UPDATE: Contrail Science writes:
Note to the media – since this was almost certainly Flight AWE808 (US Airways) from Hawaii to Phoenix, why not have a camera crew somewhere in the vicinity (does not need to be exact, or a chopper), at around 5-5:30 today, and if the weather is right you’ll see the same trail again.
Here’s the flight path below for 11/8/10. If anybody gets any new photos today, leave a comment and I’ll get them posted here.
Original post starts below:
There’s quite a buzz in the blogosphere about this video shot by a KCBS News helicopter. Explanations range from “Moonbeam Gov. Jerry Brown is headed home to visit relatives” to “missile launch kept secret by the Pentagon”.
Whatever it is, I’ve seen nothing like it. The speed doesn’t match a missile, but the trajectory and cloud pattern certainly seems to. Perhaps our readers can help figure this out. One alert reader “slp” posted in comments a link to a likely Occams Razor style explanation.
watch the video:
For people outside the USA that may not be able to see the first video, try this one:
For reference, here’s a certified missile shot from the Air Force Space Command:
I’m wondering if this isn’t some stunt plane practicing over the ocean (where the pilot doesn’t have to worry about buildings, power lines, towers, guy wires, FAA airspace permissions, etc.) with a smoke generator turned on? Watch this video from about 15-20 seconds in. That looks like what the “missile” video is. Add some red sunset lighting and you’ve got instant “slow moving missile”.
UPDATE: Thanks to alert reader “slp” who wrote: “Likely a contrail:”
Indeed it looks very much like this jet contrail seen off San Clemente, from Contrail Science Overflow, excerpted below:
Jet contrails from some angles look like missile trails
An interesting contrail cropped up off the coast of San Clemente, Orange County, California on December 31st 2009. The curious shape led some people to think it’s a missile launch, which it does kind of look like (all taken from San Clemente)
“Missile-like” contrail. Note this is the Dec 31st contrail, not the Nov 8th CBS one. That’s at the bottom of the post.
…
This view is from Corona del Mar, about 20 miles Northeast of San Clemente:
Here’s a similar photo (of a different contrail, obviously) on the same day at the other side of the country:
Not a missile launch.
…
Here’s the idea with math:
The idea that it’s a missile launch comes from three misconceptions. Firstly that the trail is vertical – it’s not, it’s a horizontal trail, at around 32,000 feet (about six miles). It’s the same as this:
This contrail is no more vertical than the road is, and nor are the power lines at 45 degrees. Everything is horizontal – it’s the just the angle you are viewing it from. All of these show horizontal contrails.
Secondly there’s the misconception of direction, that it’s flying away from the viewer, when it’s actually flying towards the viewer. This is because the “base” of the contrail seems wider than the tip. Perspective tells the brain that this mean the base is closer. But actually you can see the base has been greatly spread by the wind. Since it’s still so far away the effects of perspective are greatly diminished, meaning the actual width of the contrail is what is creating the illusion. Imagine is a plane with a 100 mile long spreading contrail were coming towards you; what would it look like? It would look exactly like this.
Thirdly there’s the idea that it goes all the way down to the ground. Now that might be true if the Earth was flat, but the Earth is round, and things go beneath the horizon eventually, no matter how high they are. A plane 200 miles away but five miles up is always below the horizon. If the horizon is raised (as it is here, with Catalina Island), then the distance is less. Here’s some math:
This diagram is not to scale, but the math is the same regardless. The solid curved line is the surface of the earth. The dot at the top is San Clemente. The little triangle is Catalina. “d” is the distance to Catalina (d=35 miles). “c” the amount of Catalina that is visible above the horizon (c=0.05 miles, really a bit more, but let’s be conservative). “a” is the altitude of the plane, (a = 6 miles). “r” is the radius of the earth (r=3963 miles).
The green wavy line is the contrail. Notice it’s at a fixed height above the surface of the earth, and is going directly towards the OC.
The point labeled (0,0) is the center of the earth. (0,0) means X=0, Y=0, where X is horizontal and Y is vertical. What we want to know is how far away the plane is, the value x. We do this with cartesian geometry, noting that the lowest visible point of the trail is at the intersection of the dotted line, which is a circle of radius (r+a), hence the equation x^2 + y^2 = (r+a)^2 and the line labeled “sight line”, which is has the equation y=x*c/d. Combining these equations to solve for x yields a quadratic equation, which we can solve with Wolfram Alpha:
intersection of (y=r+x*c/d) and (x^2+y^2 = (r+a)^2)
and with the real numbers:
intersection of (y=r+x*c/d) and (x^2+y^2 = (r+a)^2) where a=6 and d=35 and c=0.05 and r=3963
Which gives x = 212, meaning that the bottom of the contrail is around 200 miles away. So if the front of the contrail (the actual aircraft) is somewhere above and behind catalina, then that means the contrail is over 100 miles long. At 500 mph, that means it could have formed in 12-15 minutes, which seems consistent with the descriptions in the discussion above. (feel free to play around with the numbers there to see the affect of various assumptions)
Full post here: Jet contrails from some angles look like missile trails
The wide base of the ‘smoke’ trail is merrily the stratospheric con-trail being dissipated winds to appear wide.
