At Mach 3, in twenty seconds, a rocket will travel 12 miles, which enough to get it out of the frame in 40 seconds. It is also certain, that this was not a single image: it was an image that represented at least several minutes of action. The author of the article happens to be an expert in time lapse photography.
I am not an expert on this. However, The Drive is a very well respected publication, and they published it live, with several updates in short order. Nothing that they wrote suggested it was a missile, and it is suspicious that the only images were from a time-lapse camera. They were also able to locate the specific helicopter at that exact location that was credited as responsible for the image.
It would be quite unimaginable that the helicopter and missile launch happened at the same time. Additionally, there are millions of people in the Greater Seattle area, some of whom were awake, and some of whom had smartphones. Yet, not a peep from anyone else, no blog posts, no articles in the local publications about this “incident” that do not reference this one picture.
Q has taught me to have a good amount of skepticism. He has mentioned the Hawaii missile, and he showed a picture of the Whidbey Island incident. However, he is not perfect. Taken together with the Drive article there is enough to convince me that the incident never occurred as you and others have portrayed it.
Having followed TWA flight 800 at the time, I have a deep skepticism of efforts to debunk what people see with their own eyes. If those missile pictures can be duplicated with a helicopter, I would love to see that done. Then I’ll consider the missile theory as having a different explanation.