An RNZ listener named Debbie sees her own story as an example of how easy it is to fall into a conspiracy.
She tells Wallace Chapman how internet misinformation turned her lifelong interest in clouds and plane trails into a dark obsession.
Photo: Dylan Hunter / Unsplash
Debbie says she's always been a "bit of a dreamer". Looking to the sky as an adult, she began to notice that the vapour trails left by planes seemed to be hanging around for longer than they did when she was a child.
Debbie started to google why this could be and discovered a community of people around the world curious about the very same thing.
"I got quite excited by that 'cause I thought 'well, there's other people out there who have noticed this so maybe I'm on to something.'"
When she read that these trails were placed by the military, Debbie began to believe it. Over the course of two years, she'd go online every so often to research the matter further.
"The more I read, the more I got stuck into it. Not only that, every time I clicked on a link there'd be other things that would interest me, as well, so I'd get sidetracked down these other little rabbit holes.
"It became so real to me… this is a real thing that there were these big machines in the air that were spraying aluminium and trying to alter the weather… they were trying to stop us being able to feed ourselves so we'd all have to be reliant on certain governments."
When Debbie started working at Auckland Airport, she thought she could now really get to the bottom of the mystery and started chatting to her colleagues about it.
"I think they thought I was a bit of a nutcase but I persisted and tried to find information about it.
"I couldn't understand why these things weren't getting reported… I couldn't understand why people didn't believe me because they were in the sky plain as day."
When people gave Debbie evidence that there was nothing sinister going on, she would just counter it with her own.
"I would just try and skew everything my way, and it was crazy, I didn't realise I was doing it.
"Then one day someone said to me 'i'm not going to talk to you anymore because you're not listening ... thats when I had the realisation that something was definitely wrong."
Debbie says she considered herself "pretty onto it" never been the victim of a scam. Yet still, she fell "hook, line and sinker" for a conspiracy theory.
She understands how entrenched people can get in their commitment to these ideas.
"I can understand how deeply they can go and how paralysing it is to your normal way of thinking.
"I would just try and skew everything my way, and it was crazy, I didn't realise I was doing it."
Debbie doesn't feel she was insane when her thinking departed from sense, she was in search of meaning.
"Embarrassing as it is, I can say I know I wasn't completely mad, more naive to begin with."
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