The First Hints
Almost at once, eyewitnesses were being interviewed on radio and TV who reported that something strange had preceded the explosion of the 747. Witnesses, many on the ground, reported seeing a bright object "streaking" towards the 747. The object in question turned in midair as it closed on the jumbo jet. Witnesses reported horizontal travel, as well as vertical. The broad geographical range covered by the eyewitnesses eliminates foreground/background confusion. To be seen as being near the 747 from so many different directions, the bright object had to actually be in the immediate vicinity of the 747. Other pilots in the air reported seeing a bright light near the jumbo jet before it exploded. In the days following the disaster, many industry executives privately concluded that TWA 800 had been shot down. What Was The Bright Object Detected On Radar? There was an initial report that something had been picked up on Air Traffic Control radar, but this report was quickly withdraw. Associated Press on (07/19/96) reported " Radar detected a blip merging with the jet shortly before the explosion, something that could indicate a missile hit." It's important to remember that in normal operation, Air Traffic Control radar does not detect aircraft, but aircraft transponders. A transponder is a special type of radio in the aircraft that listens for a radar beam. When it detects a radar beam, it immediately sends out a coded signal with an identifying number (assigned by the Air Traffic Controller on the ground) as well as the altitude of the aircraft. The Air Traffic Control radar will then use this extra data to display useful information to the Air Traffic Controller. All air traffic operating inside the Terminal Control Area is required to have an operating radar transponder. Unless the Air Traffic Controller displays the skin paint return, any air traffic without a transponder will not be seen. Was The Bright Object A Missile? The descriptions given by the eyewitnesses and by pilots in the area (including an Air France crew) are not inconsistent with a missile. No alternative explanation for the bright object has been forthcoming. ABC World News Sunday, 07/21/96, interviewed witness Lou Desyron, who reported, "We saw what appeared to be a flare going straight up. As a matter of fact, we thought it was from a boat. It was a bright reddish-orange color. ...once it went into flames, I knew that wasn't a flare." The Washington Times, on July 24th, 1996, reported. "Several witnesses...saw a bright, flare-like object streaking toward the jumbo jet seconds before it blew up. ABC News said yesterday that the investigators had more then 100 eyewitness accounts supporting the [ missile ] theory." The New York Post, in its story of September 22, 1996, reported, | Law-enforcement sources said the hardest evidence gathered so far overwhelmingly suggests a surface-to-air missile... The FBI interviewed 154 "credible" witnesses -- including scientists, schoolteachers, Army personnel and business executives -- who described seeing a missile heading through the sky just before TWA 800 exploded. "Some of these people are extremely, extremely credible," a top federal official said. FBI technicians mapped the various paths -- points in the sky where the witnesses said they saw the rising "flare-like" object -- and determined that the "triangulated" convergence point was virtually where the jumbo jet initially exploded. | The New York Times, on July 19th, 1996, reported, | " [ Witnesses reported ] a "streak of light" hitting the plane just before it blew up." | And perhaps most tellingly, from the Associated Press, on September 23, 1996, | "...a source...said on condition of anonymity... ``There's metal bent in, metal bent out. Metal you can't tell. I see a hole going in and a hole going out..." | | "Sanitizing" The Debris Field. Almost immediately, information was leaked by the FBI and the Navy which implied that there was an object of extreme biological danger aboard Flight 800, one which posed a serious risk to anyone who picked it up. Although later retracted, the story, coupled with reports of bio-suited soldiers along the beaches of Long Island, created the impression that the FBI and NTSB did not want anyone looking too closely at any of the wreckage. 
Why Did Attention Focus on a Test Missile? Initially, it was claimed that there was virtually no explosive residue on the 747 wreckage. In normal practice, missiles being tested or used for training have dummy warheads; inert packages which are the same size and weight of real warheads but which do not explode. In many cases, such practice munitions are recovered and reused. An Associated Press Article on March 10, 1997 reported the following: The report said "compelling testimony" indicated a missile hit the
plane on the right side, forward of the wing, passing through the
fuselage without exploding. | | This is consistent with a test missile with a dummy warhead. Of course, it was not known at the time that evidence of explosive residue was even then being concealed from the public, but by that time, the claimed lack of explosive residue had suggested a test missile to most observers, and attention began to focus on the Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability system, which had been undergoing tests, including live missile firings, along the Atlantic seaboard all that summer. When it was finally revealed that there was explosive residue on the remains of the Boeing 747, the mainstream media tried to explain it away as contamination from a bomb sniffing dog training exercise that ultimately turned out to have taken place on a different aircraft entirely. Had it been true, remnants from a training exercise did not explain a swath of residue ten rows long and three seats wide reaching from an obvious perforation in the forward section trailing back to where the forward section broke away from the rest of the 747. The Very Odd Behavior Of The Navy. Unique to this crash was the intense participation of the Navy, which immediately dispatched its best deep salvage vessels to the area, and kicked out the New York Police Department divers, who had legal jurisdiction in the area. While the beaches of Long Island were swept by soldiers in humvees, the Navy bottom-searched an area of the Atlantic half the size of Rhode Island. Most unusually, the Navy searched out 20 miles to either side of the known debris field, even though the 747 could not have glided that distance from its altitude of 13,700 MSL even if left intact. The Navy justified this extensive search by claiming that they could not locate the aircraft flight recorders, the "black boxes", even though numerous private boat owners reported hearing the locator pings on their sonar and fish finders. When the black boxes finally appeared, it was reported that they had been found directly under the Navy's deep salvage vessel. 
