New conspiracy theory claims Air Force one was targeted by a missile strike
Mike Rothschild—
June 14 at 2:30AM
In the early hours of Sunday, June 10, a webcam set up to watch Puget Sound near Whidbey Island, WA, caught what looks exactly like a missile being fired into the sky.
After the owner of the webcam posted the picture on Twitter the next day, it was immediately seized upon by followers of the online persona known as Q Anon. Their hypothesis: not only was this a missile, but it was fired by anti-Trump forces in an effort to shoot down Air Force One, then on its way to Singapore for the summit with Kim Jong Un.
And how do they know this? Because of secret clues left in the misspelled words Trump used on Twitter in the days around the summit indicating that the missile had been shot down. It’s a technique Trump supposedly uses often to convey information to Q Anon believers.
Conspiracy theories like the “Whidbey Island Missile” work because the human brain is extremely susceptible to both confirmation bias and pareidolia, the phenomenon where we see patterns and shapes where none exist.
In the case of the “missile,” it really looks like what we think a missile looks like. Then, other people see the same image and confirm that they think it looks like what we think it looks like.
Ergo, it’s a missile because it looks like what a missile looks like.
However, to look at the picture and declare it has to be a missile because it looks like a missile is to ignore a great deal of other evidence that it’s not a missile To take a step back, what exactly is the photo? How was it taken? And where?
Whidbey Island is a long, rugged island in Puget Sound, north of Seattle. It’s 168 square miles, and has a population of over 80,000 people.
The webcam belongs to the owner of the website SkunkBayWeather, and is one of four that broadcast a live feed of the weather in the Skunk Bay area on the south edge of Whidbey Island, all situated in Hansville, south of the island, and pointing north.
A writer with the tech website The War Zone reached out to the webcam’s owner, who confirmed that it’s his, that the picture is real, and that the camera captures images every 40-45 seconds, with a 20 second exposure.
These details are important because they help establish what the image actually is.
But first, how do we know it’s NOT a missile? Whidbey Island does have a naval base, and the Navy has a number of other bases in the area, including a base for nuclear submarines (along with thousands of warheads) about 60 miles south of that base, Naval Submarine Base Bangor.
Could it have been fired from either the Whidbey Island base or a submarine from Bangor?
It couldn’t have been fired from Whidbey Island itself, because that base is a small airfield with no offensive or defensive missile launchers.
https:// www.dailydot.com/layer8/whidbey-island-missile-air-force-one/