What I glean from your post is that if this is actually a rocket, it is almost certainly not the first time.
With all the air and boat traffic out there, I cannot imagine that this could be a missile. Heck, the “flight 800 missile” had hundreds of witnesses and it is STILL accepted that there was no missile. Here we have, really, NO witnesses. Just a video that looks a LOT like many airplane contrails I have seen, and NOBODY that would have been much closer saying anything whatsoever.
The5re is nowhere near enough evidence yet to remotely compel me to even consider that this is a missile.
Again, I thought it was a missile - until I saw the video. And that stupid video is edited in such a way as to confuse, not clarify.
The ocean off the coast of Kalifornia can have very limited visibility at times. Marine layer was a big problem for most of the summer. Lots of marine layer normally on that big old Pacific Ocean. Offshore winds can move it away from the coast. We just had a weather system come off the Pacific. Was cold. Visibility was limited in some locations. The previous unresolved case on December 31st had a short amateur video. This new case has a professional news helicopter recording the event from altitude. Have also seen images from other observation points. We have 4 possibilities. Both events were contrails. Event A was a jet contrail and Event B was a rocket launch. Event A was a rocket launch and Event B was a jet contrail. Both events were rocket launches. The problem is that if jet contrails can look like rocket launch contrails, how are we gonna be able to tell when the real thing is launched ? Wait for the flash ?