Chemtrails Health Effects worrying to Arapawa's Goat Lady, Betty Rowe
April 2005 Interview by John and Melody Anderson
Arapawa Island, Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand

In 1969, Walt and Betty Rowe sold up their lifetime's possessions and left their dream home in Richboro, Pennsylvania to bring their young family to New Zealand in search of clean air and seclusion and a life "far from pollution, Vietnam, nuclear war and television". In 1972 they found themselves on remote Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds with dreams of an idyllic Swiss Family Robinson lifestyle of back-to-basics self sufficiency.

Their island paradise would soon test their resolve and challenge their skills of survival and endurance. As they responded to the ruthless demands of their rugged wilderness home, the survival of another island resident became an increasingly pressing and passionate cause.

The wild Arapawa goats were thought to have been left on the island by Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century and are suspected to be the last survivors of the 'Olde English Milche Goat' breed, common in the Britain of the time.

The Rowes embarked on what was to become a 30 year crusade to save the Arapawas from extinction at the hands of the Department of Conservation, whose stated intention was to exterminate the animals. They eventually established the Arapawa Wildlife Sanctuary, home to many of the goats who were successfully captured and now live within the safe confines of perimeter fencing.

A talented author, Betty documented their adventures in her 1988 book 'Arapawa, Once Upon an Island', a truly engaging read. The book remains in print and can be purchased directly from her on the island, the proceeds helping to maintain the sanctuary's facilities.

Walt Rowe died suddenly in 2002, leaving her to wrestle with the rigours of running the sanctuary alone. The goats continue to be bred by Betty and are gifted in small numbers to selected refuges around New Zealand and overseas. The few who survive outside the safety of the sanctuary regularly run the gauntlet of DOC shooters who still visit the island to cull their numbers. Through her continued lobbying and struggles with government bureaucracy, Betty is credited with almost single handedly saving the rare Arapawa Breed and is still affectionately known to many, as 'the Goat Lady'.

Betty's story is both fascinating and inspiring and from the moment we arrived we were caught up in the magic of the island and charmed by the beguiling personalities of Betty's animals. But we had not come to talk to Betty about her goats. We were there to talk about something with far more power to eradicate life on Arapawa than the wild goats who inhabit its bush clad slopes...

We were there to talk to Betty about Chemtrails - and about the chronic ill health effects she now suffers and to which she attributes to the constant aerosol spraying occurring over the beautiful Marlborough Sounds and surrounding areas...

Interview:

Betty had told us that she had first seen Chemtrails in the year 2000, 28 years after she and husband Walt first came to the island in 1972. We began the interview by asking Betty if she remembered the first one she saw...

BR: Oh yes. Oh completely yes. Sitting on the couch out there looking out the front window, and of course, the bay. I had read an article about them, oh, several days before that. There had been an article in a magazine (Ghost Riders in the Sky, Investigate Magazine, December 2000), I read the article with interest and noted the pictures and so forth. Then several days later as I say, we were sitting on the couch looking out across the bay and low and behold, there they were. I said to my husband ‘this is exactly what I just read about’. I went and got the article and the pictures and we compared and sure enough... That was the first time I saw them.

MNZ: Though they could have been there before that...

BR: Exactly.

MNZ: But you just didn’t notice them?

BR: Well probably not. Or I would have probably thought like so many people do, that they’re just air traffic, contrails - and so forth. But having just read that article I immediately thought that this is the same thing I just read about. And I’ve seen them regularly since then. On a regular basis. Sometimes every day, every single day. Even Christmas Day.

MNZ: So how many would you see at one time?

BR: It varied. Sometimes it was two. It was usually... well that’s when I was just beginning to notice them. I didn’t realise that they spread out at first, I mean it was only under observation that I realised what they eventually did, that they weren’t just straight lines in the sky.

