Posted on 11/10/2010 1:34:50 PM PST by libstripper
Not so fast. Ret. AF Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney appeared on the O'Reiley Factor last night and conclusively stated it was a missile launch, not an aircraft's contrail. He based his opinion on having viewed the entire, moving video, not on comparisons of still pictures taken from it and still pictures of contrails from aircraft. He stated it was clearly a missile launch because the object does an immediate course correction and then flies off on a predetermined path, something highly characteristic of missile launches, rather than the flight paths of aircraft.
I've read the article Saganite linked in his (hope you're a he) post. It only shows still pictures of contrails and does not indicate that its author compared the moving video of the present object with any other moving videos to reach his conclusion. The object's characteristic motion as a missile that's just been launched being the key to McInerney's well-informed professional opinion, a similar comparison needs to be made to refute that opinion. I've not seen any such comparison by an expert as well qualified as McInerney; hence, I accept his opinion that it was a missile.
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If even an "expert" starts with a wrongly biased assumption, his conclusions are almost invariably wrong.
(I live east of DFW -- under its main east-bound flight path. I see this effect after sunset on every clear evening.)
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Viewing an incoming object and assuming it is outgoing destroys any hope of a correct analysis -- even by an "expert".
By making an 180-degree error in direction, all those "experts" made 100% @$$es of theselves...
...and then there are the "true believers" who substitute wishful thinking for analytical thinking... (Those are the ones whose tinfoil hat also covers their eyes...)
We agree, See #42...
When was the last time you saw orange flame coming out of a jet engine? Or was that a reflection?
You’ve come up with a lot of nice words and smoke. However, you’ve not even touched on refuting Gen. McInerney’s basic point, that the object’s motion was obviously that of a missile, nothing else. Until you do that, you’re just swinging at air.
Whatever. When you’ve invested yourself in a conspiracy theory it’s hard to let go.
Show me where the general lays out the specific evidence and logic he used to form that opinion.
Did he base his opinion on a quick glimpse at a couple of seconds of the video or was there more involved?
When I first saw the video, it looked like a missile to me too.
He said he watched the entire video, which is less than a minute long. He based his opinion on the way the object did a sudden course correction at the beginning of its ascent and the went onto what looked like a predetermined course. Said the only thing that flies that way is a missile. This summary is almost a quote of all he said.
That looks like a normal contrail. After I watched the video I was like holy crap how can people be saying this was a contrail from an airplane?
The problem is that because of trying to make sense of a few visual clues, he's formed the thought that he's looking at a smoketrail that was produced over the timespan of a minute or so. He's not realizing that it was formed over the timespan of an hour or more.
When I look at the video, I see that when the camera zooms in, the contrail grows in length by a lot. Having watched missiles take off, his mind most likely processes that as thinking that it's rapidly growing longer as a result of it being a smoke trail that is gaining length by a missile moving rapidly forward. It's not. It grows in length because the camera is zooming in. When watching the video, if you make the effort to use your mind to filter back out the effect of the zooming in by the camera, you can see that it practacally isn't moving at all, in relation to your point of view. If it was a missile, it wouldn't be practically standing still in relation to the clouds closest to it in the shot, which is what I see on the video.
The Amish Navy is up to its old tricks again.
“He said he watched the entire video, which is less than a minute long.”
I thought the camera guy said he stayed on the object for around 10 minutes.
Freegards
Pretty slow missile, if it only got a couple of degrees above the horizon in ten minutes.
Yeah, that seems slow, but I’m surely no missile expert. A quik wiki search says that a trident missile is going 13,600 mph within 2 minutes of launch. But who knows. He was in a helicopter and had a zoom lens. How long can you film a missile in a situation like that? Is it possible to do so for ten minutes, assuming it was launched fairly near? Does the smoke trail look like what was filmed? I have no clue.
Maybe the chicoms wanted to impress us with how slow they can make a missile go.
Freegards
The "maneuvering artifacts" are where shear winds eventually shifted the vapor plume (as they eventually did all along its length, starting with the older part..)
Sunset-lit contrails (with the observer already in dusk) can be very spectacular. I often wonder what primitive people would think of such a sight... ;-)
Something else that was similarly spectacular was the clear polyethylene high atmosphere balloons launched from Palestine ,Texas. In those same evening lighting conditions, they looked like a brilliant, coppery teardrop.
FWIW, it is that same "sunset-shifted" light (diffracted through the edge of the earth's atmosphere) that gives the eclipsed moon its "coppery" color.
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I have zero interest (especially vested interest) in debunking a missile launch. I would be very interested in a missile! However, I hate to see folks making bad assumptions about something else with which I'm very familiar. Particularly when the same thing can be seen night after night -- in the same place and at the same time...
My guess is that relatively few folks are familiar with sunset contrails -- because they occur when most folks are indoors, eating dinner.
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But -- if the tinfoil fits, wear it! '-)
I was just catching up on this story on a lazy Saturday morning. This is an excellent post.
Some so-called experts need to be demoted to amateur status for calling this damn plane a missile.
It’s a contrail from an airplane. They look really ‘plumy’ when zoomed in. They puff out that ‘smoke’ fast.
There’s a lot of fools outing themselves that insist a zoomed in picture of a plane giving off a contrail is some sort of rocket.
Great post.
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