Fire In The Sky

Let's get down to brass tacks, folks: When you saw this, isn't THIS what immediately came to YOUR minds?:

If not, it should have.

Speculation runs rampant, of course.  But the military's inability to produce a compelling explanation, followed up by alibis seemingly deliberately calculated to be as nonsensical as possible, lend a Roswellesque stink of frantic ass-covering to the whole episode.  Which, argues the Danger Room, is its own national security risk:

When someone makes an unannounced launch what looks to be a ballistic missile thirty-five miles from the nations second largest city (at sea in international waters), and eighteen hours later NORAD still doesn’t have any answers at all – that complete lack of information represents a credible threat to national security. If NORAD can’t answer the first and last question, then I believe it is time to question every single penny of ballistic missile defense funding in the defense budget. NORTHCOM needs to start talking about what they do know, rather than leaving the focus on what they don’t know.

If this missile was launched at sea, was it launched from a ship or sub? If it wasn’t our ship or sub, then whose ship or sub was it? Did anyone cross-reference the launch with public AIS logs from the port of Los Angeles yet? How many dozens of times have we had someone give Congressional testimony regarding the scenario where a non-state actor launches a short ranged ballistic missile from a ship off the coast?

I raise that last point to note, if the mystery missile didn’t come from our military, you have to start looking for alternatives… and most of those alternatives are a threat to national security.

I reiterate: the ultimate assymmetrical attack against the United States - an electromagnetic pulse attack that would completely destroy our modern electrotechnological infrastructure and revert us a century and a half back in time, leaving us wide open to invasion and/or destruction or just to merrily disintegrate as a national and perish as a people piecemeal - would be carried out very much like this.

Exit question....nah, there's enough speculation already.  And I want to be able to sleep through the night.  You never know, after all, how long you might have to go without sleep thereafter.