What it reminded me... you remember, well you might not, maybe not in your era, but the old schoolteachers used to have an instrument that they put pieces of chalk, five pieces of chalk into it and they would draw the lines across the blackboard when they were teaching music. To put the notes and so forth on it and they would draw these parallel lines across. Well that’s what it reminded me of because it was so parallel. They seemed to be almost as if someone had measured them out and that’s how I first noticed them. Because as I say they were straight lines, such straight lines and so parallel with one another. And then as I observed them I realised that they began to feather out or plume, whichever you want to call it. And, and then further observation, I noticed that these plumes joined together and you would have maybe four or five of these plumes and eventually that the sky was occluded where there’d been a blue sky, suddenly became a cloud bank.

And further observation, I started seeing things that looked like that these lines crossing, making crosses in the sky and tic tac toe sort of formations and then some I saw were vertical. This was all over a period of observation. Because at first to me it just looked like lines in the sky. But it wasn’t until you know, you really watched them to see what they would do.

MNZ: So most of them were roughly North/South?

BR: North/South, South/North...

MNZ: South North right, and some of them in order to make a tic tac toe pattern would have had to have been East/West?

BR: So it appears. Occasionally you’d get one going North/South. Most of the time it was coming from the South to the North. And on some occasions, very few, you would actually get one going in each direction. One going from the North to the South and one going from the South to the North at the same time, passing one another. Well that’s what it looked like from down here of course.

MNZ: Now in amongst these ‘Chemtrails’, you also saw normal disappearing contrails, sometimes at the same time?

BR: Yes...

MNZ: That’s highly unusual isn’t it? If the trails are due to atmospheric conditions, they should all be making the same trail.

BR: Yes, absolutely. Unless it was course, people say well because they’re at different heights and you know what you’re seeing are the long prolonged ones were explained as being, because the airplane was at a different height, and not knowing that much about it... or at first I was inclined to say “well you know maybe that’s the case”.

But it wasn’t long after I’d seen the first one in the year 2000 that I became ill. I became very, very ill. To the point where I thought I was going to die, I was so ill. Everything in my body seemed to break down. I couldn’t breathe, I had to sit up in a chair for three months every night because I couldn’t lay down. I just coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed.

I had terrible pains in my head, shocking, screaming pains in my head and they would shoot through... I thought I was having a stroke at first because of the intensity of the pain and the fact that it was in my head. I thought ‘Oh my gosh you know I’ve got a blood clot or I’m having a stroke or something’. And I still get them and sometimes they’re quite intense, it’s enough to make you, you know, sort of (gasp) take a deep breath and...

MNZ: And this was unusual for you to have these sorts of conditions?

BR: Oh yes, I’ve always been extremely healthy. I didn’t even have a doctor. I’d been on the island all those years and didn’t even have a doctor.

I had a herbalist that I went to and she said I was her star pupil, her star patient, or client, whichever you want to call it, because I’d only been to her three times in about 25 years. So I was extremely healthy. And then suddenly I just fell apart. Completely fell apart.

MNZ: And you attribute that, your healthy difficulties, to the spraying?

BR: Well it certainly happened at the same time. Now I don’t know if the spraying was taking place prior to that. I suppose it’s a possibility it was and I just had, my mind wasn’t tuned into the fact that this is what I was observing in the sky. I don’t remember observing anything like that. But, they could have been going on longer.

MNZ: The earliest we’ve heard of is the year 2000 over Wellington. - which is not very far from here.

BR: Not very far at all.

MNZ: So anything visible from here would probably be visible from Wellington. Would pass over Wellington.

BR: Well I’ve often wondered if perhaps Wellington wasn’t a target for them laying them out here, with the wind conditions out here they would (move) very quickly into Wellington area.

MNZ: And when exactly was it that you had the health problems with these things?

BR: Very early on, it was probably... I got sick about three days after I first saw them. I started to feel ill and got this terrible cough and at night I’d just be laying in bed it was just (makes terrible wheezing sounds)... you could hear it. Like somebody playing a bad violin, just wheezing wheezing wheezing all the time, And even when I tried to stop it and not do it, Walt could hear it. He was lying on the other side of the bed and could hear this deep wheezing coming from my chest.