Well, since we’re all taking a SWAG at what it was, I’m guessing it was either:
1) a very sneaky ship from either China or Korea sending US a message to buy more Lead-painted Thomas the Trains…
or
2) These guys: http://www.sea-launch.com/
celebrating their emergence from Chapter 11
by launching a heavy lift vehicle with one of these for Uncle Sam:
http://tinyurl.com/middleeaststimulusprogram
Thinking more #1 than #2, but who knows?
The Project Blue Book investigations of UFO sightings provided proof — as experts already knew — that eyewitness evidence is almost useless for identifying complex phenomena. Experienced observers, including pilots, were proven to have misidentified sundogs, Venus, clouds, and many other common things.
The Contrail Science website gives a clear explanation, including photos from a prior example. While it might be incorrect, IMO it beats the sort of guessing seen in many of these comments.
My thoughts for what they are worth. Whenever I have seen condensed vapour contrails, even at great distance, there is a discernable gap between the vehicle and the start of the contrail representing the time it takes for the exhaust to cool enough to condense. In the video there appears to be no gap, therefore I would suspect smoke rather than vapour.
At this moment Im wondering why we haven’t tracked its course and seen where it would land if it were a missile. I dont know if any of you Californians remember the time the training missile got away and they detonated it, leaving an oil rainbow for folks to wonder about for days before they got their stories straight.
If it is a jet, would there not be a corresponding flight plan? If it is a missile why aren’t they out there picking it up? Its a little spooky that our response time is so slow in either case. I keep getting flashbacks from Pearl Harbor.. Noooo that cant be an attack denial until they started dropping the bombs.
I suspect its a training exercise gone awry or at the very least hope some innocent explanation surfaces because if it were a test fire or something similar. .. our response time really sucks.
That is incorrect, that is only for Air Force missiles/rockets not USN equipment. The USN maintains two missile/rocket test ranges/centers in the LA area:
1. Point Mugu just 60 miles from LA (Which is about 100 miles closer then Vandenberg)
2. San Clemente which lies just a few miles SW of Santa Catalina Island.
http://www.navair.navy.mil/nawcwd/nawcwd/about/index.html
http://www.navair.navy.mil/nawcwd/nawcwd/downloads/about/WDQF2010Final.pdf
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/san-clemente-island.htm
So it is clearly proven that Naval missile tests, including Trident, would not be done by Vandenberg but by the USN at Point Mugu sea test range. Also from what I saw in the video the object was moving away from LA not towards it.
Definitely a rocket. It is smoke, & lots of it, off-white smoke at that. Jet contrails are pure white, & take 5 or 10 minutes to get that thick as the vapor trail from each engine expands & merges with its neighbours.
Temperature inversions likely caused the appearance of this thing to be some sort of missile, explaining the discontinuities in the contrail.
Same process that gives you the green flash when you’re observing the sunset along the West Coast. That colder dense layer of air will play tricks.
If this were a rocket trail, I’d expect there to be many references to it up and down the coast. How couldn’t a bright rocket trail near sunset not attract attention? The references here all seem to be from the vantage point described in http://uncinus.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/4/#more-4 which certainly has the most confusing perspective.
My guess is that it was seen up and down the coast, but looked like a contrail lit by the setting sun and hence not made into a major fuss.
A large airliner creates powerful vortices in the air through which it travels. There are two vortices – one from each wingtip – and they spiral in opposite directions. Contrails involve the air in the vortices and consequently do indeed appear to spiral.
Lots of Discussion Going that why This Missile is Launched by US Army. its missile or UFO nobody Know.
See the Video At-
http://newsvideo99.com/mystery-missile-launch-video/
wes george says: November 9, 2010 at 7:13 pm
If its just a contrail then how is the spiraling of the plume explained? Rockets have fins and can produce a twisting plume. Contrails cannot be twisted (corkscrewed.)
Furthermore, if it was just a contrail of a airliner coming towards LA on the way to Phoenix then it would have eventually crossed the coast over the heads of the very people who were positioned at the perfect angle to produce an optical illusion of a missile launch. Obviously, this didn’t happen. So we can discount that theory.
Contrail.
