Latest TWA Flight 800 missle downing theory

Comments from all are welcome, especially Y2K optimists.

-- anonymous (anon@anon.com), April 09, 1999

Answers

I did not read through the entire letter, but the wording of the first two paragraphs leads me to believe this "Aviation Mishap Analyst " has some ulterior motives?

I find the date interesting, as well as the fact that he did not copy the New York Times or any other newspaper. When I tried to click on the website, the link didn't work, so I failed to learn more about the "source."

We'll see. . .

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), April 09, 1999.

Anon,

I am a Y2k optimist. (Thanks for using that term I feel it is the most accurate discription of people like myself.) While I am an optimist I do remain skeptical of all things I hear. I have said in the past that I do not like Clinton and have never trusted him from day one nor do I take everything the gov. says at face value. I get my optimism about Y2k from being involved in it and doing research from many different angles. As far as this report is concerned, I have always been skeptical of the original process and reporting, and would love to have spent more time researching the truth. I appreciate you posting this site (I was able to connect to the link BTW) and if I get free time, I will enjoy applying my skeptism to both this report and the areas it seems to refute.

-- ???? (????@?.?), April 09, 1999.

BTW there was a news story a few days ago about some couple who paid a TWA pilot to obtain evidence. They in turn took this evidence to have it analysed. I can not quote the story but this sure sounds like it might be connects. Something about residue on seats.

-- ???? (????@?.?), April 09, 1999.

anon,

Very interesting reading.... I wouldn't minimize this info.

FM,

Very good !!! Make your judgement by reading 1 or 2 paragraphs of the article.

All of the links work and I read about 15 pages, looked at the charts and graphs, and read misc. first hand reports.

Don't be another example of AADD(America's Attention Deficit Disorder).

-- WebRNot (webrnot@ncap13k.com), April 09, 1999.

Several points here:

1) Ok, retired commander Donaldson believes a shoulder-fired missile shot down flight 800. He might be right, but I'm not about to jump to the conclusion that everyone who disagrees must be part of a coverup conspiracy. Clearly something went very wrong. Analyzing wreckage is pretty spotty - the details support multiple hypotheses without really ruling out any of them. Donaldson's hypothesis might be as well-supported as any other, even though an equally good (but no more conclusive) explanation might fit the known facts. These reconstructions involve a lot of guesswork.

2) Why would the government want to cover up the shoulder-fired missile hypothesis in favor of any other equally supportable? Flight 800 didn't crash from some mysterious spontaneous natural phenomenon, after all. Something real happened, and nobody is claiming it was CFIT (controlled flight into terrain).

3) Whether or not Donaldson's argument finds widespread agreement among the investigators doesn't seem directly relevant to y2k. OK, sure, we know the government keeps lots of secrets. Every other bureaucrat in the military and related agencies has a "classified" stamp handy, and uses it reflexively. In Vietnam, my job for a while was to transmit classified information. Without exception, what was classified was documented reports of substandard weapons and ammunition. Not to keep this a secret from the enemy (they could see the facts directly, in action) but to keep it a secret from the American press.

Still, there's something slightly (more than slightly) off-color about suspicion that the government is keeping the *future* a secret.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), April 09, 1999.

Not believing what I think of as the "controlled-media", I place some faith in a couple of points I heard about Flight 800:

• 128 people claim they saw a "streak of light" heading for the plane just before it went down
• A physicist who was a "government expert witness" has since indicated that his testimony was used out-of-context, and the Government's claim for how the plane "went down" is illogical

...sorry, no links, just snippets I caught on (cringe) CNN, and read/heard elsewhere.

-- Anonymous99 (Anonymous99@Anonymous99.xxx), April 09, 1999.

I am a Y2K pessimist (though generally optimistic about other things) and cynical of the government so it doesn't suprise me at all that the government covered up the facts. I don't have time to read that whole article, but I saw a story about this a few months ago, perhaps on public television.

