison, Bermuda is 21st.But wait ... aren’t the CIA World Fact Book arch-conspirators? Intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, Russia’s KGB, Great Britain’s MI6, the German BND and Israel’s Mossad, are common elements in conspiracy theories precisely because they participate in covert operations.So what do we have in the way of proof of chem trails?Well, nothing, especially as life expectancy keeps rising because of modern medicine and scientific research groups (including government ones). These are facts that conspiracy theorists continually ignore since they don’t fit in their worldview.So what do you believe?I’m having a tough time working out what is scarier the potential truth to the theories or the fact that we live among nutcases who concoct and believe this stuff!