video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2qKMchcgzk

Of course one reason to keep mum: It is one of our sub launched nuclear missiles and oooops, missile drill where such a launch shouldn't happen.  Keeping it a secret until we recover the warheads!  Keeping it a secret if we don't---national security and such.

LOS ANGELES — A mysterious "missile" streaked across the sky off the Southern California coast Monday night and was caught on video by a local TV station's helicopter camera.

KCBS reported the trail was visible from Los Angeles. The station's helicopter crew described the missile's location as 35 miles out to sea north of Catalina Island.

Senior Pentagon and Navy officials told NBC News that they did not know who launched the missile.

Military officials told said that a planned military exercise would not have been held that close to Los Angeles.

Officials were also examining the possibility it was a "commercial launch of some kind" or that amateurs had built a device capable of creating such a plume, NBC News reported.

A Navy spokesman told local CBS station KFMB that there was no Navy activity reported in that region Monday night, and that it was not the Navy's missile.

KCBS, which originally reported the incident, asked Robert Ellsworth, a former deputy secretary of defense and ambassador to NATO, about the mystery missile.

"It could be a test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile from a submarine to demonstrate, mainly to Asia, that we can do that," he told the TV station, emphasizing that he was purely speculating.

So Saddam Hussien's submarine finally got here and shot their WMD in the wrong direction.  Sheeesh.  Have fun rowing back and reporting that failure morons!