I have flown in to LA from Honolulu many times. We passed over Catalina a lot. But we were heading East. That missile was heading West by North.
You’re right.
and straight up
Frankly, I find the scramble in the MSM to spin this as a combination airliner and optical illusion, and the willingness of people to believe it in defiance of all common sense, as disturbing as the launch itself.
“That missile was heading West by North.”
That was the impression that I got.
I also noted a small dot at the front end of the trail, as the source.
Has anyone magnified it?
I also noted the pulsing look of the trail.
The argument is that the direction is an optical illusion, because the contrail spreads out, and your mind puts the fatter part of the contrail closer to you.
What they think is that the contrail had actually spread out as the plane flew from west to east, and that’s why it looks like it comes up from the ground — because you are seeing the contrail go over the horizon.
I tried looking again at the video to force this perspective, and it is possible to see it this way, but not easy.
Note also that in the video, the object doesn’t really appear to be moving much. Your brain again might think this shows an object has crested it’s climb and is now moving dead away, but it is just as likely that it is simply a slow-moving airplane coming toward you (with the sun glinting off it suggesting a flame).
Also remember that the video is shot on a highly processed digital device, that is trying to fill in what it expects from the pixels it captures. 99.9% of the time this digital processing works fine, but it can make some pretty spectacular changes in the images (I remember my camera connecting a performer’s leg to a ladder they were standing on once, and it looked like she was a one-legged trapeze artist for a second).
So far as I can find out, there are no known missle types that would not show up on the radar if the missle was actually launched from the original speculated location (off catalina island). And it is highly unlikely a missle flying in that location could be missed by our satellite technology.
I expect that in the next day or two, some enterprising person will figure out where the video was shot from, and overlay the actual flight data from 808 and show how the contrail follows the path that plane took as seen from that location.
What I wonder is why the helicopter taking the picture didn’t go ahead and fly closer to see if they could find the “launch point”. My guess is they couldn’t, because as they moved the contrail moved. You can see that in the different video clips. My guess is if you tried to triangulate those different videos, the “start point” would be in wildly different locations — consistant with the start actually being over the horizon.
