In 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed into the ocean off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. After an extensive four-year investigation, the NTSB concluded the explosion was caused by a short circuit ignition within the center fuel tank. Or at least that’s the
My admittedly amateur understanding (am a private pilot, read way too many blogs about crash reports) is that eyewitness accounts for airline crashes are especially unreliable.
I suspect that a lot of this is that the average person on the street has a pretty limited understanding of how aircraft behave, and especially how they behave in an emergency. And our memory is a fickle thing prone to “fill in the blanks” with what we think we should have seen, as opposed to what we actually saw.
For example, there always seems to be an eyewitness claiming they saw the airplane on fire and falling out of the air, even when the accident in question definitely involved no pre-crash fire. They see “a glow”, or they see a fireball reflected on the clouds before they see the actual fireball rise above the horizon, and their brain fills in that unusual stimulus with something that makes sense to them (a plane falling on fire).
Oh another example - it seems like rocket launches very frequently get reported as UFOs or plane crashes. And one time we had a report of missile launches that was actually just regular old airliner contrails backlit by the sunrise, but because they all converged on the horizon they sort of looked like they were vertical launch plumes.
We aren’t really built to interpret visual information from fast moving stuff high in the sky.
Three family members of mine, none of whom are prone to conspiracy theorizing, found the idea of a missile strike plausible. Two of them were involved in the investigation. My aunt, with whom I discussed the matter in her kitchen just last night, did some non-specialized volunteer work on the investigation, and told me last night in her kitchen that the official explanation made no sense to her and she thought it was a missile strike. Tbh, not to disrespect my beloved aunt, but I don’t put a ton of stock in her perspective, as to my knowledge she has no expertise in forensics of any kind, and of course this all happened almost 30 years ago.
On 6/10/2013, my late father emailed me “You will recall that Bernie [my late great uncle Bernard Kalman “BK” Friedman, a dentist by trade. According to his obituary, he “was a respected forensic scientist within the community. He helped to create the Suffolk County Mass Disaster Team, a group of forensic scientists that assisted in cataclysmic events such as Flight 800 and the bombings of 9/11. He also served as the Forensic Dentist for Suffolk County and was a certified Forensic Odontologist.“] lead [sic] the Disaster Team that identified the dismembered bodies of the victims of Flight 800 in 1996. He has sent me a link to a now-private, but I assume soon-to-be-released, video [the link is expired at this point; it was a Vimeo link, but I suspect it was the now publicly available documentary “TWA Flight 800”] that strongly implies that, contrary to what the government said (i.e., lied), the plane was indeed shot down by a missile. It’s surprisingly credible. NTSB investigators, the coroner who employed Bernie, pilots in the air— all with impeccable credentials; highly credible eyewitnesses.”
Uncle Bernie isn’t around to ask any more, nor is my dad, but I remember my dad saying in this email and in an in-person conversation that uncle Bernie found the idea of a missile strike plausible, as did my dad. My dad had little patience for kooky conspiracy theories, so this made an impression on me.
All that said, I know nothing about plane crashes, and as some have already pointed out here, most of us, certainly including me, are ill-equipped to judge what caused any given plane crash, even one we saw (which of course I didn’t in this case). I have no strong opinion on what caused this crash. This is one of the rare cases where I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the conspiracy theories are true. At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t.
You're definitely being careful with your words but I want to seriously stress the importance of disaggregating claims here though. Just because someone isn't prone to conspiracy theorizing *in general* doesn't mean we should raise the likelihood that the theories they do believe are more likely. The specific theories should stand and fall on their own merits, not on the reputation of the people that hold them. The fact that someone finds a theory plausible means nothing to me.
There are exceptions to this rule wherever a specialized background can help us in interpreting events or assessing likelihoods, but specialized credentials should not be treated as fungible across every field or even within it. I'm more likely to accept at face value what a coroner says about your average cause of death compared to what a lay person would say, because a coroner has specialized training and experience compared to a lay person. But I'm far less likely to accept a coroner's interpretation of an extremely rare cause of death (like an airplane explosion) unless they have the requisite specialization and experience (say by working for the NTSB on this beat).
All these are potentially unnecessary disclaimers but I think it's really important to be careful and keep this mind given the subject matter.
re: "You only need one leak and if the whole thing blows open, no one wants to be left holding the proverbial gun while everyone is pointing fingers at each other."
