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Missile Launch? Lens Flare? Mysterious Object Spotted Over Whidbey Island

It looks like a missile to me.
 
What we need is another time lapse photo of a chopper to gauge the differences and similarities.
 
What we need is another time lapse photo of a chopper to gauge the differences and similarities.

Here's a long exposure photo of an LAPD helicopter using its searchlight over the Echo Park area:

LAPD-chopper-echo-park-long-exposure.jpg

 
Different colour but otherwise very similar. Helicopter it is.

The LAPD photo (only illustration I could readily find ...) involves a bright white / blue-ish spotlight. The spotlight's relatively higher intensity makes this light track crisper (better defined) than the one at issue.

I suspect the Whidbey Island illuminated track represents the chopper's (much less white-ish / blue-ish) built-in nose and / or undercarriage marker / landing lights, with the underside ones reflecting off the medevac copter's white 'underbelly'.
 
Here's a picture of the specific alleged helicopter.

3661436189_9eb5934cb0.jpg


For those who doubt that this could like like a wide missile...consider this.

If we accept that the non-vapourtail is actually a persistance-of-perception streeetched lightbeam, from the helicopter underside (painting the sky, downwards, from the port&starbord light origin points)...its width (ie that of the putative non-missile) must equal that lightshow.

And the non-missile then equates to a 'colour blotch' snub-shaped helicopter dimensional extremity blur, rectangularly-extrapolated in the line of travel (always just ahead of the light it back-casts).

A chroma-sum of the black-red-white+scatterlight could easily approximate to the (unaerodynamic, wide, short) brown artefact we see, making fun of us.

And I suspect this *is* an instance where the photo owner had his own pedestrian analysis, of this, already on (or under) the table. I predict he HAS seen pictures exceedingly-similar to this, before, taken by his weathercam.
 
Note the blinking light which indicates this one is an actual aircraft. Not on the original one.

Good point, but ...

Different copters, different marker lamps, and most importantly - different viewing angle.

Check the photo of the medevac copter in post #38. The port / starboard marker lamps are small and located at the ends of the narrow horizontal 'fin' in the rear. They're not prominent in low-light or nighttime photos of that model copter.

I'm not even sure the side marker lamps on that particular model of helicopter flash.

One of the reasons I accept the medevac copter explanation for the Whidbey Island incident is that if one expands the photo in (e.g.) PhotoShop and does some color palette tweaking there's a noticeably reddish tinge to the left, and a more yellowish / greenish tinge to the right, of the main 'blur' - exactly the distribution one would expect from an aircraft more or less overhead and traveling away from the camera.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the LA long-exposure photo was taken with relatively clear air below the cloud ceiling. The Whidbey Island photo was taken during a misty / rainy period.
 
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I'm not really arguing, just that the original photo is unfortunately too blurry to be absolutely sure what it is.

But certainly the helicopter is the most likely explanation. Nice picture though.
 
With the 20 sec exposure it does seem likely to be a copter, it's a wounder the police one round here as not been reported as a UFO as it has a series of small red lights on the Starboard side maybe greens on the port but not seen that side that are set out in the shape of a broad arrow pointing forward even knowing what it is it takes more than a glance to work it out, just looks like a series of red lights flying in formation.
 
as it has a series of small red lights on the Starboard side maybe greens on the port
This configuration would only apply if, highly-exceptionally, the helicopter was in the hover and (in effect) reversing. This could happen during SAROPS or other tactical flights, but is generally avoided.

As @EnolaGaia says, the conventional navigation lights arrangement is red on port-side extremities (ie the left of the aircraft, when self-observed from the flight-deck facing forwards) and green on starboard-side extremities (ie the right of the aircraft, again from the deck looking to the fore).

Some helicopters adopt an arrangement where their rotorblades have bi-colour lights built into the tips, such that they display the correct attitudinal/axial position of the aircraft by being the correct colour for each 180deg rotation in a flat plane, switching at the fore/aft axis transition point.

The result is a circle streak of light that is half-green/half-red, and looks exactly like....well, a flying saucer, from certain angles. This could look decidedly-odd on an extended exposure photograph.
 
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