Despite early denials, the Navy finally admitted that there had been three submarines present in the area on the night of the crash. The Trepang; a Sturgeon class attack submarine, the Albuquerque; a type 688 Los Angeles class fast attack submarine equipped with vertical launch tubes, and the Wyoming, a nuclear ballistic missile submarine just out of Groton on sea trials. It has just surfaced that something went wrong on those trials, delaying the commissioning of the Wyoming, and her captain and exec were relieved of command. Most recently, it has been learned that the Aircraft Carrier Teddy Roosevelt also participated in the CEC exercises but was not admitted to be present at the time. The Cover-up Begins. No sooner had the 747 hit the water than dozens of internet intelligence operatives flooded the internet with posts claiming that Flight 800 had been the victim of a terrorist shoot down using a Stinger man portable missile. It is an historical irony that it was this sudden activity by intelligence operatives, many of them known for their work in the Vincent Foster cover-up, that first alerted many citizens (including this writer) that something was very wrong indeed with the official story. Up until the time when the high pressure sell-job for terrorism hit the net, I was of the opinion TWA 800 was just another tragic crash. Regardless, the "proof" lay in the reactions of the intelligence operatives when several knowledgeable people pointed out that TWA 800, at the point where it exploded, was too high to be reached by a Stinger, and that the lack of obvious impact damage to the engines ruled out an IR guided man portable missile. The spooks, in predictable fashion, postulated "super Stingers" that had never been de-classified but were still in the hands of terrorists. One operative went so far as to suggest that a Stinger's operational altitude could be doubled just be re-programming its chips. All in all, the facts in the case were clearly subordinate to the pursuance of the agenda of selling the terrorist theory. Ultimately, I posted an article entitled "The Dog Didn't Bark". The thesis was simply that none of the parties present that night reacted the way one would expect them to react had the missile come from an unknown source. 24 hours later, the "terrorism" theory had vanished from the playbooks of the intelligence operatives, and in its place was the claim that a sparking fuel pump in the center tank caused an explosion. 
However, the cockpit switch for the fuel pump was found in the "off" position and the cockpit voice record did not record the flight crew turning it on. The NTSB Chairman's report of November 15th, 1996 made it quite clear that no evidence existed of fault in the fuel probes and pump system of the center tank. Never-the-less, the "frayed wire in the center tank" theory continues to be the cause for the explosion and crash promoted by the government. James Sanders Author James Sander's wife works for TWA. She lost friends on flight 800, and as rumors of a missile kill of flight 800 began to circulate within TWA, James was asked to look into the matter. In his book, "The Downing Of TWA Flight 800" James Sanders related the story of how one of the TWA employees working in the Calverton hanger became so disgusted with what he saw as a deliberate cover-up that he provided to James Sanders two samples of cloth from seats from TWA 800, to be tested by an outside, NON-government linked laboratory. On the seat fabric samples was a bright red residue which had stained three rows of seats in the aircraft, rows 17-19. Tests on the first sample revealed elements which experts confirmed were consistent with the combustion byproducts of a military solid fuel rocket motor of the powdered aluminum and perchlorate type. James Sanders then gave his second and last sample to CBS news for them to have tested. CBS promptly turned around and gave the sample back to the government. Once the sample had been returned, the government declared that the red residue was seat glue, choosing to simply ignore the fact that it has been seen on only three adjacent rows of seats out of the entire aircraft. The FBI, showing a double standard, then went after James Sanders for theft of part of the airplane, even though the FBI's man in charge, James Kallstrom, had removed a souvenir from the aircraft himself. Meanwhile, tests conducted on the glue used on the seats and the Atlantic seawater in the area proved once and for all that the red residue was not glue, and yet another of the government's lies stood revealed. The Official Story The official explanation for the crash of TWA flight 800 is that the eyewitnesses who were there are all idiots. It's not said in those words, but that's been the general tone. The government is so dismissive (read "afraid of") the eyewitnesses that James Kallstrom requested that they not be allowed to speak at the NTSB's "public" hearings into the disaster. The assumption is that almost 200 people who were actually there don't know what they saw, but that a bunch of bureaucrats who were not there do! It is the government's claim that for a reason still not clearly understood, the fuel vapors in the nearly empty center fuel tank of the Boeing 747 suddenly exploded, and blew the nose off of the 747. The 747 then continued in stable flight, pulling into a vertical climb. It is this climb which the government insists the eyewitnesses all saw and mistook for a missile approaching the airplane. At the top of this climb, the 747 then exploded into a fireball and fell into the ocean. There are, needless to say, many problems with this story. First of all, it requires virtually everyone who saw the event to mistake a climb initiating two miles up in the air for one initiating from the surface of the ocean. Secondly, the two videos used to support the government's case did not even match with each other, damning at last one of them as a work of fiction. Thirdly, the claim that the 747 could maintain stable flight long enough to execute a climb has been disproved by calculations done by one of the designers of the X-29 and by model simulations. Finally, given the condition of the aircraft following the initiating event, the evidence in the debris field proved that it would have been structurally impossible for the wings of the 747 to support level flight, let alone a climb. | 
![[FBI Cartoon]](http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/TWA/fbi.gif)
