Whose missile? Nobody's

Posted at 3:47 PM on November 9, 2010 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Some answers to the question of "whose missile was it that got shot into space off the Pacific Coast?" are presenting themselves.

The Navy says it wasn't its missile. The Pentagon says it doesn't know what it was or where it came from.

It wasn't anybody's missile. It wasn't a missile.

A Harvard astronomer says it was "probably" just an airplane.

"If it's coming over the horizon, straight at you, then it rises quickly above the horizon," he told New Scientist. "You can't tell because it's so far away that it's getting closer to you - you'd think it was just going vertically up," he says.

Preposterous? It would seem so. There are lots of jets in southern California, so why only one contrail?

But then you look at a photo off Key West in 2009, which actually was a jet contrail, and the notion becomes more believable (from Boston.com).

If that doesn't convince you, maybe this formula from Contrail Science will.

It appears to show (we're taking their word for it ) that any object traveling horizontally eventually goes below the horizon, and a contrail would give the appearance of something going vertical.

Or it's the Romulans.

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Comments (5)

I didn't do it.

Posted by John P. | November 9, 2010 5:11 PM

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We were so hot to trot with time travelers on the cell phone in the old movie, but not now?

Posted by V | November 9, 2010 5:14 PM

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Clearly the anachronistic man with the cell phone was phoning home. And they just now got the message.

Posted by Matthew | November 9, 2010 9:31 PM

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Someone should have shown this to the local news stations in Duluth (I think I was watching kbjr) when last night on the 9 o'clock news they mentioned it was a missile and everyone denied it was theirs.

Posted by Ben Chorn | November 10, 2010 10:31 AM

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The person who shot the missile was the same one who left the socks on our living floor, spilled the Goldfish crackers and didn't clean them up, and left our refrigerator open. It's our third child - "Not Me".

Posted by Al | November 10, 2010 8:38 PM

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