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Mystery Missile Launched Near LA
J. L. Tympanum writes "CBS News is reporting the launch of an unidentified missile off the coast of California. No one wants to take credit for it." The article has visuals taken from a CBS affiliate's helicopter, and a Navy spokesman said it wasn't theirs.
A Google van was dispatched to get street view data of the Moon.
... but it's still in Beta.
*ominous voice* Phase II has started ahead of schedule
My work here is dung.
Slim Pickens was seen straddling the missle, waving his hat, and proclaiming "YEEEEEEHAWWWWW".
The War Room could not be reached for comment, as there was a fight going on at the time.
Living With a Nerd
Will do anything to cross the border. I wonder how much pot was in that thing?
So, the two likely scenarios would be: 1) The US test firing something, but nobody knows who or what just yet because it is being kept secret. 2) Someone else firing off missiles off the coast of the US to demonstrate a point.
I consider 1) likely, and 2) just downright scary.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No one wants to take credit for it? Okay.
I'll take credit for it. If found please return it. Thanks.
They're testing the "dollar cluster bomb" for the Quantitative Easing 3 phase. Bernanke reckoned that helicopters were not good enough.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/e3gf3/a_missile_was_launched_off_the_california_coast/c14zqpm
NOTAM for LA. KZLA LOS ANGELES A2832/10 - THE FOLLOWING RESTRICTIONS ARE REQUIRED DUE TO NAVAL AIR WARFARE CENTER WEAPONS DIVISION ACTIVATION OF W537. IN THE INTEREST OF SAFETY, ALL NON-PARTICIPATING PILOTS ARE ADVISED TO AVOID W537. IFR TRAFFIC UNDER ATC JURISDICTION SHOULD ANTICIPATE CLEARANCE AROUND W537 AND CAE 1176. CAE 1155 WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. CAE 1316 & CAE 1318 WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. CAE 1177 WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. W537 ACTIVE, CAE 1176 CLOSED. SURFACE - FL390, 09 NOV 20:00 2010 UNTIL 10 NOV 01:00 2010. CREATED: 08 NOV 20:52 2010
Lt. Chillders had his woman down there, demonstrating how to "launch a missle," and somehow, through some "unknown act" the big red button got pushed.
It is obviously some super-secret government/military thing.
If it was not sanctioned by the military, we would be at high alert right now, right?
Much more likely, it was some sort of prototype/enhanced/modified missile tested by the USN, and they won't admit it just because doing so would mean admitting theres a development programme going on (and anyone getting a radar track of its mision profile might be able to deduce things about it)
I understand that stealth aircraft were tested for years before the technology was publicly acknowledged
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
KZLA LOS ANGELES A2832/10 – THE FOLLOWING RESTRICTIONS ARE REQUIRED DUE TO NAVAL AIR WARFARE CENTER WEAPONS DIVISION ACTIVATION OF W537. IN THE INTEREST OF SAFETY, ALL NON-PARTICIPATING PILOTS ARE ADVISED TO AVOID W537. IFR TRAFFIC UNDER ATC JURISDICTION SHOULD ANTICIPATE CLEARANCE AROUND W537 AND CAE 1176. CAE 1155 WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. CAE 1316 & CAE 1318 WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. CAE 1177 WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR OCEANIC TRANSITION. W537 ACTIVE, CAE 1176 CLOSED. SURFACE – FL390, 09 NOV 20:00 2010 UNTIL 10 NOV 01:00 2010. CREATED: 08 NOV 20:52 2010 It's not a mystery, it's been planned and announced.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Missile firing off the coast of California? Gotta be the Mythbusters. This week's myth was that you could easily build and fire a missile near the US without being caught. Myth confirmed!
"It could be a test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile from a submarine to demonstrate, mainly to Asia, that we can do that," speculated Ellsworth.
Just because, you know, we outsourced all our missile manufacturing to China and we just weren't that sure it would work.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Maybe the whole silicon valley decided to offshore itself?
