On September 3, 2024, the editorial staff of Done received a report via WhatsApp asking to verify a video published on July 10 on Facebook. The video shows a boy dressed in uniform who introduces himself as a pilot of “an important European airline”, and who explains how “in these very months” there is “a climate conversion plan underway in order to destroy the local microclimate of individual regions and individual States”. This plan, you can hear in the video, would be aimed at “destroying small farmers, small breeders and small and medium-sized businesses and thus enriching large banks and multinationals”, and would be carried out thanks to “specific hydrocarbons” that they put “inside each individual tank”.
The caption superimposed on the video reads: “Repentant Italian pilot tells the truth about climate change.”
The video was born with satirical intent, but was later believed to be real.
The video was published for the first time on November 27, 2018 from the Facebook page “Io sono stanca”, which specifies in its bio that it is a satirical page, and that «nothing published reflects reality». The one in the video is not a real airplane pilot, but Mirko Bortolottothe owner of the Facebook page that creates satirical content.
In the satirical video, Bortolotto takes up the famous, completely unfounded, conspiracy theory of “chemtrails,” according to which the governments of various countries around the world or other entities are engaged in a secret program to spread chemical substances into the atmosphere via airplanes. This conspiracy theory hypothesizes various phantom motivations for this “spraying,” including climate control through military geoengineering experiments, manipulation of the weather, extermination of the civilian population, or vaccination of people without their knowledge.