And then as I say, I got these intense pains in my head and every joint in my body hurt. It seemed like every single joint hurt from the tiniest little knuckles right to the knees, hips and everything like that. I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. I mean I’d always been very fit and very mobile, you know, but I could not even get myself out of bed and I couldn’t turn over in bed at night because it was so painful. And to get out of bed in the morning I had to try to roll over, with the help of Walt, onto my left side. And then I would sometimes be (gasp) gasping with pain and he would have to help me, sort of pull me out of bed and get me up onto my feet. It was like I was an invalid in a matter of weeks.

MNZ: Did you seek medical help at this time?

BR: No. I went to... let me see now, no, because I don’t believe in taking a lot of drugs and things like that - I never did... I’m just trying to put it all into context. I think I went to my herbalist and talked to her about it. I didn’t realise the enormity of it.

I thought I had the flu, a very, very bad case of flu. And I’d heard about people having flu for... one woman told me her brother had had the flu for 14 weeks. And I thought well ‘that’s most peculiar. How can you have the flu for 14 weeks? You know, you’d be dead or something’. And then I heard a lot about different people having these prolonged illnesses. Everybody was saying it was the flu, the flu, some terrible Chinese version or something like that. You know how they have these different flu’s that come along every year? And I had always resisted getting any flu injections and anything like that... you’re putting things into your body that don’t belong there really.

So to the best of my recollection I did not seek medical advice.  And when I did finally, eventually seek medical advice because my family felt that I needed to, because I wasn’t getting any better, I was getting worse if anything, I went to the doctor and the first thing they told me was that I had asthma. And I said ‘well, I’ve never had asthma in my life’. You know, and they fitted me out with a ventilator, is that what they call them, ventilators, puffer?  Which did nothing, absolutely nothing. So I gave that up as a bad joke. And then they wanted to give me steroids and I said ‘absolutely no’. Because by this time I think I’d become a little bit more aware of the whole Chemtrail, or aerosol, whichever you prefer to call it, the whole problem that was... I’d been doing some reading and researching on my own, trying to find out about it and... oh and I called the gentleman who had written the article that I’d read initially, that was it.

MNZ: Will Thomas?

BR: No that was Ian Wishart.

MNZ: That was a Will Thomas article.

BR: Yes, well he based it on that, but I rang Ian and talked to him about it and he gave me the name of another person. He said the chap you want to talk to is a chap up in Auckland so I rang him and talked to him. And one thing just led to another. And so I was becoming aware that this was not the flu, I didn’t have the flu and there were times when I said to my husband ‘I don’t know whether to say goodnight or goodbye’ because I didn’t think I was going to survive the night.

MNZ: So how was Walt’s health at this time?

BR: Walt’s health was... well he seemed to be a lot better than I did, that’s for sure, and of course, in the finish Walt died. Very suddenly. Walked in the house and died. Everybody thought if anything was going to happen it was going to be to me, because I was the one who was so ill. And I was ill for, well, a couple of years, a couple of years. I was diagnosed with M.E., Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or the various names that it’s known by and I went along with what my herbalist had given me to take because I refused to put any more chemicals into my body, because I thought if I was having problems with chemicals in my body now, the last thing I should do is put more chemicals into it. That’s why I resisted anything that, any pharmaceuticals of any sort, drugs.

I got to the point I couldn’t get off and on a boat. I mean, I was almost an invalid in many ways. And of course, there was very little I could do around here and living a lifestyle like this, you have to be reasonably fit. Being in a remote area, all transportation’s by boat. I could get off and on a boat, with great difficulty, if the tide was high. If the tide was low I couldn’t get on and off at all. Because I couldn’t make those stretches that were the necessary movements to do it, to get off and on and sometimes I’d have to have two or three people helping me. Whereas before I’d hop on the boat, scramble up, you know, I was fine. But for a couple of years I was almost an invalid.

