Either there's a lame UFO in our midst or an unidentified SoCal redneck (read: the Navy) is trying to punctuate President Obama's Eastern visit with one big Cold War chin-up — just in time for the debut of “Black Ops.”

It's just a theory, but it's a good one: Robert Ellsworth, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, speculated to CBS San Diego that the mysterious missile on the Southern California skyline yesterday could have been a show of military muscle.

“It could be a test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile from an underwater submarine, to demonstrate mainly to Asia, that we can do that,” Ellsworth said.

You can bet Department of Defense spokespersons, who continue to plead utterly clueless to the KCBS video evidence, want to deliver Ellsworth a swift kick to his big speculative mouth right now.

The missile's trail was pink and billowing, highly visible from the mainland — not the kind of thing anyone could have realistically hoped to cover up. Still, the Vandenberg Air Force Base maintains that the last time it flexed its big war muscles in the sky was with a Delta II rocket on Friday.

We're just sort of surprised people are probing into boring stuff like who launched this thing, when the real story is that goddamn plane it almost hits on the way up. Nothing like a nuke in the side-mirror to make you appreciate the little things again.

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