Last Updated on December 1, 2010
That footage of what appeared to be a missile launch off the coast of Southern California is now being identified as footage of a plane, CBS News reports.
On Monday night, KCBS’s news chopper recorded video of what appeared to be a missile being launched.  After inquiring with the Pentagon, Department of Defense and NORAD, the only thing made clear was that it had not been fired from a foreign country and that it posed no threat to the United States.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon released an updated statement identifying the object as an airplane:
“There is no evidence to suggest that this is anything else other than a condensation trail from an aircraft.”
A security consultant had previously suggested that it was an airplane because the vapor trail seemed to change direction, something a rocket shouldn’t be able to do.
Of course, the near-immediate denials of danger are quite suspicious when you consider the fact that no one seemed to know what it really was, where it was headed or where it had originated.  Now that almost 48 hours have passed (at the time of this posting), it’s easy to speculate that there was no danger.  But one wonders how someone could possibly have concluded that sooner when they didn’t even know what the unidentified object even was.
Still, there’s something of a mystery: the FAA still can’t say for sure what plane it was or where it was going; since they don’t know the exact location or trajectory — and when’s the last time you were a passenger on an airplane who was thinking in terms of your “trajectory?” — they can’t really say what the flight might have been.
The FAA can't say, or they can't "say for sure"? I'm not thrilled with either answer. I thought even small private planes had to tell someone about their flight plans, but I guess not. Just seems odd to me that they can't figure out what plane might've been in that area at that time. But I guess they don't keep records of these things, at least not until someone uses a plane as a bomb again.