And then just before Walt died I slowly began, well not to recover, but to gain some of my strength back and. But I still have periods of extreme fatigue now. There were a lot of little symptoms aside from the major ones that were so obvious, the wheezing and the coughing and the thickness in the back of my throat that I described as having a wad of bubble gum in the back of my throat which almost precluded even swallowing sometimes. I can remember almost choking on a vitamin tablet that I was trying to swallow and it wouldn’t go through this phlegm, this wad in the back of my throat and I nearly... I choked and spluttered and carried on and finally got it up again. And then there were things like skin rashes. Extreme itching of my eyes, constant runny nose, ulcers on my tongue, strange rashes all over my body, you know, swellings, couple of lumps coming up under my skin. All sorts of peculiar little things. I’m sort of hard pressed to think of them all at the moment. But it seemed to hop around my body from one... from the extreme pains on the top of my head that took my breath away to the fact that I couldn’t even walk because the soles of my feet felt like I’d been fire walking or something, they were so sore and so tender. And it would just as I say, travel around my body and my glands went up. You might even be able to see...

MNZ: It’s a little bit swollen there, yeah. Does it feel painful now?

BR: Yes. My glands all went up in my neck and under my arms, I had big lumps under my arms. So my glandular system seemed to be affected from it.

MNZ: You noticed the animals were affected also...

BR: Yes I had a lot of sick animals. When I got sick a lot of my animals got sick. Thirteen of my goats died, two of them went blind and four lost all their hair. The blind goat... goats have a... they don’t have a round pupil, they have a letter box shape pupil.

MNZ: Right

BR: And the pupil, the edges of the pupil were all serrated. Like someone had gone with pinking shears along the outside of the pupil. One of my goats Tralee, her joints swelled up very, very badly.

Noel the goat, had a horn, one of her horns just, I don’t know what you would call it. The horn instead of going back out of her skull just drooped down the side of her head so that the horn was lying down the side of her face. And eventually we had to put her down because we didn’t know what to do for her. The vet didn’t know what to do for her so we put her down. The young man who shot her for us said that her head was full of yellow liquid. He said he’d never seen anything like it. He was most surprised about all that. Instead of the normal blood or whatever it is, I’ve never witnessed it so I don’t know what it looks like but... he said her head was full of yellow liquid.

MNZ: And you’ve never heard of anything like that?

BR: No. No I haven’t.

MNZ: Nor since?

BR: No. None of the other horns, nothing visible on any of the other horns that I’ve seen from any of the goats. But the goats... it varies with the goats. Some of the goats got very sick and they would be ill. Diarrhoea and things like that. Or they’d waste, they’d sort of waste a bit, no matter how much you fed them or you could drench them in case it was worms or something like that. But they still were suffering from ill stress, they just were not doing well at all. And there didn’t seem to be anything that you give them or do for them that would... We took a couple of them into the vet to see what... I think we even had one of them autopsied. But nothing showed up. Some of this is not 100 percent clear in my memory because I was so ill myself, but I do recall that we had one little goat autopsied and something showed up in the liver, there was some abnormality with the liver. What else did we do?

Oh a lot of abortions. When the does were pregnant we had a lot of abortions. Or the babies would only live for a short time. They seemed to be all right when they were born, a week later they were dead. Or there were a lot of slipped kids. I’d go out in the shed in the morning and there’d be maybe two little foetuses on the floor of the shed that had been slipped during the night.

MNZ: And there’d been no other spraying around here, agricultural spraying or...

BR: Oh no. No no. No we did everything organically here or in the immediate vicinity of the sanctuary.

MNZ: But you don’t use a lot of chemicals?

BR: We don’t use any. Except when we drench the goats. That’s the only time we would use a chemical when we drench them for worms. But other than that there was no chemicals used. We farmed, our garden was organic and our hens were free-range hens. And we had good diets, vegetarian diets. So you know, basically we should have been the picture of health.

MNZ: When was it you noticed the residue, that seemed to relate to the Chemtrails, around the property?

BR: Well I had noticed that... I didn’t think anything of it I thought it was just sort of like salt spray clinging to things, and the area up behind the house, the hill behind the house, well it’s quite an extensive one, you might even call it a small mountain I don’t know. So many people remarked about the colour. It was all brown. It was just all brown. And all the trees next to the house that I had planted and I had a lot of fruit trees.

