Posted on 11/12/2010 7:02:24 PM PST by Korah
A report posted today at a CNN website claims the "mystery missile launch" on Monday was actually a Chinese missile test. According to the report:
China flexed its military muscle Monday evening in the skies west of Los Angeles when a Chinese Navy Jin class ballistic missile nuclear submarine, deployed secretly from its underground home base on the south coast of Hainan island, launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from international waters off the southern California coast. WMRs intelligence sources in Asia, including Japan, say the belief by the military commands in Asia and the intelligence services is that the Chinese decided to demonstrate to the United States its capabilities on the eve of the G-20 Summit in Seoul and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Tokyo, where President Obama is scheduled to attend during his ten-day trip to Asia.
However, the report - placed on CNN's user-generated iReport site - has yet to be vetted or confirmed by CNN, and is full of un-named, unquoted sources. The only link provided goes to a site with basically the same report - again, with no corroboration.
The source of the report is one Wayne Madsen, who once claimed Wikileaks was a CIA operation, and that Al-Qaeda was a front for the military-industrial complex.
No other news organization is reporting the incident as part of a Chinese missile test at this time.
A much less sinister explanation is provided by a site called "Contrail Science".
According to a report at that site, the CBS camera crew probably captured Flight AWE808 from Hawaii to Phoenix, and the perspective of the the viewer made the contrail appear to be a ballistic missile being launched, possibly, from a submarine.
The site reports a very similar incident:
An interesting contrail cropped up off the coast of San Clemente, Orange County, California on December 31st 2009. The curious shape led.......
That’s some very interesting information. Perhaps I’m too late or you made an error in the URL but the link gets me “no document on this server.”
Thank you. I appreciate you taking the effort to make an exact count of the time that actual movement was seen in the video.
I have seen thousands of contrails in the sky, some after the fact and some as they were being made, some would have looked a lot like a missile launch in a still pic of them. I have never once seen a contrail and thought to myself, even for a moment, "hmmmm, that looks like a missile!"
That photographer's whole working life revolves around observing the sky and the ground in order to make a visual record of whatever might be newsworthy or unusual and he did.
On quite a few occasions I have noticed contrails that appeared to be rising vertically from the horizon. At first I thought they might be fighter jets rising at very steep angles, but I figured out that this is how distant level-flying passenger planes often appear, due to the curvature of the Earth. Even when you know what is causing the effect, it is still a very convincing illusion.
You are more likely to see this if you drive along a highway beneath a common flight path, at a point where most flights are high enough to have contrails.
some would have looked a lot like a missile launch in a still pic of them. I have never once seen a contrail and thought to myself, even for a moment, "hmmmm, that looks like a missile!"
But you just said that some did look sort of like missiles.
Let's face it, there are going to be cases where a still pic or a very short, distant video will not be sufficient to tell these two things apart.
I said only in a still pic of it.
Suppose it was a group of doctors who were diagnosing a patient by looking at a picture rather that through direct examination. They could easily be wrong despite all their accumulated years of experience. It is very sad to say it, but this is a similar case.
Just like the camerman, who has been flying in copters and filming LA skies for ELEVEN YEARS, is so stupid that he couldn't tell the difference between an airline contrail and a missile shot. *sigh*
I'm not sure that the cameraman stated a definite opinion on what it was, just that it looked like it could be a missile shot. Also he did say that he saw the same phenomenon on two other nights. Why is no one talking about those "missiles"?
In both of these cases you saying that we should accept the opinion of "authority" without question rather than thinking for ourselves.
If a video shot is so short and distant that there is no time to observe any movement it is effectively the same as a still shot. Also a lot of judgments on these threads are being based entirely on still pictures.
Even if we had a fairly long movie of this event, it is possible for a plane to become separated from its contrail. And a rocket plume will end when the rocket runs out of fuel. So a movie may show nothing more happening than a still pic does.
If it is possible that the two phenomena could be confused, it is not safe to state dogmatically what the picture shows without further info.
You’re avoiding the point I made.
Hmm
Oops, my bad. It's been awhile since I've used html. I'm sure I made a mistake on the code for the link. Try this:
http://www.ktar.com/?nid=6&sid=1353284
You can also see that same shot about ten seconds into that news report. It has been speculated that it was a fighter jet or a large helicopter. The first time I saw it it looked like a huey military chopper to me.
The striking thing to me about that frame is that the fighter/chopper is traveling at a right angle to the contrail and the vehicle making it. That is what gives one a good sense of the speed of the mystery vehicle. If it were an airplane at 37,000 ft., as flight 808 is supposed to fly at, the contrail could not possibley grow at that rate. That is the one frame of reference in the video.
If it were the UPS flight it should have been descending and far too low to appear that far above the fighter/chopper.
I looked like a Huey to me, too. Definitely.
"It is however perfectly true that there are missile launches in that area, some of them secret ."
"Launches of NASA Black Brant IX rockets from San Nicolas Island in California carrying MARTI targets for the Missile Defense Agency's Airborne Laser testbed were until recently on public NASA schedules - those schedules have been removed from public access in the past few weeks. The most recent MARTI launch, which was publicly acknowledged, was on Oct 21. The MDA has also launched Scud missiles as targets from the ocean off Point Mugu. Launches of target missiles for the Aegis ship-based missile defense system being tested by the US and Japan have also occurred in the Pt Mugu area."
"Nevertheless, the consensus of analysts is that the particular contrail seen on Nov 9 was not a missile, and this is consistent with DoD statements on the matter."
Do not ask who my source is, suffice to say that it is someone in absolute knowledge of every missile launch on the planet, private and military. That being said, I remain skeptical for technical reasons offered by a rocket expert I trust, that it was a missile launch. There are satellite photos of the event that I am told deepen the mystery.
I am certain that if it was a missile launch it was a DOD event, no foreign power would risk an act of war.
Why did NASA stop making the Black Brant IX rocket launches public ? Anyone have the specs on that rocket and some plume images ? We did just get non-official confirmation of where the Airborne Laser test rockets where fired from. All I knew before was somewhere off the So Cal coast. Just assumed San Nicholas. Safest point to launch from. I guess it might be a good idea for them to make those test launches public in the future, so we dont mistake any of those for incoming. Of course they might be trying to mask the test firing and results from the enemy spies we no doubt have all along our coast.
Oops. Should have been three possibilities. Any thing beyond that gets into tinfoil hat territory.
A source/expert on rocket/jet emissions has me convinced that it is not a contrail, but a plume, because of the single point exhaust unity and lateral expansion of the gases. Also, the trajectory is upward and to the west.
How do you know that the trajectory is toward the west?
I knew it was. Heck, I am part of an organization that does for our country.
Infamous Contrail (aka the 'Mystery Missile') Spotted in Satellite Image
Infamous Contrail (aka the 'Mystery Missile') Spotted in Satellite Image
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