Parallax to the viewer and lighting conditions can also play a huge role in perceived direction of an object. Put a glowing object in a featureless sky and I would give zero reliability to an observer to determine if it was truly climbing, diving, or receding. A piece of debris that fell off and rapidly slowed could appear, from certain perspectives, to be rapidly climbing up and away from the reference object.
Where did you get those numbers?
The surface of the Earth is 510,072,000km[sup]2[/sup].*
The planar surface area of a 747 is about 1000m[sup]2[/sup]* (based on a wing area of 511m[sup]2[/sup] and [del]eyeballing[/del] estimating that the surface area of the fuselage, engines, and empennage is about the same).
Pulling a number out of the air, let’s say there are 10,000 commercial airliners in the world. Let’s also say, for the sake of simplicity, that they are all the same size as a 747.
One square kilometer is 1,000,000m[sup]2[/sup] and the planar surface area of 1000 airplanes is also 1,000,000m[sup]2[/sup] so 10,000 airliners would cover 10km[sup]2[/sup] or 1/51,007,200 of the surface of the Earth.
Roughly 500* meteorites the size of a marble or larger strike the surface of the Earth every year, or 10,000 in a 20 year period. This means that, on average, that is one meteorite per 51,007km[sup]2[/sup] and that one meteorite has a 1:5700 chance of hitting the 10km[sup]2[/sup] of airliners. Not your 1:10 chance.
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- Numbers from Wikipedia.
I can’t find my orginal calculations. A lot depends on the size of meteorite. Even something smaller than a marble could bring down a plane at high speed. I am willing to admit I may have been way off, however.
In the book Stiff, Mary Roach spoke to Dennis Shanahan, who examined the injuries on the recovered corpses of the passengers on Flight 800. Using seating charts and analyzing the types and locations of the bodies’ damage, he was able to rule out a bomb or missile because there was no corroborating shrapnel or fire damage consistent with such events. Everything the corpses told him pointed toward a fuel tank explosion that caused the plane to come apart in midair.
I found his reasoning much more convincing than anything else I’ve heard about this.
While the same tests on victims of the Lockerbie bombing used the shrapnel entry paths to point to where the the bomb was when it exploded.
Personally, I always preferred my dead folk to be LONG dead. Working with wet ones never appealed to me. Okay, robbing graves stopped appealing to me, too, so now I try to have no truck with dead folk at all and design A/V, automation, and security systems for the obscenely rich.
And sometimes people are just lousy observers who want something to be so and confabulate, aided by communal reinforcement:
Religious history is full of claims of thousands of observers seeing the Virgin Mary appear to them. All of them. How about claims of crowds that they saw the sun dance? All of them. Is that sufficient evidence for you to believe it really happened? How about other apparitions? Are we to take all of these at face value without question, in the absence of corroborating evidence?
Although the following quote was written about religious experiences, I think it applies to conspiracy nuts as well, as they can approach the same fervor about their favorite topic:
If one witness can be mistaken, others can be, too. That is why eyewitness testimony needs to be taken with a grain, or maybe a block, of salt. It’s not the gold standard of scientific evidence.
I’m sorry but that is a weak argument. 100 plus people described a contrail that matches that of a missile and not of burning jumbojet. The 2 are so different in appearance it is worth serious debate. It was completely ignored in the investigation.
I gave the Hindenburg example for a reason. for 70 years people thought that the hydrogen exploded first. It took a rocket scientist to make the simple observation that hydrogen doen’t burn bright orange. He hunted around for bits of the skin and when he found some of it and had it tested he discovered it was painted with rocket fuel. After looking through German archives it turns out they new it all along and covered it up.
Now I’m not too keen on cover-up theories but I know what burning jet fuel looks like and it doesn’t look anything like what was described as a missile approaching the plane. The 2 cannot be confused. While I’m comfortable with the knowledge that the center tank exploded at 13,000 feet I don’t see how a rise of 1000 to 3000 feet of burning jumbo jet can be confused with a missile that climbed 13,000 feet from the surface.
This is a statement divorced from reality by a truly staggering gulf of facts. We live in a world where it is a routine occurrence for people to believe that the planet Venus is a spaceship. You don’t think people could mistake a missile for a burning plane?
That sounds to me like a very easy mistake to make, unless you are personally familiar with surface-to-air missiles, which most people are not.
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Exactly how many missiles do you have experience observing?
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What about the 600 people you claim saw a missile? Can you provide a cite for 600 seaprate eyewitness accounts, anyway?
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If the plane was struck by a missile, what kind was it? SAMs come in many shapes and sizes, and not all would look the same.
And these are all trained observers? Who have seen missles and burning jumbojets, and know the difference? Miles away?
It was completely ignored because eyewitness accounts are often wrong. These are not independent, trained observers. They had time to compare stories and none of them knew about the things the investigators uncovered, i.e., flatulent fuel tanks and frayed wires. They were being fed ideas by the rumor mill and they saw what they wanted to believe. The facts were otherwise. Who ya gonna believe, the hard facts or your lyin’ eyes?
