Hey Orange County Residents: What Is This?

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of odd contrails in the sky, and today I got some pictures with my phone. Here’s what the path looks like at the start of their flight:

I’m pretty sure airplanes don’t take off at a 45 degree angle. So it’s a missile test of some kind, right? Or a military jet? Here’s the middle of the path:

And here’s the end of the path as it flies out over the Pacific Ocean:

I’ve enhanced this photo so you can see another odd thing: the black trail ahead of the contrail. The missile, or whatever it is, is following the exact path of some earlier missile without the slightest deviation. I don’t doubt the precision of our armaments, but this seems almost creepily accurate.

Also: it’s coming from the south, so it’s not something out of Vandenberg. Do they test missiles from Camp Pendleton? Does anyone know what this is?

UPDATE: The black trail is the shadow of the contrail. I’ve never seen that before, so that’s pretty interesting. The airplane/missile/UFO is still a bit of a mystery, though. The betting money in comments is that this is an ordinary commercial jet flying out of San Diego, and the steep angle of ascent is just a trick of perspective. That seems really unlikely to me. I never saw anything like this until about a month or so ago, and since then I’ve seen it several times. And anyway, San Diego is just too far away for this. Maybe something out of Ontario? Or March air base? Or a new aircraft carrier floating around on Lake Elsinore?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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