Speculation continues to grow that the event recorded by a local CBS TV affiliate off the coast of California on Monday, November 8, was anything but a mere airliner contrail, as the Pentagon and other officials would have us believe.
General Tom McInerney, a fighter pilot and thirty-five-year veteran of the Air Force, appeared on Sean Hannity’s TV program on November 11 and declared forthrightly: “This is not an airplane….I never saw an airplane con like that. That is a missile. It’s launched from a submarine.”
That’s about as definitive a statement on the event as I have seen. It certainly beats the official story. After hemming and hawing for a couple of days, saying that they didn’t know what the thing was, finally, after the video went viral on YouTube, the brass in Washington declared that it was “probably” just an airplane. Exactly which airplane nobody seemed to know and it was clear that officialdom would have been happier letting the matter drop. Eventually, when it was pointed out to the FAA that they actually should be able to identify the given flight, since they are charged with keeping track of such things, that agency suggested that maybe it was U.S. Airways flight 808 from Hawaii to Phoenix. Contrails, they said, can fool you if seen from weird angles.
Government officials can fool you too, if you aren’t careful. Skeptics protested that the event recorded on the news tape certainly didn’t look like an airplane contrail. At which point the experts replied in a chorus that we–and presumably old-time fighter pilots like General McInerney–were mere victims of an optical illusion. Not to worry, the much-vaunted American defense structure was on the job and would never let an foreign power launch a missile this close to the Homeland. Honest.
Had our rulers never lied to us, we might be willing to buy into this, in spite of what appears to be the evidence of our own eyes. Yet, somehow, it didn’t quite jibe. On an average day, about 30,000 commercial flights take off or land in this country, a large proportion of them jets leaving vapor or condensation trails. Has anyone seen such a trail as this before? General McInerney in thirty-five years flying jets hasn’t. So let’s speculate that there is more to this than meets the eye.
If somebody actually did launch a missile from a submarine off the California coast, who might it have been? The answer to that one is easy. The People’s Republic of China now has arguably the most active and quite possibly the largest navy in the world. Their Jin class subs are capable of firing a JL-2 ICBM, which some now believe to have been the missile in this case, a full 7000 miles. It would not be coincidental, nor out of keeping considering their penchant for such stunts, for them to fire a missile near the American coast at the same time President Obama was ineptly representing United States interests at the G-20 Summit in Seoul and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Tokyo. It would in fact have been a fine time to make a statement, perhaps a reminder of the nearly one trillion dollars we owe them.
The Chinese have performed nautical tricks like this before. Three years ago, the London Daily Mail printed a story of an 160-foot Song Class Chinese sub surfacing undetected in the middle of a U.S. Navy exercise in the Pacific. The paper reported, “Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its ‘backyard.'” As their navy has grown, the Chinese protectivness of their rather large “backyard” has increased dramatically, resulting in sparring bouts with the Japanese, South Korea, and more and more commonly, with the United States.
What had been overwhelming American dominance in sea power has already come to an end. In its heavily mortgaged future, the United States will be lucky to maintain parity with the Chinese. And, if what we saw on November 8 was in fact a brazen launch of a Chinese ICBM, it may be time to worry, in spite of what our government tells us.