Explained: Washington State Island "Mystery missile" - Helicopter

That's a long trail for a 20 second exposure of a single light - not impossible - i can only guess how long it is - perhaps someone with Mick's "distance away towards the horizon" grid can do a bit of a calculation?

But at, say, 600mph - 10 miles/minute (16km/minute) one would expect it to be only 3.3 miles long - about 5.5km, and it certainly looks longer than that.

 

I don't know what link was broken , but here is a screen capture!

 

There is an impression of multiple forward scattering, so a searchlight perhaps.

 

You've got to invert more Mick It is going, not coming. It is (primarily) a light beam trace, not the trace of a moving light. As a FlightAware feed wallah, I have undetermined privileges which don't normally manifest themselves. My thought that you were able to delete faster than electric pixies can travel the information super-highway is probably bad! Here is the track for the under-privileged:

ps. My Google Earth broke when I last updated it, so I have not been able to look at the file.

Edit:
On the assumption that my link: https://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/N952AL/history/20180610/0957Z
does not work for others, here is part of the Track log (Capture.PNG):

 

There are some artifacts visible in the car headlight trails in http://www.skunkbayweather.com/WhidbeyMissile.mp4

 

Pity there is not a searchlight visible, but a lot of Air ambulances have one.
eg. http://trakkasystems.com/trakka-beam/

 

I had to fiddle the long to -122.587 to get a good fit with SHCC. MLAT is not very accurate anyhow.

 

I'm still having great difficulty in visualizing the helicopter moving away from, rather than towards the camera. Shouldn't it be pointing downwards, rather than upwards, if it was flying away? Can someone explain the optical illusion here?

 

Well, that's what's puzzling me. The 'rocket' at the top was what I though was the helicopter, and that it was heading towards the camera, hence flying 'upward' in the 2D photo. If the helicopter is flying away, then it's at the bottom of the streak of light, flying 'downward' in 2D.

What's throwing me off is the grey 'rocket' at the top. What are we looking at here?

 

OK, thanks. Time-lapses can be very disorientating! I assume that tram is travelling left to right, with the headlights disappearing from view as they come level with the camera on the right side of the photo. Is that correct?

 

This video with N952AL show the positions of the green&red light, the tail light and two lights in the front.

Source: https://youtu.be/jJJEvp7379M?t=24s

 

Thanks, that helps.

 

From Skunk Bay Weather https://skunkbayweather.blogspot.com/

 

Im not certain about this; my interpretation would be that the helicopter was simply coming out of the clouds with the searchlight always on, the "metalic" streak would be therefore not the fainter positionlight at the rear but instead just the searchlight where the cloud is still blocking most of the light, but getting thinner at the edges, right?

edit:


I mean, why would there be a fainter streak from another, fainter light just for a small, specific lenght on the pic? its assumable that the searchlight outshines every other light on the helicopter due to long exposure and distance, even if we are looking at the underside and see mostly the complete lenght of the helicopter, this would only make sense if the searchlight was off and was turned on a few seconds after the helicopter entered the frame of the cam, but as statet, it seems it wasnt:

 

If anyone has exact coordinates for the camera (to a few metres) I might be tempted to make a version of the unmetionable thing, referred to as SHCC, that inputs KML files, and overlays the track on a photo. I moved my house to Skunk Bay for the plot, but I left it at the same height, as I had no information on height. The points should probably be a bit higher in the sky as the camera is probably lower than mine.

 

It would be an interesting twist if they were using a near-IR = NVG (Night vision goggles?) filter. on the searchlight.
I read somewhere that the camera was sensitive to IR.

 

I see, you could be absolutly right and it makes sense and I wasnt thoughtfull enough about it. again . what still bothers me is the pink glowing edges of the cloud, where the trail starts, and I assume that could only be the case if the helicopter was in fact coming out of the clouds. so, I am not totally convinced, but that detail really doesnt matter anyway, cause the case as a whole seems otherwise completly debunked

 

ok, I am convinced, youre both right...tried it with a flashlight and attached another, smaller one at the end of it to simulate the helicopter, all pretty sloppy but the result fits your explanation quite nicely; first photo shows flashlight with second "positionlight", second photo with exposure time 2 seconds, moving flashlight from top to bottom already in frame, when exposure starts (added "missile"-detail for comparison):



thank you two for the lesson

 

Here is my first attempt of a .klm track overlay. I don;t have accurate data, and the picture will not fit on this laptop. Notice that the track is a bit longer than a 20 second blur would be.

