Danger, MSNBC! [Updated Again]

Here’s me, talking with Rachel Maddow about L.A.’s mystery “missile” that wasn’t. After the show, reader J emailed me a picture, taken last month, of a jet contrail that could’ve been mistaken for a missile, too.

Update: SA is one of many readers who remain convinced that this was a missile.

Some basic geometry helps here. Let’s assume it was a plane contrail. Plane contrails fly parallel to the surface of the earth.

Watch the video. At 35 seconds into the tape, the plume has sunlight on both sides of the cone, near the base, while the sun is below the horizon. That means the plume of smoke is backlit: the sun is behind it, lighting up the back of the plume, and penetrating the thinner edges of the sides of the thick smoke.

How can the sun be behind a plane contrail, if it is simultaneously below the horizon? It would be daylight, instead of twilight. Well, there’s one option. The cone of smoke has its origin from the surface of the earth, due west of the camera’s location. The vertical climb stage has the sunlight shine through the other side of it, and the in the final rise, the sunlight shines from the right and underneath of it.

Finally. If object was a plane, it would have needed to be flying from west to east, towards the camera. If that was the case, then it would be growing larger, and start flying overhead. Which never happened. No witness stated that, and the helicopter crew, who informed the news station about it, never reported it.

The only other possible trajectory is that of a ballistic arc from east to west, towards the sunset.

Update 2: Veteran national security reporter Elaine Grossman says there’s another “possible, if remote, explanation” for the contrail: “The use of an obscure U.S. Navy facility at San Nicolas Island to secretly test foreign-made missiles.”