I agree with you, but this was precisely my reasoning as to why it was unlikely-approaching impossible that there could be 'an island where some rich guy has been treating politicians, scientists and media celebrities to sex with minors, and this has been going on for years'. But Epstein's island was a real thing. And it looks as if the coverup was able to happen despite various people doing what you would think -- discovering what was up and calling law enforcement, their congressmen, the press, and their own publicists. This leads me to believe that those that want to keep things covered up have forces they can deploy that we aren't aware of and aren't factoring into our calculations. see also: Bill Cosby.
Of course, I'm not claiming that leaks will always be inevitable! I'm only trying to assess their relative likelihood. Ensuring a cone silence in some situations can be much easier than others, depending on the circumstances.
Ah, you misunderstand me. I don't think that the problem is that sometimes, however unlikely it seems, leaks do not occur. I think the problem is that the leaks occur but then nothing gets done. Some people are above the law.
At the time, I was driving back in my convertible to my beach house on Dune Road in Quogue after getting ice cream with my daughter and her friend, Rea in Westhampton. We were going over the Westhampton bridge when I saw what I thought were fireworks shooting up over the ocean. I said to the girls, "look, fireworks" and they both saw the burning object rising up and up until it finally exploded, not like a firework but a real explosion.
A few minutes later, when we arrived back at the house, we learned that it was Flight 800. I called the FBI and was thanked for calling. I never heard from them again. I have no idea who fired it or why, but I saw what I saw.
Well damn, I definitely did not expect eyewitness testimony to show up in the comments. I believe that you are honestly and earnestly relaying what you believe you witnessed, but I admit that I have trouble accepting that your missile interpretation is correct. You're obviously extremely well-versed in the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and I would assume that awareness would militate against erroneous testimony, and so I further admit that I don't have a satisfactory explanation for what you remember seeing. It's possible for your interpretation to eventually be vindicated but until further evidence comes out (for me, I'm most curious about how they managed a cover-up on this scale) I don't think we have enough to rule out the erroneous interpretation theory.
I make no claims as to conspiracy or otherwise. At the time, I had no idea what I was looking at or what its significance was, so it's not as if there was anything to rationalize. It was just a firework shooting into the sky, of no greater nor lesser significance than that at the time. I make nothing more of it than that.
My admittedly amateur understanding (am a private pilot, read way too many blogs about crash reports) is that eyewitness accounts for airline crashes are especially unreliable.
I suspect that a lot of this is that the average person on the street has a pretty limited understanding of how aircraft behave, and especially how they behave in an emergency. And our memory is a fickle thing prone to “fill in the blanks” with what we think we should have seen, as opposed to what we actually saw.
For example, there always seems to be an eyewitness claiming they saw the airplane on fire and falling out of the air, even when the accident in question definitely involved no pre-crash fire. They see “a glow”, or they see a fireball reflected on the clouds before they see the actual fireball rise above the horizon, and their brain fills in that unusual stimulus with something that makes sense to them (a plane falling on fire).
I agree for the same reasons you outline. You need some sort of specialized background to make a proper technical interpretation.
Oh another example - it seems like rocket launches very frequently get reported as UFOs or plane crashes. And one time we had a report of missile launches that was actually just regular old airliner contrails backlit by the sunrise, but because they all converged on the horizon they sort of looked like they were vertical launch plumes.
We aren’t really built to interpret visual information from fast moving stuff high in the sky.
Great stuff, Yassine!
Three family members of mine, none of whom are prone to conspiracy theorizing, found the idea of a missile strike plausible. Two of them were involved in the investigation. My aunt, with whom I discussed the matter in her kitchen just last night, did some non-specialized volunteer work on the investigation, and told me last night in her kitchen that the official explanation made no sense to her and she thought it was a missile strike. Tbh, not to disrespect my beloved aunt, but I don’t put a ton of stock in her perspective, as to my knowledge she has no expertise in forensics of any kind, and of course this all happened almost 30 years ago.