There were Lilies, everywhere, because this place was called the Lily Valley. There were fruit trees and Lilies and flowers all sorts of things. It’s just barren now. Totally barren. Everything was wiped out. The trees all turned brown. It looked like somebody had just been standing in front of them and spraying with Roundup or something, some sort of spray. They were just totally brown, the colour of this table here. Some of them are just recovering now from it. And as I say, I lost my Lemon Tree, my Feijoa, my Lime, everything just gone. Completely gone. And the Lilies which are almost indestructible, were totally wiped out. Totally wiped out.

And I had photographs with pictures of the Lilies and they were all in bloom, they were absolutely beautiful and every one of them turned brown. People would come and they would say ‘oh this is natural die off’ (laughs).

MNZ: This was just localised around this area?

BR: Well basically yeah. I mean, at that point I didn’t know what was... I hadn’t talked to the neighbours about it - I hadn’t spoken with the neighbours about it. Because I didn’t know what sort of phenomenon I was dealing with myself. It wasn’t only until I had done more research, talked to more people and started looking up things on the computer and so forth that I realised that this was something more than just salt spray that was doing all this damage and many, many people said to me, coming to the bay on numerous occasions over the years ‘we’ve never seen the bay look like this before’.

BR: But they never went away. These drops just stayed there. Usually after the rain’s done and over with the drops evaporate and so forth. But the next morning these drops were all there, still on the window. But there was no rain you see. But that was the impression you got. So I thought it was just salt spray because there had been a bad storm. So I went out with some window cleaner, or whatever it was and I tried to clean it. I think I might have just used hot soapy water to get the salt spray off. And all that happened was that the window just went into a sort of a purple, purply blue... smear is what it was. Like when you see an oily puddle, a puddle of water with oil in it or something. That’s what the windows looked like. So I said to Walt ‘well I can’t get this off’. And I think he went out with a razor blade to see if he could scrape it off if it was dried salt. And that didn’t work, the only way we could get it off was with a waterblaster - at close quarters. We had to take a waterblaster to it.

MNZ: And there’s no other explanation for that...

BR: Not that I know of. It was the day after that it all happened - where everything died. The Lilies were all brown, the trees were all brown, everything was brown.

BR: These little filaments that collect on the fenceposts and on the fence wires and things, they’re sometimes all over the place, they’re in the sheds, they’re everywhere. They‘re in corners, you know places where dust and webs do collect, there’s no doubt about that. But these are different, they’re not cobwebs, they’re not circular like cobwebs, they’re in little sort of squares or rectangles and all sort of joined together. Some of them can be quite large, the size of maybe an envelope, a small envelope, or they can just be a few strands. But they’re very long. Some of them are very long and just like a great big long thread of this white stuff. So I just went around with a clean cotton bud and collected them and put them in a syringe that I had, without the needle of course, because it was clean, I had got it from the vet and put them in there and sent them off. They were just collected on the fence down here in front of the house.

BR: Yeah, of course I’m in a situation where I can just look out and see it. Where people in town, they’ve got trees and power lines and goodness knows what, you know. I’m in a very remote area where I can see what’s happening. Where a lot of people can’t see it or don’t bother to look up or out. And maybe I was the same, before that fateful night where I sat down on the couch and looked out across the bay and there they were.

MNZ: Why this area?

BR: I have no idea really. As I said, I had a theory that perhaps they were targeting Wellington, but that was just a theory. I have no hard evidence of any kind to put on that. I’ve thought perhaps that because we’re in such a remote area too that it wouldn’t be noticed, there weren’t that many people out here to notice it. But they’re doing it in more populated areas now too. I mean I’ve seen them, when I’ve been in Blenheim, I’ve seen them in Picton. Friends in Levin have seen them. People in Auckland have seen them, people in Wellington have seen them. But why, I don’t know. Whether it’s military or... I don’t know.

MNZ: But you don’t think they’re trying to save the planet?

BR: No. If they are they’re going about in it the wrong way I’d say.