An unexplained & unidentified ICBM was launched, & filmed, 35 miles off of L.A.
Link to site with video
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/missile-fired-off-the-la-coast-baffles-nation_b15038
Maybe one of us fired it and didn’t want to draw unwanted attention?
And now it’s said that it was probably just a jet contrail.
I heard about it, but I posted it on another forum.
Yeah…and where *was *Skald yesterday? Actually, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him. He would have claimed responsibility right away 
I heard about it this morning and looked for a thread, but didn’t feel like starting one since it was pretty obvious that nobody knows what was going on, or if anyone does they’re not telling…
That news anchor rather butchered the name of the satellite contractor mentioned in connection with the Delta-II launch (Thales Alenia Space at 1:15).
Everyone’s acting like we can’t tell whether it was going more or less straight up or a trick of perspective and a normal contrail. But that’s crap. It’s only 35 miles away – fly out there and circle the contrail to look at it from different angles.
I’ll be waiting for that report. You can’t possibly tell me nobody cared enough to do that with an apparent ICBM launch off our coast.
And where’s the radar data?
Arms Control Wonk posits jet contrail (9 NOVEMBER 2010).
Bosda, the article you cite mentions a possible mystery missile based on the contrail. Where on earth did you get the idea that it could have been an ICBM, though? 
Heck, I was on a Navy warship back in the 1980s right off the coast of California that test-fired a Standard missile, which a huge missile, but certainly not an ICBM.
I love rational explanations and assumed it was just a jet contrail, like the New Year’s Eve one last year. I’m still about 90% sure that’s what it was, but the smoke trail in the video does seem oddly dense and “round” rather than the usual thinnish, twin plumes that soon merge into a “flat-looking” light-coloured trail.
Does anyone know why it would have looked like that? Simply an artefact of the lighting conditions?
Although, this image, showing the same flight number 24 hours later, captured on a webcam, looks like pretty conclusive proof to me.
“Now that I have your attention, I would like to receive One Million Dollars - what’s that? Oh, yes, One Hundred Billion Dollars to Evil Enterprises. Don’t make me launch another - the next one will be loaded.”
What?
Where is this film of the ICBM launch? All I found was a video of the contrail, but no launch.
Not if it were a TEST. And only if I were sure Aquaman were out of the way, damn his eyes.
This link provides a slightly different angle. Looking pretty grim
for the missile hypothesis.
I don’t care either way, but it sure looked like a missle launch I saw in the late 80’s from college down there. As I recall, it took the powers-that-be a few days to own up to it back then.
What is more frightening, the general public screaming “rogue missile launch” or NORAD not stepping up to tell us what it really was?
I’ve yet to hear from any credible source that it appears to be a real missile or rocket launch, but I’ve heard the flood of laypeople conjecturing that it is.
As someone on a nuclear sub said about the matter “there is no one button that a person can accidentally press to cause a launch, it’s a multi-person process”.
Rogue weapon launches that would produce such visible evidence, would be the biggest deal imaginable for the US military, and hiding it would be the biggest blunder politically.
No missile, probably distorted contrails from a plane. Or, that kid I knew from middle school finally followed up on his “triple taco truck burrito fart extravaganza” that he’s been promising for two decades.
If it turned out that it was actually a missile launch, it wouldn’t be from a US sub and it wouldn’t be “rogue”. I would be a demonstration from a potential enemy that they can sneak right up to a coastal city and fire with impunity and we wouldn’t be able to defend against it.
I’m glad it turned out to be bogus. It it were real, it would trigger a defense spending crisis for Star Wars lasers and zappers along our coasts.
It would be an act of war. The launch would have occurred within our territorial waters which have constituted an invasion of our sovereign territory. There would have been a major effort to hunt down the vessel, capture it, or destroy it. And we would have launched other methods (covert and not-so-covert) against the hostile power(s) that it is not in their interests to engage in said behavior again.
As for the argument that it was a “secret” launch by our military, it stands to reason that people living in Malibu, Ventura, and Santa Barbara would have seen a vertical plume. But AFAIK, nobody reported any such thing. Note that launches from Vandenberg AFB can be seen in Phoenix, Arizona. Another fatal blow to the missile theory is the length of the raw video: ten minutes (per the Daily Show). Having watched dozens of missile launches from Vandenberg AFB, you know the missile’s visibility during the day is less than three minutes (Back in college, I watched Peacekeeper launch late one morning from 50 miles away–it was like a bat out of hell and was gone in less than three minutes) In the military, you want missiles to achieve high accelerations: presume you have a surprise first strike of incoming nuclear warheads. Do you want your missiles to dawdle on take-off? In addition, a missile ambulating for ten minutes while spewing forth contrails is easy pickings for an anti-missile system.
We have a set of satellites which are tasked to looking for missile launches: Satellite Early Warning System such as DSPand SBIR. A rocket throws out an enormous amount of infrared in a very small area. The US military monitors these activities world wide 24-7-365.
Hypothetically, if it had been a missile launch and had occurred without detection, the military would be in a panic: How did this happen? Human error? Bad sensors? Or did a hostile power come up with a way to launch a missile that can’t be detected via IR sensors or radar? The latter would be a titanic shift in the strategic balance–we would be effectively blinded with respect any missile launches from said power. That would give our military and political leaders a lot of sleepless nights.