Two airborne trails spur two very different tales

Brian Stelter and William J. Broad, The New York Times
Gil Leyvas has been a photojournalist on board a television news helicopter for a decade. He has seen countless airplanes and their wispy contrails. What he saw – and recorded – near Los Angeles on Nov. 4 and 8 looked nothing like the trail from an airplane. It looked, to him, like the launching of a missile.
The first time, it looked like a far-off plume of smoke over the Pacific Ocean. The second time, it appeared to be rising into the air, a large vertical column set against the bright orange sky at sunset.
The sunset video piqued the attention of KCBS, the TV station Leyvas works for, and by dawn the next day, last Tuesday, news anchors were speaking of a "mystery missile," one that apparently posed no danger to Los Angeles but that baffled people who saw it. By the end of the day, the video had garnered worldwide attention, which the absence of an official government explanation magnified.
On Wednesday, about 30 hours after the "mystery missile" started attracting news media attention, a Pentagon spokesman said that "there is no evidence to suggest that this is anything else other than a condensation trail from an aircraft." That day, news coverage took a sharp turn, with many reporters, and experts, concluding that what Leyvas had seen was an airplane or, barring that, an optical illusion. Some experts chastised media outlets for running with a half-baked, whole-hyped story.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said from the start that the tape showed an airplane. In an interview, Pike, whose group in Alexandria, Va., analyzes space and military technologies, defended the military's evasiveness as resulting not from dissembling but from the difficulty of knowing with certainty what every part of its vast network was up to. Pike added that television news programs had acted irresponsibly in pushing the missile hypothesis without bothering to establish basic facts that would have quickly cleared up the riddle.
Scott Diener, news director at KCBS, said that the experts interviewed by KCBS on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning had leaned toward the missile hypothesis, spurring the initial "mystery missile" coverage. Asked why he thought there had been a change in the tone of the coverage, he surmised that the aircraft was "the explainable answer as opposed to the unexplainable."
Brian Stelter