Mystery missile lauch off California coast

[aerius]

ABC News link

Mystery Missile: Launch of Unknown Missile Caught on Tape in California
Navy, Military Investigating Missile Video; No Agencies Claim Responsibility Yet

The mystery of a missile launch last night off the Southern California coast deepened today as U.S. military officials said they were still checking to see if the missile was one of theirs.

The unmistakable contrail of a missile streaking into the California sunset was captured on video last night by a KCBS news helicopter flying over Los Angeles at around 5 p.m. Pacific time.

The missile firing drew more attention when local news stations were told by Navy and Air Force officials that they did not launch a missile last night.

Flying above Los Angeles, the crew aboard the helicopter estimated the missile was fired approximately 35 miles west out to sea, north of Catalina Island.

The missile appeared to have been launched at sea, which prompted speculation that it had been launched by a U.S. Navy vessel.

However, Navy officials contacted by local news stations said they were unaware of a missile launch in that area. Contacted by ABC News, a Navy official said today they were still looking into the report, but, a preliminary check indicated it was not a Navy asset.

U.S. Northern Command said it's investigating. They say there was no launch last night from Vandenberg Air Force Base which is a regular launch point for the testing of missiles.

"NORAD and USNORTHCOM are aware of the unexplained contrail reported off the coast of Southern California yesterday evening," the agency said in a statement. "At this time, we are unable to provide specific details, but we are working to determine the exact nature of this event. We can confirm that there is no indication of any threat to our nation and we will provide more information as it becomes available."

Apparently there's a news conference about it going on right now but I have no access to TV.

[Broomstick]

CNN has a video

Looks like some of rocket/missile/whatever. US military denies they had a launch. The FAA says there were no civilian launches authorized.* I am certain US authorities are anxious to determine who did this.


* In the US civilians - both commercial interests and private hobbyists - are permitted to build and launch rockets. However, they are obligated to follow a large stack of rules, including those involving use of airspace. I recall one fine summer day I had to alter my flight plans after calling air traffic control and finding that a model rocket club had reserved a block of airspace along my intended flight path. The club had authorization to launch rockets up to 12,000 feet, or about 4,000 meters. That is by no means an upper limit. I am told that not many other countries permit this sort of thing.

[Cecelia5578]

Meh, probably one part of the military forgot to tell another part of the military what was going on.

Once, while doing morning PT at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, (CA Central Coast) we say a missile contrail from Vandenburg that looked pretty cool-all sorts of squiggly lines and curls.

Otherwise, maybe some geekier than thou tech billionaire who decided to send up a rather large model rocket?

[Solauren]

The first thing that jumped to mind are "Where were the Mythbusters?"

However, given the stack of regulations involved in private rocket launchers, and the Mythbusters (and their backers) following for such things, it's unlikely it was them.

However, I can't get the 'exploding water heater' out of my head.

Are the proper people sure it was a rocket, and not some kind of freak-accident?

[General Zod]

Are the proper people sure it was a rocket, and not some kind of freak-accident?

Freak accidents don't generally produce relatively clean contrails. Especially at sea.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Land-based SM-2 doing a test fire and the DoD and FAA are being hush-hush about it.

That's my bet.

[Lonestar]

It's off the coast of Southern California. Ten will get you twenty that it was a USN exercise and someone reflexively said "nuh-uh no missile launches from us!"

[Pelranius]

Apparently neither NORAD or NORTHCOM has a clue yet (though it's been ten minutes since I checked the news).

If it is one of ours, that doesn't bode well for intra government communications. Reminds me of the screwy statements coming out of Beijing after the 2007 ASAT test.

[FSTargetDrone]

Or not:

Mystery Solved? Missile Launch Could Be a Jet Contrail

Published November 09, 2010 | FoxNews.com



A mysterious vapor trail caught on camera has the military scrambling for answers -- but is it just a jet? On the left, a still image from KCBS video of the launch. On the right, a very similar event from Dec. 31, 2009 commonly believed to be an airplane.

A video that appears to show a missile launch off the coast of California is so far "unexplained" by anyone in the military, a Pentagon spokesman told reporters Tuesday -- but what seems mysterious could be nothing more than an airplane.

Federal officials do not consider the event a threat. And they aren't the only ones.

According to a post on ContrailScience.com, the visible exhaust from a jet engine, a trail of condensed water vapor called a contrail, resembles a missile trail when seen from some angles.

The confusion between a missile launch and a jet plane launch is caused by several common misconceptions, the site notes, explaining that the angle of launch, the direction of flight, and even the shape of the Earth can lead to the illusion. And indeed, when you look at certain images of jet launches, they do look a fair bit like missiles.

