A series of U.S. government agencies said Tuesday that they could not explain what created a vapor trail that lit up the evening sky Monday over Southern California.
But a series of civilian experts said they could. It was not a missile, they said, as many conjectured, but an airplane.
Video posted online showed an object flying off the Pacific coast near Los Angeles, leaving a large contrail that looked like one created by a missile launch.
That theory got legs once a CBS affiliate showed the clip to Robert Ellsworth, a former deputy secretary of defense and ambassador to NATO. “It’s spectacular. . . . It takes people’s breath away,” he said. He called the projectile “a big missile.”
Reporters asked the Pentagon, the Air Force, the Navy, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. Northern Command and the Federal Aviation Administration what it was. But none of them knew. NORAD did say the contrail was not the result of a foreign military launching a missile. It added that the U.S. was not in danger.
But John Pike, a defense and aerospace expert who runs , said the object was moving too slowly to be a missile.
“There’s a reason that they’re called rockets,” he said.
