Investigators are pinning the blame for last year’s errant missile launch, which triggered a brief but costly battle across Apollonia Strait, on a silo employee’s brand new sneakers. Flashing LED lights embedded in the shoes’ heel support tripped a sensor which in turn fired the missile.

The flashing red pulses, which are normally used to help identify joggers and pedestrians to passing aircraft, happened to be patterned on the same sequence as the silo’s top-secret military command protocol.

No charges have been laid against the employee, who had previously been ordered to buy new sneakers on account of his extremely strong foot odor. The investigation also found no fault on the part of military systems designers who programmed the missile to launch on a simple sequence of four evenly timed pulses. Instead, the report described the incident as a combination of unforeseeable events that constituted a “perfect storm” of footwear-missile launch collision.