Bizarre Light In Sky Was Nuclear Missile, Navy Says — Unarmed Trident Fired From Submarine Off Coast

The mystery of a bizarre light in the sky seen off the coast of California all the way from San Diego to San Francisco Saturday night has been solved. Despite widespread speculation that the light was an actual UFO, a meteor or even a comet, the United States Navy revealed later on Saturday exactly what the strange, moving light actually was.

The light was a state-of-the-art nuclear missile — an unarmed missile, without the nuclear payload it would be carrying if fired during wartime — fired from the USS Kentucky, a submarine loaded with enough nuclear missiles to destroy entire countries, which was located off the coast of Port Hueneme, California, a small beach town northwest of Los Angeles in Ventura County.

Commander Ryan Perry of the U.S. Navy Third Fleet issued a statement saying that the launch of the missile was part of a scheduled “ongoing system evaluation test,” but that test missile launches remain classified at least until they are conducted.

The strange light in the sky created by the fast-moving missile was seen as far away as Arizona and Utah, indicating that it was flying at an altitude of “a couple hundred kilometers at least” — or more than 120 miles high — according to Slate Online astronomy columnist Phil Plait, who explained as well why the flying missile was as bright as it appeared, when it was spotted by thousands of people throughout the west and southwest at around 6 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday.

The expanding halo of light is likely to be a “staging event,” Plait wrote.

“When one stage shuts down, is ejected, and the next stage ignites. Ordnance (a small explosion) is used to separate the spent stage. If the missile were above most of the atmosphere, you’d expect to see a bright flash and an expanding ring of gas from the staging ordnance.”

An amateur video taken by Julien Solomita showed what Plait called the best view of the “staging event” creating the light in the sky.

Here is the whole video, complete with commentary — but be cautioned, the astonishing nature of the light in the sky event led to some profane language being uttered on this video.

The exact type of missile fired from the Kentucky was a Trident II D5, a model first deployed in 1990 and refurbished in 2002 in a system-wide upgrade. Manufactured by the Lockheed-Martin corporation, the Trident II D5 is the sixth generation of ballistic missile since the United States initiated its submarine-launched nuclear missile program in 1956. The missile has a range of more than 4,000 nautical miles and will travel at about 20,000 feet per second — or more than 13,600 miles per hour.

In other words, once fired, the Trident could hit a target 4,000 miles away in under 20 minutes. A single Trident missile, when armed, can deliver between seven and 14 nuclear warheads, each one of then between 150 and 300 megatons of explosive force — approximately 10,000 to 20,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima.

Why the Navy chose to launch the missile in an area where it could be widely seen by huge segments of the civilian population is not clear. The Navy also has not confirmed that the military no-fly zone imposed around Los Angeles International Airport starting Friday night was connected to the Trident missile test launch — though it seems highly probable that it was.

The no-fly zone required flights in and out of LAX which would normally take off and approach over the Pacific Ocean to seek alternate routes.

Numerous witnesses initially believed that the formerly mysterious bright light in the sky over the west coast was part of the Taurid meteor shower, but astronomers quickly ruled that out, noting that the Taurid meteors would approach from the east.

[Photo By United States Navy]