On 6/10/2013, my late father emailed me “You will recall that Bernie [my late great uncle Bernard Kalman “BK” Friedman, a dentist by trade. According to his obituary, he “was a respected forensic scientist within the community. He helped to create the Suffolk County Mass Disaster Team, a group of forensic scientists that assisted in cataclysmic events such as Flight 800 and the bombings of 9/11. He also served as the Forensic Dentist for Suffolk County and was a certified Forensic Odontologist.“] lead [sic] the Disaster Team that identified the dismembered bodies of the victims of Flight 800 in 1996. He has sent me a link to a now-private, but I assume soon-to-be-released, video [the link is expired at this point; it was a Vimeo link, but I suspect it was the now publicly available documentary “TWA Flight 800”] that strongly implies that, contrary to what the government said (i.e., lied), the plane was indeed shot down by a missile. It’s surprisingly credible. NTSB investigators, the coroner who employed Bernie, pilots in the air— all with impeccable credentials; highly credible eyewitnesses.”
Uncle Bernie isn’t around to ask any more, nor is my dad, but I remember my dad saying in this email and in an in-person conversation that uncle Bernie found the idea of a missile strike plausible, as did my dad. My dad had little patience for kooky conspiracy theories, so this made an impression on me.
All that said, I know nothing about plane crashes, and as some have already pointed out here, most of us, certainly including me, are ill-equipped to judge what caused any given plane crash, even one we saw (which of course I didn’t in this case). I have no strong opinion on what caused this crash. This is one of the rare cases where I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the conspiracy theories are true. At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t.
You're definitely being careful with your words but I want to seriously stress the importance of disaggregating claims here though. Just because someone isn't prone to conspiracy theorizing *in general* doesn't mean we should raise the likelihood that the theories they do believe are more likely. The specific theories should stand and fall on their own merits, not on the reputation of the people that hold them. The fact that someone finds a theory plausible means nothing to me.
There are exceptions to this rule wherever a specialized background can help us in interpreting events or assessing likelihoods, but specialized credentials should not be treated as fungible across every field or even within it. I'm more likely to accept at face value what a coroner says about your average cause of death compared to what a lay person would say, because a coroner has specialized training and experience compared to a lay person. But I'm far less likely to accept a coroner's interpretation of an extremely rare cause of death (like an airplane explosion) unless they have the requisite specialization and experience (say by working for the NTSB on this beat).
All these are potentially unnecessary disclaimers but I think it's really important to be careful and keep this mind given the subject matter.
re: "You only need one leak and if the whole thing blows open, no one wants to be left holding the proverbial gun while everyone is pointing fingers at each other."
I agree with you, but this was precisely my reasoning as to why it was unlikely-approaching impossible that there could be 'an island where some rich guy has been treating politicians, scientists and media celebrities to sex with minors, and this has been going on for years'. But Epstein's island was a real thing. And it looks as if the coverup was able to happen despite various people doing what you would think -- discovering what was up and calling law enforcement, their congressmen, the press, and their own publicists. This leads me to believe that those that want to keep things covered up have forces they can deploy that we aren't aware of and aren't factoring into our calculations. see also: Bill Cosby.
Of course, I'm not claiming that leaks will always be inevitable! I'm only trying to assess their relative likelihood. Ensuring a cone silence in some situations can be much easier than others, depending on the circumstances.
Ah, you misunderstand me. I don't think that the problem is that sometimes, however unlikely it seems, leaks do not occur. I think the problem is that the leaks occur but then nothing gets done. Some people are above the law.
At the time, I was driving back in my convertible to my beach house on Dune Road in Quogue after getting ice cream with my daughter and her friend, Rea in Westhampton. We were going over the Westhampton bridge when I saw what I thought were fireworks shooting up over the ocean. I said to the girls, "look, fireworks" and they both saw the burning object rising up and up until it finally exploded, not like a firework but a real explosion.
A few minutes later, when we arrived back at the house, we learned that it was Flight 800. I called the FBI and was thanked for calling. I never heard from them again. I have no idea who fired it or why, but I saw what I saw.
Well damn, I definitely did not expect eyewitness testimony to show up in the comments. I believe that you are honestly and earnestly relaying what you believe you witnessed, but I admit that I have trouble accepting that your missile interpretation is correct. You're obviously extremely well-versed in the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and I would assume that awareness would militate against erroneous testimony, and so I further admit that I don't have a satisfactory explanation for what you remember seeing. It's possible for your interpretation to eventually be vindicated but until further evidence comes out (for me, I'm most curious about how they managed a cover-up on this scale) I don't think we have enough to rule out the erroneous interpretation theory.
I make no claims as to conspiracy or otherwise. At the time, I had no idea what I was looking at or what its significance was, so it's not as if there was anything to rationalize. It was just a firework shooting into the sky, of no greater nor lesser significance than that at the time. I make nothing more of it than that.