The evidence indicates that the explosion occurred under the fuselage where the air conditioning vents are located, which blast out very hot air. Since the unit itself was not capable of an explosion of such force, the conclusion is that a heat seeking missile was launched by terrorists from a boat. Since it rose up from underneath the aircraft the first heat source it locked onto was the AC vents. The FBI immediately swarmed in and controlled what was told to the media because they didn't want it to be known that our security against terrorism was inneffective. Is this basically the same theory as your source?

-- @ (@@@.@), April 09, 1999.

Read "The Downing of TWA Flight 800" by James Sanders. Extensive documentation including eyewitness testimonies, various news articles, interviews with former and current military personnel, etc. all point to a terrible accident that occured during an extensive weapons system test conducted by the Navy in an area just south of TWA 800's flight path. An anti-missile missile lost track of the drone (simulating an incoming anti-ship missile) it was supposed to hit (due to intensive electronic jamming, this was all part of the test) and bagged Flight 800 instead. No terrorists, no evil government intentionally killing its own citizens, just a tragic error and a widespread and criminal coverup. There is a *great* deal of data in the book to support the author's conclusions. Highly recommended.

-- YourFullName (email@ddr.ess), April 09, 1999.

couple of problems with the theory of a man portable (aka "shoulder launched) SAM:

1. There is NO man portable SAM in anybody's inventory with effective range sufficient to cover the slant range (i.e. actual range to the aircraft from the launcher) of the aircraft from any proposed firing position on the water or nearby shoreline.

2. While there *are* other SAMs that are quite capable of doing this, they require some sort of stabilized launcher. No one has yet demonstrated how such a launcher could have been brought into play and then removed from the area without detection. [Hint: check the Janes books for modularized *Naval* SAM systems. Note the size of some of the smaller ones relative to a standard seagoing cargo container.]

3. the antimissile missile theory doesn't fit the factual data, sorry, but it certainly did sell a bunch of books, didn't it?

just some observations, Arlin

-- Arlin H. Adams (ahadams@ix.netcom.com), April 10, 1999.

I read the article a while back on the Jeff Rense site - thought provoking to say the least.

If the military tragically screwed up - why not just admit it, pay the victim's families - save us all a lot of grief.

"No one has yet demonstrated how such a launcher could have been brought into play and then removed from the area without detection."

Throw it overboard.

How are the fish biting skipper?

-- Andrei-hung-lo (2000EOD@prodigy.net), April 10, 1999.

Flint, et alia:

One of the reasons that the SAM theory gets such a bashing by the "Authorities" is that this is i=the ONE means of terrs acting that we have NO WAY of controling. My spouse, who is neither the most trusting nor the most cynical of people pointed this out at the time the theory was being HEAVILY debunked/ignored, much like the 128 civilians, the Army Reserve Flight Captain (who has presumably found that the "Reserve" can still snatch one and assign to Thule greenland for ever), etc., ad nauseum.

Chuck

-- Chuck, a night driver (reinzoo@en.com), April 10, 1999.

Dear Arlin,

You say, >1. There is NO man portable SAM in anybody's inventory with effective range sufficient to cover the slant range (i.e. actual range to the aircraft from the launcher) of the aircraft from any proposed firing position on the water or nearby shoreline.

Maybe you can clarify what you mean by "effective range". I am not a military expert, but in normal usage I think that "effective range" for a SAM means the range at which it can be expected to hit a fast, manuverable military plane like a fighter. If we are speaking of striking a larger, slower moving domestic airliner traveling in a straight line at a constant speed then we could certainly expect a longer effective range than the commonly used value.

-- Don't take (Government@face.value), April 10, 1999.

Chuck:

What I find interesting is that, although we may not agree on what caused the crash, we *can* agree that whatever the cause, the government must be covering it up! This isn't an empirical decision, this is a policy decision (on our part). The answer is that the government is dishonest. The question doesn't matter, it's irrelevant. Now, what was the question again?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), April 10, 1999.

Arlin: You must be sniffing paint. The evidence of a missle strike is OVERWHELMING. The evidence of a spontaneous fuel tank explosion is NIL.

Read the article again with your brain turned on, if you even read it to begin with.

-- a (a@a.a), April 10, 1999.