occurred. i guess it s in the private rocketeer category or a sounding rocket. shepard: a rocket that scientists send up to do research. if that were the case, wouldn t some scientist popped up by now saying my bad. sorry. i didn t mean to get everybody s freak on. defense officials suggest it might just have been an airplane. we have seen lots of airplanes that look like that, right? the atmospheric conditions making its vapor trail look more like a missile. bottom line, there are a lot of theories. we still have no idea what that mystery object was, just off the california coast line. so, let s turn to the pentagon, our national correspondent steve centanni. steve, are have they ruled out some sort of secret missile launch? they haven t ruled out anything yet, shep. it s been all day and they still don t know for sure. they can t be 100% certain, for instance, that it wasn t some kind of black op.s or secretly highly under cover operation. they are going back and counting noses,
private rocket, or something sinister. you can take it into a high school class where the kids are taught with model rockets. you can take it to the laboratories of california where they could be doing more advanced research with bigger systems. you could take it to the backyard entrepreneur who is interested to take on the president s request to privatize space. so there is a lot of ways people can get their hands on thing and tick them in tins and fire them into the sky. and it could be something sinister. i doubt it is the government. we would have heard. and i doubt it is something sinister because nothing sinister has occurred so my guess is probably in the private rocket category or someone sent out a sounding rocket. shepard: if it is a rocket rocket category, and you are a private rocketeer, and you make a mistake like this, you should
ago. we re told it happened about 35 miles offshore, west of los angeles, north of catalina island there. here is what it looked like. you can see it was moving pretty quickly. experts suggested it could be some sort of rocket or missile. but the u.s. navy and air force can t or won t explain it. suggestions? looks to them like an airplane. look like a jet to you? and the folks at norad who oversee aerospace defense for the united states and canada said it didn t come from a foreign military and it wasn t any kind of threat. how can they know that? after all, they claim they don t know what the thing is the former command of the u.s. 6 fleet offered some possibilities earlier on studio b. think of it in three terms. u.s. government agency, private rocketeer or something sinister. i doubt it s the government. we would have heard of them already. i doubt it s something sinister because nothing sinister has