BTW, you might want to check out that Hindenburg disaster RE flammable dope compound. I’ve seen the same show you have, and it was quite convincing, but not all experts are on board with it.
I’m not aware of any eyewitnesses that said they saw the missle leave the surface. If someone had said that, it would be relatively easy to trace the route to some place on the surface and find evidence of the firing. A SAM missle doesn’t fit in a shoebox.
Back to eyewitnesses…from here:
We have millions of eyewitnesses to Jebus in the clouds. If you are not willing to discount what the missle-trail enthusiasts claim to see, then you’d better believe Jebus really is in the clouds. The amount of evidence is the same, unless you say the more people, the more likely it is to be true – in that case, the Jebus claim is the more credible.
You’re not listening.
It has nothing to do with people’s perception of the object. Not sure why you’re having a hard time following my point. I made a very specific observation regarding the descriptions of the contrail of a missile versus the burning wreckage of a plane that exploded. Missile contrails are completely different from burning jet aircraft. Jet fuel burns very dark and leaves a large blooming contrail. This is exactly how it was described by Flight Engineer Dennis Richardson who was doing National Guard training flights into Gabreski Field:
MR. WIEMEYER: Okay. Dennis, what was your involvement in – what were you doing at the time that
the TWA accident took place?
MR. RICHARDSON: I’m a flight engineer on the H-60 helicopter. And that night we were doing local
training. And we were making our second approach into Kabresky [phonetic sp. 1 here. Capt. Baur was flying side of the helicopter in the back, to scan outside while he was – had his head inside the cockpit doing the instrument approach. And as we terminated the approach, Capt. Baur said, “Dennis, is that pyre?” And as I looked up the sky exploded. And the fire went across the sky like napalm. And then it just came down like a curtain. And –
MR. WIEMEYER: Okay. Would you describe that fire in as much detail as you possibly can: color, smoke trails. Anything you can recall about it.
MR. RICHARDSON: It was red and black – red with, like, black smoke in it. And it was, like I said, just like napalm. Like when you see an air – a fighter drop napalm; it erupted and just went across the sky and then came down at the same time in one big curtain. And the – the three of us that were in the airplane at the time, Maj. Meyer, Capt. Baur and myself thought – immediately thought that each local bugsmashers
or banner-towers that are up and down the beach all summer had finally collided, you know. And we immediately headed out to the fire – you know, do that – start a search.
MR. WIEMEYER: Was there any smoke trail following it? MR. RICHARDSON: When we got out there we could actually see a black smoke trail in the sky. And, like, a – like – like something with the gilt in. You could still see it in the sky.
No, that is my whole point. The 2 are so different in appearance it would show up in the description. It doesn’t matter what the person thinks they’re seeing. What matters is the description of the event. What the Flight engineer described was what I would expect to see after the tank exploded. It wasn’t even close to what was described by other people who claimed to see something ascending:
Witness 73 described the smoke trail as light gray
Witness 88 described it as a wispy white smoke trail
Witness 144 described it as white streak
Witness 145 described it as gray/white smoke trail.
Witness 150 described it as white or light gray smoke
Witness 243 described it as the smoke which trailed this object was whitish in color and the band of smoke was narrow.
Witness 649 described it as a trail of whitish smoke
If the fuselage that supposedly climbed 1500 feet was the perceived ascending missile then the contrail would have been described as black and billowing.
I think you just proved the opposite point from what you were trying to make. All the witnesses watched the same thing, but look how different their descriptions were! Were they lying about the colors or what? Could their memory of the event have been altered by time or expectations?
You are saying these are identical descriptions, but I say they are quite different. Maybe your interpretation depends on what you want them to say and how you force them to match?
You’ve made no attempt at researching anything I’ve said or the topic. You’re operating under the assumption that the United States government is incapable of investigative error. If you study the methods used you will find that the FBI handled all of the eyewitness investigations and asked that the NTSB not re-interview them to avoid any confusion. Fine, except the FBI didn’t record any of the interviews nor did they ask the respondents to review the notes taken by the FBI for accuracy nor did the FBI make any attempt to correct their own notes. This becomes obvious when you read through them and see all the phonetic mistakes made by interviewers. A monkey with a microphone would have produced more accurate notes.
I don’t understand why eyewitness accounts were dismissed to the point that the FBI asked they be withheld from public hearings. From the James K. Kallstrom FBI letter to James Hall the NTSB:
**December 3, 1997
Honorable James E. Hall
Chairman
National Transportation Safety Board
490 L’Enfant Plaza East, SW
Washington, DC 20594
Dear Chairman Hall,
I write to express again my views, concerns and objections to those portions of the public hearing, scheduled to begin December8, 1997 in Baltimore, that address the criminal investigation into the TWA Flight 800 tragedy. As we have discussed previously, the FBI, exercising its jurisdiction and responsibility under the law, conducted an exhaustive and thorough investigation to determine if the Flight 800 tragedy was caused by a criminal act, particularly a bomb or a missile. After sixteen months, having exhausted all avenues of investigation, we found no evidence that this tragedy was the result of a criminal act and we placed the investigation in a pending inactive status. As we have discussed, the FBI has not closed the criminal investigation because of the possibility that new evidence could be discovered in the course of the continuing National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)accident inquiry, from intelligence sources or wreckage that heretofore has not been found. The possibility of this occurring is, admittedly remote. Nevertheless, until the NTSB has definitely determined an accidental cause for the crash, I believe it is prudent to withhold from public disclosure or discussion the identities of witnesses and the raw investigative details of the criminal investigation. **
For all practical purpose it looks like the FBI humored the 600 plus people who came forward without actually investigating anything and then went on to insist that the information not be presented in a public forum. I’d put that under the column of WTH?
