The Glade 4.0

This is great. Wish I lived closer to the coast, where I might have seen this (had I not been sitting in a cube at the time).

Mystery Missile Launch near LA no threat to national security, says military.

Apparently, late yesterday afternoon, a CBS news helicopter captured video of what appeared to be a missile of some sort fired off the coast, north of Catalina Island. And, we ain't talkin' a model rocket, either - this thing has a serious plume behind it. But, it wasn't launched from Vandenberg AF base, nor from the Naval Surface Weapons testing area up near Ventura. In fact, the military says, it wasn't ours. But, really, just because we don't know what it was, or where it came from, or even where it was going, it wasn't a threat to national security.

Yeah.

Will be interesting to see how this one comes out.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Um...ok, no idea where it came from, what exactly it was, or where it was headed...and its not a threat?

Yeah....

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

If it's not a threat, then clearly it was the military.

It's official. Obama has turned the propaganda machine up to 11, so that now, we, too, can have our very own Minister of Information!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That was an SLBM. Almost certainly a Trident from one of our SSBNs. That's why it's not a threat. If it was someone else's SLBM, they arranged it beforehand with us if it was that close to our coastline. Firing one that close to our coastline without prior warning would be a good way to trigger a thermonuclear exchange. I doubt it was anyone else's though; no one needs to get that close to our coastline to conduct SLBM tests and they wouldn't want to give us that much of a look at it if they did. The only people that wouldn't vare are the British since they use the same missiles (with their own warheads) and they don't send SSBNs into the Pacific to my knowledge.

Don't let them fool you; they know exactly what kind of missile it was and who fired it. SLBM firing tests aren't that uncommon in the first place; they just aren't news. What is a little odd is that it was done so conspicuously, which, as the end fo the video indicates, might point to some sort of show of force.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Missile launch off California, cruise ship adrift due to fire off Mexico. Coincidence?

I wonder who was on that ship...

Oh, I'm sure they know. It's just the curious manner in which this was done, and then denied. Why deny it, if it's just a standard test? They throw **** up from Vandenberg all that time that's visible from parts of LA, and they willingly and gladly cop to it. Why not this time?

The show of force thing is most likely. Seems an odd place for a test.

(Yeah, nice coincidence, Lon, hey?)

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I think I'm going with the explanation offered here until more info comes out.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Can't even come up with anything to say to that. It's a freakin' news helicopter, and was also witnessed by many people on the ground. Yesterday.

/rolleyes

OK, maybe I'm being harsh. It is kind of odd that a bunch of ground stations say that they can find nothing on the radar.

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

OMFG! "They" have stealth missiles! Might as well turn off the big board at Cheyenne Mountain and relocate it (the screen, not the mountain) to my living room.

Huh, guess that's what I get for not reading the first paragraph of the OP

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

No, no, you're right to broach all the possibilities. There are folks who are saying this was just a contrail, viewed at an odd angle, for instance. Looks oddly like a single engine, though, not like something a four- or even two-engine plane would make. But, it is interesting.

Heck, could be a real UFO - captured on film, doesn't show up on radar, denied vigorously by the military, which tries to deflect attention and raise the idea that the timestamp was wrong ... ?

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I would not be surprised if nothing was tracked on radar. Most air traffic control radar these days pings a transponder; it doesn't bounce a signal off an aircraft's skin.

Right now, I'm sticking with the SLBM theory

If it were a surface ship, it probably would ahve been fired from inside the Surface Weapons test area noted in the OP article.

I could sort of buy the incorrectly-dated video, but evidently people phyiscally saw it, and if it were just a contrail I doubt this would be the first time such a mis-identification occured. The zoom-in, in that later video, showed a red dot that looked like an engine glow too.

I also note that we've not only heard of no damage, no one has identified any sort of re-entry at all. If it came down inside a designated area for SLBM/ICBM tests to re-enter it might have gone unnoticed.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Could it be a plane?

Jet contrails from some angles look like missile trails

This video shows, at 42 seconds, the rocket motor glowing. I've never seen a plane with an engine glow like that other than on afterburner, and I've never seen a plane on afterburner leave a contrail, although I don't know for sure if it can or not. I also don't see any navigation lights that would indicate a plane, although it could be too far away or not dark enough.

Mr. Ellsworth points out that it could be an SLBM as well in that video.

The guy you linked has a decent grasp on possible misidentifications, but I don't think this is one. When you see it actually moving, it doesn't look at all like an airplane leaving a contrail, and seems to be putting out entirely too much smoke.

The other thing with the contrail theory is that if it was just a misidentifed contrail, the military would be a lot more likely to say "It's a contrail" not "Well, we don't know whose missile it was but its no threat" to forestall all kinds of conspiracy nonsense, and also because it's pretty hard to gain any real advantage out of claiming a nonexistant missile launch on the fly because some people misidentified a contrail.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Uhm, it was a weather balloon, leaking swamp gas, and on fire, going really really fast.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Somewhere under the waves of the Pacific is a poor ensign wishing he had opted for the spill proof coffee cup yesterday morning before putting it down on that control panel.

As for whether or not its a contrail (pretty cool pictures btw), or as stated in that article that Vind linked they couldn't determine the origin... what is the likely some US agency doesn't have a satelite watching the Pacific coast that could show the incident from above?

I think we just witnessed James Bond saving the free-world by aiming a rogue operative's SLBM out to sea after said rogue agent commandeered a Russian Nuclear sub.

If needed you can substitute Chechnyan Separtist for rogue operative above.

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That one already may have happened

One theory behind the sinking of K-129 in 1968 is that Yuri Andropov inserted a special forces or KGB team of some sort that hijaked the sub and attempted to launch a nuclear missile at Hawaii, but didn't disable the safety systems correctly. The goal was supposedly to implicate the Chinese because Soviet-Chinese relations were at a low and there was fear of Sino-American detente that would disadvantage the Russians. There's a book about this, Red Star Rogue that puts this theory forward. I find the hypothesis more than a little far-fetched, but not impossible since there is no really good explaination for the sinking of K-129. On the other hand, I don't see even a hard-liner like Andropov actually wanting to take the risk of nuclear war if it were found out.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So, this guy is pretty sure he's solved the mystery.
http://blog.bahneman.com/content/it-was ... flight-808

His evidence is pretty compelling that it was in fact a commercial flight.

Yeah, I've heard that, Midgen. I've seen another blog where they get into the physics of refraction at altitude, etc. I wish we could see all of the raw footage that was shot; at some point, if it was a jetliner headed for Phoenix, it should have passed overhead. Maybe they didn't film it for that long, however.

Too bad, I like the missile theory much better. But, I'll go with the simple explanation, if it fits, I guess.

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I'm becoming more and more convinced by the airliner theory but I still haven't heard a good answer to the rocket motor glow, why no one kept watching untill it passed overhead, or why it took so long to figure it out if it was.

There also seems to be a great deal of "well a contrail could look a lot like a missile trail under the right conditions" but there seems to be a lot of weight being put on that ignoring the fact that a missile trail would also look like a missile trail.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."