Second point first – We see only brief time segments of not very fast motion, the remainder is all still shots. That means the cameraman didn’t get much footage to see where it went. It probably did continue ‘over the heads’ of the folks on its way to Phoenix or wherever, but the cameraman got bored watching it crawl along.
First point, the ‘spiraling.’ Contrails Always spiral. I’ve crept up behind and passed many slower airliners across the Atlantic, and I’ve watched the contrails form in detail.
They only form at certain altitudes, depending on the atmospheric conditions, and often you’ll see them turn on and off as the aircraft passes through varied conditions.
There are two kinds, as seen in the blue photo with the highway in the article. Wingtip vortices form a pair of very tight thin spirals, just from condensation of the ambient moisture. You see a pair of thin white lines to the left of the wider contrail in the picture. Tip contrails tend to stay at the aircraft altitude or rise a little.
The engine exhausts form broader contrails in the aircraft wake. The wake has two spiral tubes, counter-rotating with the flow downward in the center and upward out at the wingtips. On four-engine aircraft, each engine contrail goes straight back for a while, but then the outer contrails fold over the inner ones and they merge to form left and right single rotating tubes. These tubes sink below the aircraft altitude.
The tube centerlines spread apart, and the width of each tube broadens, making a wider contrail with time. Depending on conditions, the contrails can expand into cirrus or evaporate. Differing winds at altitude can put turns and kinks in the contrail.
In the photo, you can see the gaps where the contrail turns on and off. You can also see that the couple hundred feet difference in altitude between the thin tip contrails and the thick engine contrails has the engine contrails drifting more to the right, due to a slight difference in wind speed.
As to the video, the sun has gone down, but the contrail is up in the sunlight. The bright ‘rocket exhaust’ in the video might not be the fuselage, but rather the broad wings lit from below by the sun. At that narrow angle of incidence, the wings would be mirror-like, so you’d see not the shape of the wings, but a reflection of the sun off only one of them, since they are mounted on the aircraft at different angles.
A rocket will generate its whole contrail in a matter of seconds. The broadening of the start of the video contrail compared to the end being formed suggests it’s been there a good number of minutes.
Contrail from an aircraft.
Story from chicken little.
The way the contrail can be viewed “upside down” because the viewer expects the “noise” to be bigger at the closest point whereas the “noise”/con-trail is widest at the oldest point rather than the furthest away reminds me very much of the way the global temperature record can be totally misconstrued because some expect the “noise” to be smaller than the signal, whereas in 1/f noise the noise is as large or larger than the “signal”.
There are other similarities including the limited visual horizon (limited time period) the way starting conditions are hidden (the lack of pre 1850 long term proxy trends). There’s also the way that the perspective of the viewer can make a horizontal curve appear like an upward trend …. and then there is the media interest!
One of the YouTube comments suggested it might be Nancy Pelosi on her broomstick. I think there might be weight to that theory. Mystery solved. 😀
I verified boballab’s comments. If the object generating the contrail was in fact a rocket, it was most likely a Navy Trident or a Navy Ballistic Defense Missile as I mentioned in my earlier post. I mean’t no slight to the Navy’s test range bob. I just know that the US does not go launching big rockets around major metropolitan areas without real-time range safety which prevents catastrophic accidents!
Again, I have not seen the full video, just chopped up pieces so I can not get the flight duration nailed down to rule out a ballistic missile launch. Doing a little research I was surprised to learn that the Navy’s Standard Missile 3 (Star Wars) could easily fit the bill. It is launched from Naval crusiers and even some destroyers as it turns out. It is also 3 stage solid rocket.
The timing of a possible missile launch is fascinating given the President’s itinerary.
This was a contrail lit up by the setting sun. Look at the video right at the beginning, or at one of the screen captures showing a still frame (before the camera zoomed in). That portion of the contrail which appears to be closer to the ground is brighter than the surrounding sky. Looking into a western sky at dusk, the only reasonable way that the portion of the contrail which appears “lower” in the sky to actually be brighter is for it to be at high altitude further west, past the terminator. I’m going to cast my lot in with those saying that this was US Airways flight 808 heading from Hawaii to Phoenix, which was transiting the area at the time.
http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/4603
Let’s get past the argument that it was a stunt plane or jet and (for the sake of this exercise) assume this was a substantial missile fired by either the US or a foreign military. Putting the conspiracy hat on (as you have to to some degree in this scenario) lets examine some possibilities:
1) The US fired the rocket and didn’t admit it.
-Why?
-Was it a mistake? A disgruntled soldier maybe? It would take more than that I imagine to fire an ICBM or comparable projectile.
-If it was a sanctioned test, did the Pentagon just not know? Did they know and want to put the F-E-A-R out there for a few days? Seems unlikely but plausible.