What I’m saying is that you cannot mistake a burning jet ascending 1500 feet to a rocket rising 13,500 feet because the events are so visually different. Jet fuel burns black and in the event of a catastrophic event it is a billowing cloud. You can look at any video of any mid-air accident and you will see this. A missile on the other hand, produces a thin light colored contrail because of the nature of the fuels burned and also because it follows in the slipstream of itself. There is no turbulence to cause it to billow it out. You can look at any missile video and see this.
Magiver, you feel that eyewitnesses reports should be taken at a greater value than I (and most of science) do.
If a scientific investigation is at odds with eyewitness reports, I (and most of science) will put more credence in the scientific investigation. This does not mean that the investigation is correct or flawless, just that it deserves more weight.
The conspiracy crowd rarely brings forward solid evidence, but instead relies on “anomolies” and such dubious sources as untrained and possibly biased observers. On this weak structure, they build a house of cards. I prefer to start with a strong structure and see if it makes sense, giving credibility to those who know more about their highly specialized fields than I do. No, I don’t trust any report just because it’s a government report, but I don’t discard it for that reason, either. It doesn’t mean I can’t question anything that seems odd or wrong, but what do I know about airplane wiring and fuel tanks? About as much as the eyewitnesses you so fondly revere.
Let’s look at this another way. What part of the official explanation do you feel doesn’t hold up to science? If you feel that a spark wasn’t likely, or if it was, wouldn’t ignite the fuel, or if it did, wouldn’t blow up the plane, what is your hard evidence to support this conclusion? Do you have any evidence other than contradictory eyewitness accounts to back up your theory?
I saw the program they did on Bigfoot. They came to the shocking conclusion that. . . a person in a suit could have matched the gait in the Patterson video. The Bigfooters have typically said that humans were not physically able to match that posture and gait.
The center tank exploded, there is no doubt in this. Everything that happened from that point on fits eyewitness accounts. However, nothing prior to this fits eyewitness accounts. It’s not a function of weighing the testimony, it’s a function of ignoring it entirely and then actually seeing that the information isn’t discussed in public.
There is another avenue of discussion I could talk about but you’re so unwilling to admit the obvious that there is no point in discussing it. I invite you to look at videos of any jet aircraft accident and then look at video’s of any missile launch. It is so flamingly obvious (pun intended) that one cannot be confused with the other in ** description**. I’ve gone to great lengths to explain this.
I’d say its femur was disproportionately long but that would burn whatever credibility I might’ve regained in this thread. 
There’s really no point in my trying to analyze stuff I don’t feel qualified to interpret. And maybe that’s the difference between you & me. Even if a video of a missle looked exactly like my [stored in personal memory] account of the incident, it wouldn’t prove that the incident was caused by a missle.
Human memory is not a perfect recording of what a human experiences, and it does not get stored forever without alteration. It can be imperfect at the start; it can be altered by fantasy, time, expectations, influences and accounts of others, ignorance, and confusion with other events. Worse, the human who is recalling that memory may not be aware of its imperfections or alterations and may believe that it is an accurate record. It is not.
I invite you to investigate these links:
Anecdotal Evidence
Confabulation
Confirmation Bias
Memory
Selective Thinking
Wishful Thinking
EEEEEEEEEEE. Pulls hair out in frustration. I fully understand your point about eyewitness data.
People don’t have to know what they’re looking at to describe it. It helps just as it helps to be able to relate it to something else they’re familiar with. But you don’t have to know what a missile contrail looks like to describe it. Obviously my argument needed visual aids to make more sense. But let me reiterate it’s unnecessary for you to know doodley squat to make the observation. I’m not saying a single observation is something to bet the farm on. But when you start correlating 10, 20, 30 observations you then have something to analyze for common elements.
I think I could ask you a question about an event 20 years ago and your answer will correlate with most other people. Even after all these years. You don’t have to know anything about the machines involved to describe what you saw.
OK, describe the explosion of the shuttle challenger. Feel free to look it up and see how accurate your description is and let me know how you did.
Speaking of Challenger, we have all seen missile contrails in detail – the Shuttle booster rockets are essentially quasi-ICBMs. And surely we’ve followed their trails in the course of reviewing Challenger, right?
BTW, I am largely agnostic here. I am willing to believe in anomalous mechanical failures, sure – we all saw the AA jet crash over Rockaway due to some pretty basic wake-turbulence/horizontal-stabilizer interaction – yikes.
You mean the event we’ve all seen at least 100 times on TV?