Posted on 11/10/2010 12:27:27 AM PST by Corky Boyd
Network news and the internet were abuzz with the report and video by Los Angeles CBS affiliate KCBS of a reported missile launch late Monday afternoon -- around 5 PM. Both the Air Force and the Navy denied they had any missiles launches at the time. According to CBS News the Defense Department remains baffled.
"Nobody within the Department of Defense that we've reached out to has been able to explain what this contrail is, where it came from," Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said. "So far, we've come up empty with any explanation."
And they go on:
"The FAA told CBS News that they ran radar replays of a large area west of Los Angeles based on media reports of the location of a possible missile launch, but they did not reveal any fast moving unidentified targets in that area. The FAA also did not receive any reports of any unusual sightings from pilots in the area."
"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."
A search for flights that could have left a contrail led me to US Air’s flight 808 from Honolulu to Phoenix. The flight took off from Honolulu at 10:06 AM HST, passed over Catalina Island at 5:03 PM PST....
(Excerpt) Read more at islandturtle.blogspot.com ...
I’m well aware of what contrails are, thanks. I have studied them comprehensively over many years in the battles with chemtrailers.
It’s important to remember that water vapor is invisible, and that when the ice crystals form at high altitudes it is a sublimation process. That is, the water vapor sublimes directly to ice and then directly back to water vapor. It never goes through the intermediate liquid water stage.
Your wiki article is a bit incomplete. Contrails can actually occur at all altitudes with varying levels of persistence and they can form at various distances from the engine from immediately after to well after. Numerous photos show this.
Here’s a cool WW2 study:
http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/reports/1942/naca-wr-l-474.pdf
Where are all of the airline pilot’s comments and photos of this big old rocket that took off well within their view?
Where are all the airlne pilot’s comments on the boards about an unannounced rocket launch along their airways?
Should have been a bunch of pilots hollering and taking movies and photos, along with lots of passengers.
Perhaps we could check with US Air Pilots laundry service for conclusive evidence?
Not when they're climbing, and not below 18000 feet, they don't. And their rate of climb doesn't exceed 5000 feet per minute. (Max legal speed below 18000 feet is 250 kts.)
ML/NJ
There are several popular pilot’s boards and airplane nut boards. AFAIK, there were no comments about an unannounced big old rocket launch.
This cr*# sounds just like TWA 800 nonsense...why do We the People have to pay taxes to be peed on and told its raining....
How do you know there weren’t a dozen contrails? The video and photos cover a narrow area and a narrow time frame.
Also, different airliners make different sized trails.
Some, like the 747, can make spectacular huge twisting contrails as shown in the photos I have posted.
Some only make short, skinny trails.
Older engines which pollute more tend to create the more spectacular contrails.
I wonder what altitude you think a flight from Honolulu to Phoenix might be at when it passes near Los Angeles.
ML/NJ
Target identified as missle....where have we seen this before?
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.
The video was focusing on one, so naturally you only see one, and so do I.
What that has to do with whether it’s a rocket or an airliner, I don’t know.
Still betting on an airliner, though.
If it was a contrail from a jet flying from Honolulu, that “corkscrew near the ground” is actually a contrail at 30,000 feet hundreds of miles away that has been there for maybe hours being moved about by the wind patterns.
Just TRY to imagine it that way, and re-watch the video.
This is like those 3-d images that you have to stare at until your eyes cross a bit to see them.
You mention the Russians. That is an important point people are ignoring.
According to the story, a missle was launched from near or on American soil, heading WEST. That means TOWARD Russia, North Korea, and China — all of whom have satellites which are watching for us to launch a missle attack on them.
And yet not one of those three countries changed their defensive position. If they had detected a launch, they would have immediately gone into pre-launch mode themselves, just to be prepared.
And remember, our President was in India at the time. It’s not like you’d be able to cover up the President being whisked to safety, which most certainly would have happened if OUR sensors had detected a missle launch.
The entire reaction by our government to this really fits with the theory that it was simply a normal airplane flight. That’s why they are all scratching their heads - there is no evidence of anything ELSE.
Welcome to the new, improved FR.
We don't need none of your stinkin' logic around here. We've got a few seconds of shaky video to tell us all we need to know. /s
But watch the video again, and realise you are not watching a “launch”. You are watching a rather short clip of a contrail. Your brain is equating that image to an image it has seen before. But you don’t see the contrail being formed by this “rocket”. You can’t even see the rocket. You see a couple of glints that look like sunlight that seem to be at the end of the contrail.
The “combustion” you say you see is a light pattern covering maybe 10 pixels of a digital image that is shot from a moving platform at a distance of (if you are correct) over a hundred miles.
At that distance, what you are “seeing” in the image is what the digital processing on the camera THINKS is there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.