Until Tuesday evening, the national media largely ignored the event. Notably, the New York Times produced nothing on the sighting until the late afternoon on Tuesday, when it reposted an article from the Associated Press on its web site.
The lack of any official explanation and the downplaying of the issue by the media suggest the possibility that the government or elements within the military/intelligence apparatus were, with the collaboration of major media outlets, buying time to come up with a credible story for public consumption.
Robert Ellsworth, former US Ambassador to NATO in the Nixon administration and deputy secretary of defense in the Ford administration, on Tuesday morning speculated that the object was indeed a missile fired by the US military to coincide with President Obama's Asia trip.
"It could be a test firing of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from a submarine, underwater submarine, to demonstrate, mainly to Asia, that we can do that," Ellsworth said, adding that similar firings had taken place over the Atlantic during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but never previously over the Pacific.
A retired Russian rocket scientist who looked at the video told the World Socialist Web Site that the object could only have been a ballistic missile or a rocket destined for outer space.
Later in the day, reports circulated that the object was an optical illusion, created by the particular vantage point of the helicopter in relationship to an airplane flying directly toward it in the evening sky.
However, the intelligence web site Stratfor quickly challenged such explanations, noting that "the video footage available on open source appears to capture a flame emanating from the contrail's source," making such theories "unlikely."
If the video indicated the normal route of a jet airplane, moreover, it should have been easy for the FAA to settle the matter. But both the FAA and NORAD had earlier claimed that there was no evidence of an airplane in the area.
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