I just saw the show on TDC about the tragic loss of TWA Flt. 800, off LI NY, in 1997. AS we all know , everyone on board was killed. The offical explanation was that the plane’s central fuel tank ignited and exploded, destroying the plane in mid-air. Yet, there are at least 3 witnesses who maintain that they saw an oject with a flaring exhaust, move toward the plane’s lights…shortly aferwards, the plane exploded in a massive fireball.
Now, the FAA, FBI, and the CIA were involved in the investigation, and all of the aviation experts concluded that the plane was destroyed by accident. Yet, these very credible witnesses maintain what they saw.
My question: assuming a couple of terrorsist has “Stinger” shoulder-launched missles, would this be enough to bring down a 747? And, if terrorist wereinvolved, wouldn’t they want to take credit for this?
The usualy conspiracy-minded paranoid would say: “Aha, if the US government admitted that terrorists brought down the plane, people would stop flying and the airlines would go bankrupt!”
So, what’s your take on this?
I think the rumors continue because planes don’t just “blow up” in the air. Sure, there are tragic plane crashes, but never “kaboom” accidents like this that don’t involve bombs or other forms of terrorism.
The fact that there are tons - tons of people that maintain that they saw “objects” streaking to or from the plane just gives fuel to the fire.
I believe I remember that being explained as objects that were blown away from the plane. It’s apparently very common for witnesses to mistake which direction such things are traveling when it happens fast like that. You have to remember that the human brain is “designed” to piece together incomplete information and remember it as a whole event. For example, if you are in a dark room with 2 lights that are seperated by a certain distance, and the 2 lights flash in sequence, one after the other, what you will “see” is a light moving from one point to the other. And it’s not uncommon for eyewitnesses to the same event to give completely contradictory accounts, so you always have to take eyewitness accounts with a grain of salt. Sometimes people just plain remember things wrong.
I happened to be standing in the parking lot when a military jet crashed about 13 years ago (I was working on the base). I watched all of it: the steeper than normal descent, the canopy blow off, and the far too late/too low egress. When I gave my statement to the examiners, I asked what type of stories they had received from other witnesses. It was astonishing: Fireballs, explosions, rolling/tumbling airplane, explosions in the cockpit, streaking missiles, one even claimed that the underwing “bombs” had blown up (there were no external stores on the a/c). You name it - someone had “seen” it. I guess eyewitnesses are not that reliable in a stressful situation. Hence the continued belief in an external cause to TWA 800 (they really believe they saw the “streaks”, “missiles”, whatever).
So, that must be why the conspiracy kooks refuse to believe that 9-11 was an act of terrorism. It couldn’t have been terrorism, because the government SAID it was terrorism! And, uh, vice-versa in the case of Flight 800.
Was one of the eyewitnesses a military person? I seem to remember reading that somewhere. Something about either the Coast Guard or the Air National Guard, but I can’t remember right now.
I even have a good friend in California, whose father used to work for General Dynamics who swears he told her that he heard that is was accidentally shot down by a missile from some US Navy ship. She claims he got the info from “friends” in the C.I.A.
Classic FOAF story-telling.
When I point out all the weak points of the story she gets angry that I “come off like I know everything”.
I still try occainsionally, never give up, never surrender.
Because it’s similarities to flight 103 exploding over Lockerbie Scotland are too similar to ignore, and flight 103 was a bomb.
IIRC, the radars in the area did not show a missle, so the eyewitnesses’ accounts are suspect. That’s a congested air corridor with many radars.
Maybe it’s because most people aren’t all that technically minded. As I heard how the tank was nearly empty and the wiring was old I put two and two together and wondered how people could be so stupid as to fly an aircraft in that condition well before the investigators were done explaining their findings.
You also have to take into account that these people have no idea how a missile works.
AFAIK most, if not all missiles, do not continuously “flair” to it’s target. A stinger (for instance) fires a burst of exhaust/flame as it takes off and perhaps for several seconds after. Once it reaches it’s max velocity it no longer has any fuel and goes balistic for the end part of it’s journey.
Next to a shuttle rocket, I don’t think many SAM missiles have enough fuel to continously flame for 30,000 feet (unless it’s one HUGE missile).
THAT is the strongest piece of evidence it wasn’t terrorists. Why would terrorists obtain a surface to air missile, blow a jet out of the sky, and then keep quiet about it? It would defeat their purpose if it what was generally believed it was an accident, and people weren’t in terror.
It wouldn’t have had to. TWA 800 wasn’t anywhere near 30,000 feet when it went down.
So, what did the 100+ witnesses actually see?
As a Naval Officer, this claim always stirs me up. Frankly, we don’t all that often shoot missiles, and when we do, it’s a pretty big deal. For the Navy to shoot down an unarmed civilian airliner, you’d have to assume that 15 minimum Officers and crew were willing to shoot the thing down, and that the entire crew, ~350, was willing to never tell a sole that they just killed hunderds of fellow Americans in cold blood. Just not going to happen.
Case closed…
I would not consider a military training accident “in cold blood” unless it was intentional.
You chose your words very carefully.
A “training accident” would still require the same number of people to cover it up and is just as asinine as other conspiracy theory.
Eywitness evidence is incredibly unreliable. People misinterpret things or remember them wrong even under hypnosis. It seems there was some debris in the air immediately after the explosion that left trails and were probably interpreted as objects streaking towards the plane when they were falling away. The remembered sequence is of no consequence. There was no reason to even look up before the initial explosion and they just got the sequence scrambled in their memory. It happens. The brain tries to impose interpretations of things it doesn’t understand and those scrambled interpretations are experientially indistinguishible from any other “memory” (the same applies to false memories which can be suggested or implanted under hypnosis resulting in bogus “recovered memories” of Satanic ritual abuse, etc.). In fact visual memory doesn’t even really exist in the sense of objective “record” of experience stored in the brain. All memories are really imaginative or cognitive constructs designed to retain information but those constructs are not perfect records.
So some people saw some trails and convinced themselves they saw rockets. Their rocket stories sounded more interesting and got them more attention than saying they saw falling debris. After all these years they have fully convinced themselves that they saw rockets and doubtless they have enriched their “memories” with all kinds of ancillary details and more vivid visual “recollections.”
Good points, Dio. Aural evidence is in this regard more reliable (I’m talking in general terms, not about this accident or air accidents in general). Words may be “seared” onto memory in ways which visual events appear not to be able to emulate. I would imagine one of the reasons is the multiplicity of visual cues, compared to the more singular nature of aural reception.
Why could it not have been someone with explosive sneakers sitting over the fuel tank? They caught one trying to do this later, just by chance and good work by a flight attendant.