GUYS, I want you to KNOW, it is NOT the location of my secret evil lair. Or ANyone else's. THere IS noevil Lair. really. Don't come searching. Please. The squid are causing enough problems. I mean. Ignore that.
Qxe4
We know where it came from. Just because you don't isn't a problem.
Signed,
Your Overlords
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
An expert named Brian on the seesat-l list says:
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Trident II's are 44 feet tall, which is a good ballpark for this object, but their 'trail looks completely different (~1:20 in the vid).
New type?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
>Laster beam
Well, I've got a firster beam, but it keeps getting modded down.
--
BMO
Seems clearly likely that the US military knows exactly what it is and doesn't want to talk about it. (Maybe it's high up enough that even the local commanders don't have a full picture) :P
Considering how this country often goes apeshit over fake or small threats, hell hath no fury like the US facing an actual incident.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The State Department getting a diplomatic communication from China or Russia that just says, "Don't fuck with us."
Here's yo free shit, motherfuckers!
I don't think NOTAMs are in local time
This isn't the first mystery missile that has been launched near a coast that has baffled military and intelligence experts. It happened 12 months ago off the coast of Canada where THREE missiles were seen. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/05/28/ufo-newfoundland-dnd.html http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jjl6k8NB7mE
You have 10 seconds to find the little red dot.
Then why would you launch it right next to one of the most populated areas in the US? If you were going to launch something like that why not take it to some overseas territories in the middle of the pacific and test it there? I mean, really, out of all the places to stage a launch you do it 30 some miles off the coast of a very populated city? Even though it is the US government, you would think they would be smarter than that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Nobody thought that it might be a demonstration to the US from an unnamed entity, trying to make the same point?
Is Dr. Evil on TV right now?
Cruise ship flare sizes are getting out of hand...
And you... kept it on?
You, you... PERVERT!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Since all you need is a sealed tube with the missile inside it, a sub could deposit such a device on the sea floor. The sub needn't be the actual launch platform. If the US has mastered the ability to do that, it would certainly shake things up some. Tracking subs (a major effort by most nations) suddenly gets a whole lot less effective if it doesn't have to be where the missile it launches is. Which would require the ability to communicate over a significant range underwater, which would itself shake things up.
Another consideration is that this might be a warning to Britain, rather than potentially hostile nations. Remember, Britain isn't upgrading its Trident missile system - something the US is very angry over. (The DoD was depending on that money to fund its fleet of luxury cruises.) Advertising new launch systems and/or new missiles at this precise moment may be intended to shake things up in the UK and persuade the British Government to find more money.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I believe the term they are looking for is "secret" or "classified".
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> Fine it's a secret test, but why on Earth would you do it near the coast? Why not just do it out in the ocean where it's substantially less public? I mean, it's supposed to be secret, why do it in plain view?
(1) Maybe something about the test required it to be at that location at that time. Maybe it was intercepting something, or monitoring something, or delivering something, that needed to be at a certain position and velocity a short time later. Maybe it was even something that required having a city nearby, though I can't easily imagine what. (2) Maybe they've done this before, it's not a big deal, and usually nobody gets it on camera and reports it. Would the news have reported it if they didn't have the footage? And seriously, if you see a missile launch, does the average Joe expect it to be the navy and not bother reporting it, or does he report it to the local police, or to the news?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Not different at all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkT3I6RDPkw&feature=related
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Mythbusters are just trying to disprove the myth of the DIY ICBM.
:)
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
You didn't do your homework.
The time is wrong, and the location is wrong.
The FAA has already denied publishing any notifications about this launch.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2010/11/09/exp.nr.mystery.launch.cnn?hpt=C2
PLEASE STOP POSTING THAT NOTAM. WRONG TIME. WRONG PLACE.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Who are these so-called "scientists"?
As any reputable scientist can see it is obviously swamp gas.
Seastead this.