The site's author goes on to note other factors that could connect the unexplained launch to a jet engine. There's no no bright rocket flare, just a few flashes of sunlight, and a sunlit trail. Plus the unexplained craft is incredibly slow, the site notes, while rockets move incredibly fast.

Meteorologist Kevin Martin of the Southern California Weather Authority is a believer in the airplane theory, too.

"We see this often when the flights come at the right time, however, some people are just out to witness it at the right time," Martin told Examiner.com in Los Angeles. "We had strong winds up there as well as really cold temperatures from a passing storm system. This also had an area of upper level moisture ... where airliners fly."

And a senior military official told Fox News late Tuesday that indications are that the contrail "was more likely caused by an airplane than anything else because the other possibilities of rockets or missiles are turning up negative." But officials still aren't 100 percent sure, so the military is taking steps to review its missile inventory and make sure they're all accounted for.

A similar mystery event took place on Dec. 31, 2009, when a launch in the skies over Orange County mystified people. The Orange Country Register noted a few days later that the event was variously described as a rocket launch or jet contrails. ContrailScience.com argues that both events were simply planes -- seen from an unexpected angle, that is.

A Boeing spokesman could not immediately confirm this potential explanation for event. Meanwhile, military officials continue to puzzle it over.

The Missile Defense Agency told Fox News it did not launch any test missile last night that could explain the dramatic images. The Navy and the Air Force were also unable to offer an explanation.

"It does not appear that this was a regularly scheduled missile test," Lapan said. "Before a missile test the military sends notifications to mariners, airmen and air traffic controllers to stay clear of the area." And according to Lapan, it doesn't appear those warnings were sent.

ContrailScience.com's plane theory may explain why the military simply doesn't know what the so-called mystery missile was.

I'm going with it simply being an airliner or other jet. Or Iron Monger.

More pictures of this sort of thing at this site.

[FSTargetDrone]

Temporary page for the content of the "Contrail Science" page here, as their site is down from traffic.

[FSTargetDrone]

The explanation sounds a bit 'Swamp Gas/Weather Balloon' to me

Did you look at the referenced site at all? There doesn't appear to be anything like a fire plume at the base of the "missile" in this incident and there are numerous photos of known aircraft contrails taken from different directions that look just like the contrails here.

Another article from The Washington Post:

Mystery in sky over California may be plane as day

By John Pomfret

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, November 10, 2010; A02

A series of U.S. government agencies said Tuesday that they could not explain what created a vapor trail that lit up the sky Monday night over Southern California.

But a series of civilian experts said they could. It was not a missile, they said, as many conjectured, but an airplane.

Video posted online showed an object flying off the Pacific coast near Los Angeles, leaving a large condensation trail, or contrail, that turned pink in the setting sun. A news helicopter owned by KCBS, a CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, shot the video. At sunset, the contrail looked like one created by a missile launch.

That theory got legs once another CBS affiliate, KFMB in San Diego, showed the clip to Robert Ellsworth, a former deputy secretary of defense and ambassador to NATO, to get his thoughts. "It's spectacular. . . . It takes people's breath away," he said. He called the projectile "a big missile."

Reporters asked the Pentagon, the Air Force, the Navy, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. Northern Command and the Federal Aviation Administration what that thing in the evening sky was. But none of them knew.

NORAD did say the contrail was not the result of a foreign military launching a missile. NORAD added, reassuringly, that the United States was not in danger.

The FAA did not receive any reports of unusual sightings from pilots flying in the area, according to Col. David Lapan, a spokesman for the Defense Department.

The FAA said that private businesses would need to apply for a license to launch a missile and that none had. It also said that a review of radar tapes of the region revealed no fast-moving unidentified objects.

Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, told reporters and editors at The Washington Post that it "wasn't a Navy missile." He declined to go into more detail. He did, however, appear to be smiling when he said it.

Said John Pike, a defense and aerospace expert who runs GlobalSecurity.org: "This thing is so obviously an airplane contrail, and yet apparently all the king's horses and all the king's men can't find someone to stand up and say it." He added, "I guess the president's out of town."

The object, Pike said, was moving too slowly to be a missile, adding: "There's a reason that they're called rockets."

It looked like a missile launch, he said, because of an optical illusion that made the contrail appear as though it started on the ground and zoomed straight up.

In reality, he said, the contrail began on the horizon and ran parallel to the ground.

"It was an unusually clear day," he said. So what looked like a missile launch 35 miles off the coast of Los Angeles was actually the contrail of a jet that stretched 300 miles into the distance, he said.

"At the end of the day, you really have to go with the simplest explanation," he added.

Pike was joined in his opinion by geeks and experts. Web traffic was so intense on one site, ContrailScience.com, that its owner had to send visitors to an overflow site.

