Maybe we'll learn the truth about this in the next Wikileaks dump?

 

Bluejay is correct, it was a commercial aircraft contrail at sunset. The evidence is overwhelming:

FAA radar shows lots of commercial planes in the area (LA) at the time, and no indication of a fast moving object like a rocket.

There were hundreds of commercial and GA planes in that airspace at that time. Not a one of them saw an ICBM launch, hard to believe.

A missle capable of reaching that altitude would have to be a ballistic missile. Ballistic missiles travel ~7 times the speed of sound. This object was not going that fast and it turned is a short radius. A ballistic missle going 7 times the speed of sound cannot turn like that.

The glint that is visisble is easily expalined by reflected sunlight at sunset as in the pic below from APOD.



Also, watch the raw footage, not some doctored up version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAZLY...eature=related

Keep in mind that the contrail is coming at you, the broad part appearing lower because it is farther away, close to the horizon.

 

I generally get my news from the internet as I don't watch TV. On Pravda right after this happened, a Russian military officer explained it and confirmed identification as a Chinese missile. Named the type of missile but I don't remember which one he said. He said it was the Chinese giving the USA notice that the US military was not the only one that can play war games in somebody else's back yard. I would say that was probably a Chinese response to the war games the US was holding in the Yellow Sea, China's back yard. He identified the type of missile from the type of exhaust and con trail. Other national news from other countries also confirmed a Chinese missile.

 

Perhaps less tinfoil and more science is in order?

contrailscience.com

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fI8834iCgo

 

That makes sense to me!.............

 

What I find amazing here is how this incident, which supposedly happens a lot, garnered so much attention, particularly so much attention to prove it was only a plane contrail.

Never have I seen such a concentrated effort to prove/disprove something of this nature. Why now? What's up with that? The contrail science thing is page after page after page . . . and for what? And why now?

As I said back on page two of this thread (and yes, I realize I'm quoting myself)

Just sayin'.

 

All of us see contrails every day. Look at the base of that contrail in the first shot. I have never seen such a thick contrail when that far spread out. Nor have I seen one with little trails of movement and curvature like the one in the video. 747's don't play leap frog.

It also appears to be going almost straight up (which would explain it's seemingly slow movement). Pretty big contrail for such a tiny dot at the tip.

This was also filmed from a helicopter. How would it more so appear to go straight up, when your already high up? You can watch a distant jet liner fly by in a matter a minutes. They have footage of it just going up... And up... And up.

 

As soon as I saw that weeks ago, the first thing I said was "missle launch".

I was thinking it was a SLBM test firing... They've got to test those things, I'd think, every once in a while, to make sure they'd really fire if we needed them to.

I rememebr years ago when they tested the current SLBM (Trident II I think). They fired it out to the Bikini Atol area, and if memory serves, from thousands of miles away (somewhere off the west coast), it fell within a target area that was the size of a football field. Pretty damn impressive...

Then again- if you're firing a nuke, you don't have to be that accurate. If you miss by 5 miles, you'll still take the target out... It's a simple matter of yield (kT, MT)...

 

Or the old adage that goes: "if two is better than one, three must be better than two!" Let's just fire five or six of 'em and walk away

 

Bluejay is a "company" man. I don't trust him. - Og

 

What is interesting is that the likelyhood that someone will accept the logical explanation is directly related to whether or not they have attached a theory to the event. If someone believes that it was China flexing its muscles with a sub launch, then they become very resistant to the overwhelming evidence that it was a contrail.

 

In that regard, I will later post the company's position on this matter. I just have to wait on the official statment.

 

See? I told you! - Og