Allahpundit has done a great job of covering the Mystery Contrail story, which most experts agree came from an airplane flight and not a rocket, especially since the phenomenon happened the very next day at the very same time as one blogger noted and linked to a specific commercial route.  The Pentagon took its time in analyzing the contrail that appeared over Southern California, leading to an explosion of speculation, but after eliminating all of the other possibilities concluded that an airplane had created the contrail.

Yesterday I asked Andrew Malcolm how people in Los Angeles had reacted to the Mystery Contrail story, and he reported that it had led all the news shows and generated a lot of interest.  One television station decided to poll Angelenos on whether they thought the government had told the truth about its origin, and the results show that LA doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the answer.  The Survey USA poll shows only 20% of respondents who were “familiar” with the story think the government told the truth about the contrail, while 66% — two-thirds — say the government lied about it.

The crosstabs show a remarkable sense of unity.  Young, middle-aged, old, white, black, Hispanic — the overwhelming majority in every demographic believes the government lied about it.  The best the government does is with those 55 or older, where only 54% say it’s a lie, while 34% believe the explanation.  Only 6% of younger voters buy the official conclusion, while 77% reject it.

Interestingly, KABC-TV doesn’t have a report on its own poll, at least not yet, but they do have a report on the contrail that perhaps more Angelenos should read (emphasis mine):

“It seemed to change directions. Ballistic missiles don’t do that. It doesn’t accelerate. Ballistic missiles accelerate,” said Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of physics at City University of New York.

Kaku also said the mysterious object was going in the wrong direction for it to be a ballistic missile.

“Ballistic missiles go east to west. This one seems to be going north and south,” he said. …

Some people had speculated that it was a secret launch by the U.S. military, but experts point out that if the government wanted to keep it secret, it wouldn’t launch a rocket or missile so close to Los Angeles and its millions of residents.

LA residents would apparently argue that conducting a secret test with 10 million potential spectators just proves that the government wanted plausible deniability.  The truth is out there, dudes …. way, way, way out there.