Posted on 11/10/2010 12:53:48 AM PST by roses of sharon
Video posted on the CBS Los Angeles website shows an object flying through the evening sky Monday that left a large contrail, or vapor trail. While cruising the skies Monday at sunset, Sky2 captured on video what appears to be a missile making its way up into the sky from over the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.
Pentagon officials were stumped by the event. “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.
Pentagon Says No Missile Behind Contrail: KNX 1070′s Charles Feldman Reports
While the vapor cloud captured on video resembled that created by a rocket in flight, military officials said they didn’t know of any launches in the area.
Lapan said that “all indications” were that the Defense Department was not involved with the object.
One expert called it an optical illusion. “It’s an airplane that is heading toward the camera and the contrail is illuminated by the setting sun,” said John Pike, director of the U.S.-based security analyst group globalsecurity.org.
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 details.
“We can confirm that there is no threat to our nation,” the statement said. “We will provide more information as it becomes available.”
NORTHCOM is the U.S. defense command and NORAD is a U.S.-Canadian organization charged with protecting the U.S. from the threat of missiles or hostile aircraft.
Pike said the object could not have been a rocket because it appeared to alter its course.
“The local station chopped up the video and so it’s hard to watch it continuously,” Pike said. “But at one place you can see it has changed course — rockets don’t do that.”
Pike said he didn’t understand why the military had not recognized the contrail of an aircraft. “The Air Force must …understand how contrails are formed,” he said. “Why they can’t get some major out to belabor the obvious, I don’t know.”
Judge for yourself by watching this raw video from Sky2.
Or have a closer look at some of the screen shots we’ve taken.
Ok, as a former pilot in his mid-sixties, I and we have seen hundreds of missile launches and thousands of contrails in our lives. And this was a missle launch.
The media is failing to point out:
1. The speed of the object - far too rapid to be a plane;
2. The magnitude of the contrail/exhaust as it is going up;
3. Most conclusively, the bright glow at near the end of the brilliant flame of the missle blast only produced by a missile - this clearly was no “glint of the sun” reflecting off a fuselage of a plane.
IMHO, this is either an erroneous or intentional launch by a Russian sub; a friendly would not have been so close to our shores without our knowing about it. I do not believe the Chinese have subs with ballistic missiles.
Our Pravda media will not let the truth be known, and our government cannot let it be known that this could have happened without our intelligence knowing what was going on. The implications are too embarassing. The nation just might panic.
Another cover-up. Nothing here - just move on.
And another thing:
“It’s an airplane that is heading toward the camera...”
Wouldn’t the airplane and contrail become larger in the video?
The plane's ascent would maintain the perspective.
This is a plane, people.
Tin foil hats off!
Right, as we all know that everything is always perfectly innocent in this big pink fluffy world of ours so there is no chance at all that this might be something foreign and undesirable. How silly of us to even consider it!
Yes. The "missile" was launched from Honolulu International Airport.
Mike
Thanks for ping. The pilot said he saw something similar last week. Odd.
Didn’t someone fire a missile toward Hawaii and another one near the west coast about one or two years ago? It caught us unaware, apparently.
The video and stills look more like this than any aircraft contrail.
Those later screen shots look this projectile has multiple stages. Any estimates on altitude, speed yet?
I think it’s a government (”Skunk-Works”) “experimental” project. However, it could be the “Aurora” that’s used in intelligence gathering like the SR-71 Black Bird back in the late 60’s and 70’s.
If it is a plane shouldn’t the FAA be able to identify exactly what flight it was from radar data? Maybe I need more tinfoil in my hat, but this does not look like a jet contrail to me.
One of my hobbies is watching shuttle launches either from the space coast or my yard in central FL. Started by watching the Saturn / Apollo moon shots when I was a kid. I don’t care what the “officials” and media say, this was a missile, and a fairly large one.
If one of these nonexistent missiles takes out, say, San Francisco with a nonexistent nuke or a nonexistent bio-weapon, will the MSM report the city’s destruction as an optical illusion?
Sorry. After the TWA flight 800 coverup, the government’s credibility about any threat to the nation is zero.
I’m inclined to agree with you.
A similar event occurred Dec 7 1941 in Hawaii.
The mass population claimed they saw Japanese planes bombing Pearl Harbour. The absurd claim was supported with pictures of smoke rising from the area. The govt. promptly said there was no threat to the nation, just natives bar-b-que’ing a pig at a Sunday luau.
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.
STS-115 launch