ContrailScience pointed to several similar incidents in the past in which jets were mistaken for missiles. One occurred on Dec. 31, 2009, close to the location of Monday's incident over the Channel Islands. On the ArmsControlWonk site, Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said: "There are multiple hypotheses for the contrail seen near Los Angeles. But the most likely one is pretty boring: It's a jet . . . viewed from a weird angle."

Lapan said the Defense Department and other agencies with aviation and space expertise continue to look into the cause of the contrail.

"If any new information comes to light in the coming days," he added, "we will update the press and public."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

[Edi]

All the bullshit has been sent here

[FSTargetDrone]

It's official:

Pentagon says vapor trail from an aircraft, not a missile

by Jim Mannion Jim Mannion – Wed Nov 10, 1:47 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Pentagon said Wednesday it is satisfied an aircraft -- and not a missile -- was the source of a vapor trail off Los Angeles this week that sparked fears of a mystery missile launch.

It took the Pentagon nearly two days to reach that conclusion after examining video of the plume, FAA radar tracks, its own missile launch detection systems and canvassing the US government.

"There is no evidence to suggest it was anything other than an airplane," said Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.

The vapor trail was videotaped by a KCBS News helicopter as it arced into the sky off Los Angeles on Monday evening, giving the appearance of a projectile rapidly moving through the air.

Speculation that it may have been a missile launch intensified on Tuesday after the Pentagon said it was unable to explain the source of the vapor trail.

Among the new evidence cited Wednesday by the Pentagon to conclude that it was an aircraft -- not a missile -- vapor trail are FAA radar images of the area, which detected several aircraft but no rockets, Lapan said.

"The FAA, when they looked at the radar replay for that time period, they went out some distance from the coast, and identified that they had no fast moving unidentified objects in that area at that time.

"They did have commercial airliners in that area. None of those commercial airliners reported anything unusual," he said. "So all of those things point again to the fact that we believe this is an aircraft condensation trail."

Until now, the Pentagon had been reluctant to confirm what outside experts were saying: that what the video had recorded was a common optical illusion.

Experts said that the vapor trail, or contrail, of an aircraft approaching the observer often looks like it is rising vertically into sky because the end of the tail is hidden by the curvature of the Earth.

"It's a jet plane contrail, obviously," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.

He said no sign of a fiery exhaust was evident in the video, and that its movement was too slow and made changes of direction that were uncharacteristic of a missile trajectory.

But he faulted the Pentagon's halting, unforthcoming public response to the sighting for magnifying perceptions that either it was inept or it was hiding something.

"That's the mystery -- why I'm spending 750 billion dollars a year and that's the best I can get out of them?"

On Tuesday, the North American Aerospace Command, which is responsible for protecting the skies over the United States and Canada, issued a statement saying there was no evidence of a launch of a foreign military missile.

The command also gave assurances that there was no threat to US homeland.

But the military's initial response left open other possibilities, like a US military or civilian launch of some kind.

In Moscow, Major General Alexander Vladimirov, vice president of Russia's board of military experts, told the Interfax news agency the television image "looks like the launch of a missile from a submarine."

"Most likely we are talking about the launch of a Trident-2 ballistic missile from an Ohio submarine," Vladimirov was quoted as saying.

"There is reason to believe this was an unsanctioned launch of a missile from a submarine. If this is so, then many questions arise about the condition of the US armed forces," he said.

Lapan denied that the Pentagon's fumbling response to the vapor trail sighting was because of an attempt to cover for a secret, or "black" operation.

"That was one of the questions we asked yesterday," he said.

"That didn't take any more time than anything else. The time was canvassing all these different agencies for whatever information they might have, making sure everybody was certain this was something they didn't know about."

Contrail Science is also pretty sure of the specific flight, a regularly scheduled one:

Note to the media – since this was almost certainly Flight AWE808 from Hawaii to Phoenix, why not have a camera crew somewhere in the vicinity (does not need to be exact, or a chopper), at around 5-5:30 today, and if the weather is right you’ll see the same trail again. (or check the web cam)

Note to everyone else – If you have photos of the Nov 8 contrail from any angle, please email them to uncinus@gmail.com

[weemadando]

Assuming that this wasn't a plane (which it would seem it is) and the Russians are correct (Trident launch) and the US had another major incident (after the USAF debacle), just how bloody would the hallways at the Pentagon be getting right about now?

On another tack, just what happened to that space-plane that was launched a few months back? [/tinfoil hat].

[FSTargetDrone]

I think Major General Alexander Vladimirov needs to get off the conspiracy wagon and look at the pictures.

[Sarevok]

On another tack, just what happened to that space-plane that was launched a few months back? [/tinfoil hat].

The X-37 ? It completed its mission and landed recently.