On Wednesday of this week, NORAD - the organization who has the charter to protect those of us who live in North America, scrambled an unknown number of fighter jets from various bases over the United States to chase_contrails. Officially, NORAD reported that the interceptors could not determine a visual or radar source for the contrails and returned to their bases.

A contrail by the way is a white trail of condensed water vapour that sometimes forms in the wake of an aircraft or a missile. Matter of fact, if you look up in the sky on one of those days that few clouds are around, you might see some contrails and since Toronto still has a CAP of military aircraft patrolling due to September 11, the chances of seeing the contrails left by CF-18's for those of us near to the city, is a pretty good one.

In light of the high state of tension with Iraq and the United States and additionally with terrorist events taking place all over the globe, there is little wonder that contrails of unknown origin being seen in the skies of North America would cause NORAD to scramble fighter jets.. but what is important about this particular story is that the contrails were first sighted in the Caribbean and then seemed to follow a path over the Midwestern United States and obviously was something that would be measured in minutes or hours.

Soooo... to be blunt. Simple... unknown contrails in the sky, scramble jets to determine what they are and determine the level of threat or not_all standard operating procedure - right?

Wrong!

There's one little tiny problem - NORAD does not, repeat not, scramble jets to simply investigate things that people see in the skies. To confirm this, I went to a site that details what NORAD's operational policies are and found this little tidbit of info, and I quote from a document entitled, Identification of Air Traffic, January 31, 1996, series number NI10-15, "NORAD's primary means of identifying air traffic penetrating or operating within the North American ADIZ is through correlation of AMD with observed radar tracks." In other words, they have to have hard data before they're going to scramble jets to intercept and gather more data.

This of course means that NORAD had something on their radar before they scrambled the interceptors; the only question now is - what was it?

Theories say that it was most probably a test flight of a new top-secret aircraft or spacecraft. Some people think it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft and others think it might have been a meteor going through the atmosphere but not hitting the planet.

I don't know what it was and I'm not buying into the nicely sanitized and sounding, "We couldn't determine what it was and sorry returned to base." It is NORAD's job to know exactly what is in the skies over North America and they simply would NOT have given up so easily if they didn't know. If it was the test flight of a new spacecraft or aircraft, NORAD would have been informed because the manufacturers of the craft would not want interceptors to shoot it out of the sky.

The only real problem I have with the news story is that it annoys me when organizations like NORAD think they can treat us like idiots and tell us only half of the story expecting us to believe it. They should have told us about they caught on radar and go from there_at least if they said they couldn't catch it, or it vanished before the interceptors could obtain it visually or on radar, I'd be more inclined to think it was a simple thing. But now, all they've done is make intelligent people want to ask a lot more questions...

But that's just my take on it!