It didn’t look anything like a missile launch to me either. If those spirals were rocket exhaust then where are the pics of it diffusing and being swept along by wind currents into a fuzzy looking cloud of smoke?
Failed rocket launches are ugly, asymmetrical messes. The vapor trails are this jagged, almost sickly sort of tracing in the sky. I remember the Challenger explosion and the trails left by the SRBs, and that to me was more gruesome than the thought of those astronauts burning up.
Nothing is more evil looking than when large structures fail. There’s this ruthlessness of sorts.
Yeah, this story is pure horse hockey.