It was actually a successful launch of the first intercontinental stealth missile put out by Obsidian/Bethesda. Now all they have to do is sit back and let the modding community come up with the working stealth portion of the missile. China, however, will probably wait for the Intercontinental Stealth Missile: Missile of the Year to come out first.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
I had a friend whose father was in the, ummm, Foreign Service during the 1960s, and whose brothers flew airplanes for Air America. Her father requested to be posted to Indochina, and they did in fact post him to Indonesia by mistake. (To cut them a bit of slack, there was Anti-Communist paranoia about both places, but it was basically a screwup.) It wasn't all bad for her, since she did meet her future husband there.
Bill Stewart
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I'm not so certain that maritime law would allow the US to respond with violence for firing a missile from outside US territorial waters and the trajectory of the weapon never crosses US water or soil. According to wikipedia, foreign nuclear subs are even allowed passage within US territorial waters and are not "destroyed with impunity" on sight. In this case, however, the missile was launched from 35 nautical miles offshore, which would put it in international waters.
I suspect this was the act of a foreign entity demonstrating a newly-developed capability to the United States. If the submarine doesn't identify its country of origin, then the US would be allowed to destroy it with impunity in international waters.
I also suspect the US knows exactly who did this and knew prior to the incident and was able to discretely provide advance warning to the other superpowers. There are probably a mixture of reasons the US is playing dumb on the identity of the launcher.
Seth
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Reference please the authorities on things like this: it-aint-no-thing
it was not a missile.
http://uncinus.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/4/#more-440
it was a plane.
ya, this guy seems to have other good arguments against it....most noticeably the only people reporting it were all in one specific location (where trick of the eye made it look like a vertical rise), whereas people along other parts of the coast saw a more horizontal trail
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Former naval officer here. I think it's dubious that the water in the vicinity of the Channel Islands constitutes "archipelagic waters" for purposes of the law - I think the islands are too far apart - but you'd need a JAG to help you with that question. However, each of the Channel Islands, as part of the US, are entitled to its own 12 mile band of "territorial waters", which are also sovereign US territory, so if the launch took place within that zone, yeah, you're talking act of war there.
Also: while the US hasn't formally ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty (aka the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea - UNCLOS), it has signed it and every administration since then (including Ronald Reagan) have treated it as "customary international law" and have considered us to be bound by it. I can promise you through many years of my own at-sea experience that the USN thinks the UNCLOS is the law.
Finally: you did hit upon something important in your first paragraph. The law notwithstanding, if someone else's submarine really did do this, sure, we'd sink it. The reason is not that it's legal but that we could get away with it - when a submarine sinks, it's really hard to prove what happened, and being as how this took place right off LA we could certainly prevent China (or whoever) from investigating.
Bottom line: no way this was a foreign sub. The whole Navy would be a general quarters so fast it would make your head spin. Mullen, Roughhead, and likely a host of other admirals would be fired. Obama would have flown home from overseas. Etc, etc. This was just the Navy doing the stuff they do, and not wanting to talk about it.
We still have large and impressive operational SOSUS arrays all over the Pacific, and I guarantee you that the Chinese SSBNs are loud enough to be tracked with them. No way they snuck all the way across the Pacific undetected.
1) We don't even know if this was a sub launched missile. The surface fleet launches missiles all the freaking time, and you couldn't tell the difference from LA.
2) There are test ranges for all sorts of stuff off the coast of SoCal. Recall that the Navy owns several islands out there that they use for target practice.
I guarantee that this is a perfectly ordinary test shot that the Navy doesn't want to talk about.
This is military jargon thing. ICBMs, no matter what the acronym stands for, are considered to be land-based missiles. SLBMs are the same thing only launched from submarines (although many early US and current rest-of-world SLBMs have considerably shorter ranges). MRBMs are land based and have ranges about to about 3000km. SRBMs are also land based and have ranges up to about 1000 km.
For what its worth the theory about it being a jet contrail seen end-on appearing to be a vertical launch column (easy viewpoint for the helicopter, never seen from the ground) is now starting to convince me
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