This report (which, quite oddly, has turned up at the web site of my favorite local news radio station, KYW) is intriguing but it will probably go nowhere:

FBI agents and Homeland Security officials spent the weekend investigating the report of a possible missile fired at an American Airlines plane taking off from Los Angeles International Airport.

Sources tell ABC News the pilot of American Airlines Flight 621, en route to Chicago, radioed air traffic controllers after takeoff from LAX. He told them a missile had been fired at the aircraft and missed.

The plane was over water when the pilot said he saw a smoke trail pass by the cockpit.

FBI agents believe it was a flare or a bottle rocket, but say they may never know if that's what it actually was.

So the fumbling or dissembling FBI (don't know which) now has an alternative case-closed explanation: the pilot saw a "contrail" streaking past.

Really? Contrails are only made by planes. Must have been a hallucination of some sort.

Used to have a bumpersticker that said "I BRAKE FOR HALLUCINATIONS."

This is all very interesting, but IMHO the story can't go anywhere unless witnesses come forth, as it's been reduced to case-officially-closed, blogospheric speculation. There's nothing else to do but speculate, and since it's Saturday, I'll join in with some (hopefully logical) speculation of my own.

According to the report, this is just the word of a pilot. There's no word on what the copilot saw, nor of what any passengers might have seen. I'd like to know more, but I would note that many pilots are highly trained former military pilots, many of whom have seen and even fired missiles. Former military pilots are not the type of people who'd be likely to misread a contrail as a missile, so the FBI explanation does not pass my smell test. The fact that it was the second explanation offered after the blogosphere was all over the bottle rocket nonsense gives it even less credibility. I think it's pretty clear that if this was a missile, FBI and Homeland security would not want the public to know about it because that might cause a huge panic. Even less would the airline industry want the public to know -- especially this close to the Christmas travel season. So there would be enormous vested interests in covering this up. That, however, no more proves a coverup than the sudden murder of someone would prove his worst enemy was the murderer. Nor do allegations of previous coverups of missile attacks (like this stuff promulgated at NEIN) prove that there was a coverup here.

Frustrating though it may be, we're stuck with an either or scenario. Missile or no missile. And even if there was a missile, while that probably indicates a terrorist attack, it doesn't necessarily. There are a number of bases in the area, and mistakes can happen.

To coverup is as human as the urge to suspect a coverup. That's why (as I've said before), in examining conspiracy theories, I try to avoid the following common pitfalls:

the temptation of believing what I want to believe

the temptation of disbelieving (denying) what I don't want to believe

the temptation of clinging too tenaciously to my own conclusions (if any)

the temptation of being adversely influenced by emotions instead of logic (loud and ugly tones, or harsh rhetoric make me distrustful; reasonable tones engender trust and can create illusions of truth)

I think it's obvious that information is being withheld. While that doesn't prove that there was a missile attack, it justifies blogospheric scrutiny.

And "blogospheric scrutiny," I hasten to add, is not a synonym for "paranoid conspiracy theorizing"!

AFTERTHOUGHT: If American Airlines in fact employs commercial jetline pilots who confuse contrails with missiles, that doesn't speak well for the company.

UPDATE: In response to his earlier post, Bill Quick has received an email from a passenger who didn't see anything, but who says another passenger claimed she did, and spoke to the FBI.

The blogosphere is amazing, really. While the case isn't yet unclosed, Bill Quick is already ahead of the MSM (and perhaps even the FBI) in straightening out the misreported flight information.

Let's see, according to Bill, they had "the wrong flight number, the wrong date, and the wrong time of day."

Good job, Bill!

(I'm starting to think that the official story may soon be disembunked . . .)

UPDATE(12/07/05): Bill Quick has posted what may be a sort of final report on this matter -- in the form of an "email from Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American Airlines."

- Flight #612 was at 13,000 feet altitude - 7-10 miles offshore.
- Cloud ceiling was at 4-5,000 feet (someone on the ground or on a boat
wouldn't have been able to see the aircraft)
- Captain saw straight vertical rocket contrail up to about 6,000 feet
- Rocket was approximately 3-4 miles away from flight #612
- That equals a horizontal separation of about 4 miles and a vertical
separation of well over a mile.
- The captain never used the word "missile" and never believed the
aircraft was a target of the rocket.

I remain skeptical, of course, that we'll ever know exactly what happened.