 

I don't have time to read through all the comments- and I'm not disputing the helicopter idea, but the instant I saw the image I thought it was possibly an airliner climbing out of Bellingham, WA (KBLI) or Vancouver Canada (CYVR) southwest bound, towards the camera, with the sun shining over top of the visible low clouds and illuminating the aircraft's persistent contrail.

I think that Vancouver is the place to start because that aircraft is probably too high to have just launched off of Bellingham.

[EDIT:
I just looked at the track in the post just above mine and realized that it DOES look like it comes from Bellingham or Whidbey NAS. Also, with the APPEARANCE of a single contrail, it is unlikely to be an airliner and more likely to be an E/F-18 Growler which has its two exhaust nozzles so close together it would appear as one.
I doubt that they ever use afterburner due to noise, but I could be totally wrong about that (particularly if they were simulating a scramble for training).
With regard to lights: if that's a light it's (obviously) on the centerline... which is not where most airliners have their lights (other than the taxi lights on the retracted nosegear). Though the 737's landing lights are under the belly in the center mounting in the wing-to-body fairing.
The E/F-18 probably does have a landing light on its centerline mounted on the nose gear, but (like the airliners) that would be retracted immediately after takeoff.

There are not too many jet departures daily out of Bellingham other than some Alaska/Horizon flights that I think are pretty rare. I'm not sure if Allegiant still has one flight out of there per day.
By the way, don't ever fly Allegiant- their maintenance is atrocious. They fired a captain for evacuating an MD-80 when a flight attendant reported smoke in the cabin because they had to pay to repack the slides.

I would start investigating on planefinder and/or flightaware, starting with flights from CYVR to Hawaii or Australia [EDIT PART 2: I'd start with Alaska flights from KBLI to Hawaii], but I'm currently trying to finish my exhaustive "chemtrail" debunking video which keeps growing in scope because there are so many lies to debunk. It's currently at 2 hours and 9 minutes and I am in the middle of subtitling the sections I chose to include of the Weather Modification.com pilot in the YouTube video "Hidden cam interview chemtrails pilot POISONING US".

That video totally debunks itself. And then the guy walks out of the place saying, "Well I think they are spraying ... that's what I believe." It is exactly like how George Noory of Coast to Coast AM dismissed me when I called in 2014 and explained all the science of contrails... after he got me off the line he said, "Well I think there is something going on up there. They are spraying something on us".

 

Good point! Looking at the time may have been a good idea!
Having flown over Whidbey Naval Air Station on several occasions (with ATC permission!), it looks like the track plotted by CloudsGiveMeTheWillies goes precisely to it.
If the image is of that Northwest Airlift helicopter that would be logical because it is entirely possible that someone injured themselves somewhere on Whidbey Island and Northwest Airlift picked them up from the only suitable landing place at the NAS and took them to Harborview Hospital in Seattle (which is where they usually take everyone around here who has serious injuries or burns).

[EDIT: They have P-8s (737s) at NAS Whidbey now https://cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrnw/installations/nas_whidbey_island/news/news_releases/18-037.html

 

I realize that the 20 second exposure gives the appearance of a long airliner-like fuselage where there is not really a fuselage, but because I think the color of the image looks like the grey of the P-8 (737), I did a search for "P-8 lighting" to see if there is a light on the tail (not expecting to find one)… and of course there isn't a big light on the tail, but interestingly there is a DIRC "Directional Infrared Counter Measures" on the tail...
http://www.b737.org.uk/mma.htm
Directional Infrared Counter Measures is a system produced by Leonardo, Elbit Systems, Northrop Grumman, ITT Corporation, and BAE Systems to protect aircraft from infrared homing man-portable missiles. It is a lightweight, compact system designed to provide mission-vulnerable aircraft with increased protection from common battlefield threats. It is more advanced than conventional infrared countermeasures.

 

But we know the helicopter had its searchlight on and was in the correct position at the time of the photo, to within a few 100s of metres and 10s of seconds.

 

Sorry I didn't realize that. I scanned it too fast.
The time I wasted would have been better spent editing my video!