L.A. News Helicopter Films Mystery Contrail off California Coast.

A cameraman on board a helicopter for KCBS in Los Angeles filmed what appears to be a missile off the coast of Los Angeles on Monday night.

Almost immediately, this fuelled all sorts of online speculation regarding any possible explanation for the mystery missile and its distinct contrail. Vandenberg Air Force Base, located along the Central California coast, confirmed that they had launched a Delta II Rocket on Friday, but there were no launches on Monday.

Other theories include:

*'Accidental' launch of a ballistic missile by the US military (not very plausible given the number of failsafe mechanisms in place
* A foreign ICBM-capable submarine (Russia, China) probing our coastal surveillance
* Iran or one of their proxies using a disguised freighter re-fitted with a ballistic missile launcher and registered through a third party flag of convenience (Panama, Liberia, Marshall Islands) to get close to the American coast.
* An anti-missile test undertaken by Boeing Co that originated from nearby San Nicolas Island

The Pentagon initially said that they couldn't identify the object filmed, but then said that the 'missile' was the contrail a commercial flight from Honolulu to Phoenix, AZ some 48 hours later.

In the video, the Pentagon explains that what appears to be flame coming from the object is actually the setting sun reflecting off of the metal body of US Airways Flight 808.

I'm not completely sold on the 'just an airliner' theory, although those far more knowledgeable than myself say that the flightplan and timing is consistent with the Pentagon's findings.

The other possibilities would be that a foreign entity did get close enough to the West Coast to launch a ballistic missile over a major metropolitan area, some sort of military SNAFU, the Pentagon genuinely not knowing what the object was Monday night or the Pentagon knowing, but providing the public with the story about the US Air flight as some sort of smokescreen because they felt the public couldn't handle whatever they determined took place. Any one of those is pretty disconcerting in and of itself.

You gotta admit, that IS a weird looking contrail.