Mystery Missle

From CBS News:



Hooooly crap.

But wait? Is it just a contrail from a jet?

From the New York Post:

The mysterious vapor trail spotted off the southern coast of California was “more likely caused by an airplane than anything else,” a senior military official told Fox News Channel Tuesday, though another official said authorities continue to investigate to rule out a possible missile launch.

The contrail caught on video by a news helicopter “was more likely caused by an airplane than anything else, because the other possibilities of rockets or missile are turning up negative,” the senior military official said.

I call bullcrap. Look at the video. If a plane made that, then it was on fire. You can clearly see flames shooting out of the back. But what's curious is that there's no word about where the missile went. Did it go into space? Did it fall into the ocean? How far did it go?

I see two major possibilities:

1. What we're seeing is a homemade missile that somebody launched. A homemade missile probably couldn't have gone very far and would've fallen into the ocean. But then who? And why?

2. What we're seeing is a missile fired - possibly accidentally - by the United States. If it was an accidental launch, it would have been detonated remotely over the ocean. And that would also explain why NORAD and the Navy are saying, "well, golly gee ... uh... we didn't have nuthin' to do with no missile..." If it was, as the analyst in the video speculates, a test firing to show our capability off to foreign powers by the president, well, that just seems a bit ... brazen ... doesn't it? "Hey! Looky what we can do! Check out our cool toy!" That doesn't make much sense because, after all, we've had these capabilities since the Cold War. Why show it off to Indonesia, of all people?

And there's another possibility:

3. What we're seeing is a foreign power demonstrating their capabilities to us. Maybe somebody parked a sub off of Los Angeles and fired off a missile just to show that they could. If that's the case, we'll probably never know about it, but it's the most scary scenario.

And there's this from CBSNews:

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, issued a statement jointly with the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, saying that the contrail was not the result of a foreign military launching a missile. It provided no further details.

"We can confirm that there is no threat to our nation, and from all indications this was not a launch by a foreign military," the statement said. "We will provide more information as it becomes available."

"Nothing to see here. Move along."

Yeah. okay.