– Face it, this was not a US action and at best they will try to cover it up by saying it was but to what end? The better action, and what we are seeing is silence. This should be a Wolf Blitzer/AC360 constant coverage piece until we have answers.
2) Was it the ‘shadow’ government we hear about?
-Do they really have those kinds of resources – like access to an unknown Submarine capable of firing ICBM’s?
-What would be the point? They can’t blame Iran.
3) Was it China firing another shot across our bow?
– They’ve done it before and to an equal extent (at least in military circles).
– We are wielding some serious financial muscle at their expense at the moment – they’re used to being our biggest creditor, what is their recourse as we throw them the bird and not only strip the value of their savings overnight but set in motion a chain of trade events which could set them back 20 years (and I’m no fan of the Chinese mind you, I like Dennis Miller’s plan).
-The Chinese cannot use Robo-Signers and criminal attorneys to motivate the USA to protect their interests.
-The Chinese are more than likely run more by the military than diplomats.
There are probably many theories and it is ironic we are talking about this event here. I think maybe, just maybe we should stop chasing around Muslims in caves at $55 million per kill and shore up our defenses here. You think?
We’re in default and our biggest creditor seems to be putting their foreclosure mill into action.
Or not.
Wingtip vortices, easy
As for mysterious missile launches, i live directly under one of the flightpaths towards Schiphol Airport, Schiphol is to north of me, planes come in from the south and south-west, with the sun behind them and they look exactly as this mysterious missile launch.
Are you certain it wasn’t Obama on his way to India?
Or maybe a Jon Snow-seeking missile aimed at Haiti, in a final effort to get rid of Jon Snow, who must be a pain in their collective arses at the moment. UK readers will know I mean…
ET going home after the AB32 ballot?
Petrol head Aliens chuckin burnouts
It’s just Cthulhu swatting flies…
Ian and Mike,
Huh? Contrails never form corkscrews in the sky!
Well, at least I ain’t never seen it and I live under the Brisbane to Melbourne traffic lanes where I’ve watch contrails on an almost daily basis for years. The wingtip vortices are independent they don’t weave together as they do in one section of the “mystery missile” video. This corkscrew effect can only be caused by the body of an airframe slowly rotating as it ascends, a highly unlike trajectory for an airliner. Jeff Id and others point out other signs that this is a rocket, not a contrail, as well. Such as the fact that one can clearly see the flame of the rocket’s engine and that there is no gap between the rocket’s body and the plume as one normally sees in a pressure wave induced condensation trail behind a high altitude jet.
The contrail hypothesis is like the AGW hypothesis. If a single observation-such as the fact that the plume spirals at one point into a corkscrew shape-occurs that can’t be explained by the hypothesis, then the entire hypothesis must be discarded in favor of a new one that better fits the observed facts. It’s called the scientific method. I’m always amazed at how few otherwise finely educated dolts actually picked up a course in the philosophy of science while at uni. Sure would make rational analysis on all manner of topics more fluid.
The principle of parsimony does not necessarily support the contrail illusion hypothesis either. Since thousands of high altitude jets transit this airspace daily the contrail illusion must be fairly common and local observers well versed in sorting out illusion from truly anomalous events. Moreover, as Boballab makes clear, US military activity in the area is dense and arcane. Making the missile hypothesis even more parsimonious than a once in a lifetime optical illusion that defies the usual physics of condensation trails.
Personally, given Obama’s Asian tour and the unprecedented (for foreign policy limp-wristed Obama) anti-China saber rattling that he and Hillary are doing along the way, my long money is on a rogue Chinese sub commander hyped that he made it through to LA letting loose a signal to the world that China is ascendent. Sure, it’s a 10 to 1 punt, but anyone got a better idea?
Ironically, the proof for Chinese submariner’s hubris might well be the Pentagon declaring that Yeah, Unicus the obscure blogger got it right all along. It was a contrail! Nothing to see here folks. Move along…
What nobody can doubt is that it was running out…..from California. 🙂
Quite likely a jet contrail.
Living in Florida I’ve seen and photographed many launches, from distances of 35 to 150 miles.
Solid rocket motors do produce a lot of smoke, but not as much as shown in the CA images unless it is made by very big motors. To me the key is that no image or video shows the actual rocket exhaust, which in my experience exceeds the length of the vehicle by two to three times and is very apparent, even in bright daylight, even from distances of 100 miles. Here is an image I made of the space shuttle back in 2008, from a distance of about 30 miles, with a 500mm telephoto. Notice the burning exhaust. This long flaming exhaust was easily seen with the naked eye from the same distance.
http://www.josesuroeditorial.com/Other/Tests/1138678_nKNKC/11/1085383618_PD9vD/Original