Crash of Flight TWA 800 Analysis: a Military Luminous Decoy Involved?

[ Plasma Technology ] [ Theoretical Model ] [ Summary of the Evidence ] [ Synthesis Grid ] [ The Role of the Armed Forces ] [ Crop Circles ] [ Cattle Mutilations ] [ The Crime Weapon ] [ The Apparitions of Fatima ] [ The Crash of Flight TWA 800 ] [ The 1946 UFO Wave ] [ Roswell Crash Analysed ] [ A Colorado Case Study ] [ The Nullarbor Plain Case ]

u f o s : t h e m i l i t a r y u n m a s k e d

Off Long Island (State of New York), July 17, 1996 Version française

Translation by Emmanuel Dehlinger

Flight TWA 800. A Boeing 747 at an altitude of about 4,200 metres (13,800 feet). The plane breaks into two parts. 230 fatalities including 42 French people. Three hypotheses are proposed: accidental explosion of a tank located at the centre of the plane, bombing, missile fired by terrorists or lost by the US Navy. The accident version is finally adopted by default. Indeed, more than 95% of the plane has been reconstituted after fishing the debris out of Long Island bay, but no (or too few) traces of explosive are found and there is no deformation indicating an explosion in the baggage hold or the passengers' cabin, nor is there any sign of missile impact in the engines or on the fuselage (although that point is highly contested by some private counter investigations). However, civilians, military pilots and coastguards testify to the presence of one or more lights going up towards the plane just before the explosion. According to the satellite pictures one light is said to have actually circled the plane before the fatal contact. Would it then be possible that a luminous plasma ball simulating a UFO hit the plane and caused the accident?

It is today admitted by the investigators of the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), which deals with the civil investigation, and by the FBI, which carries out the criminal investigation, that the tank located between the two wings indeed exploded. The tank has been rebuilt from 700 pieces scattered in the ocean whereas, by comparison, large portions of wings were recovered. The pieces indicated an outward deformation, resulting from the explosion. The latter is explained by the fact that the tank was almost empty and was filled with kerosene fumes heated up to a temperature enabling their explosion in the presence of a spark (around 40°C or 100°F depending on the pressure). This tank was almost empty owing to the fact that the plane had just arrived from Athens, and the little remaining kerosene had been heated up by the air conditioning packs which were running at full power, whereas the passengers had boarded too early in JFK airport on an aircraft parked in hot sun, the take off of which was delayed by one and a half hours. This situation, although dangerous, does not seem at all exceptional considering the number of planes in circulation. The kerosene fumes can fortunately explode spontaneously only at a much higher temperature (around 300°C or 550°F depending on the pressure). In spite of multiple hypotheses and experiments, the experts could not determine with certainty the origin of the spark which would have caused the explosion of these fumes: phantom static electricity, defective pump not fished out from the ocean, gauge cables, badly insulated but in low power, or wiring in poor condition in one of the wings. Already in Manila in 1990 a Boeing 737 had exploded on the ground under apparently similar conditions, without the origin of the spark being confirmed [TWA3].

Many military aircraft on exercises were flying in the area and could have been the origin of the firing of a plasma imitating a missile, particularly a P3C-Orion of squadron VP-26 of the US Navy which was flying about 5 kilometres away from the Boeing at the time of the accident. This military aircraft was itself the victim of a temporary electrical failure and its transponder was faulty, which made it impossible to identify on the radarscopes [TWA8]. In this respect it would be interesting to have a close look at the history of this plane to see whether it could have been equipped with a particle gun at the time of the events in 1996.

If flight TWA 800 were really the object of a UFO staging operation using the technology we describe in this study, it could well be that the plasma ball came up too close to the air outlets of the tanks. Normally, these air outlets allow only air intake towards the tanks but a defect of design on this model of Boeing could perhaps make it possible for kerosene fumes to escape when climbing at a marked angle [TWA2]. This aircraft, built in 1971, was very old and it was not equipped with the fire wall system which prevents the penetration into these ventilation systems of a flame coming from outside [TWA1].

Of course, it is only one additional hypothesis, but this one has the advantage of accounting for the luminous phenomena which were seen heading towards the aircraft, and especially for the coincidence between the arrival of these luminous phenomena and the explosion. In connection with these lights, the FBI (criminal investigation) had initially complete control over the witnesses' interrogations and kept the NTSB (civil investigation) out of the picture, before the latter was authorised to read interview reports in November 1996 and finally to lead some interrogations in January 1997, but always under the FBI's control [TWA8]. On the other hand, the CIA was promptly involved in this investigation, which is surprising enough for an agency which is not entitled to operate on the territory of the United States, just as the DGSE is not on French territory. The CIA provided the FBI with a synthesis of 244 testimonies enabling them to conclude that the witnesses had taken the burning parts of the plane for lights moving around it, and that there could be no question of a missile. The FBI, however, admitted that some testimonies excluded from this synthesis did not fit in with this conclusion [TWA6] and brought up the possibility that the witnesses observed a burning fuel projection emanating from the plane or a meteorite shower, without much more conviction than the CIA's explanation. A NTSB report, however, clearly mentions that there are about a hundred testimonies indicating that the light or lights that were seen moving towards the plane soared from the surface of the ocean [TWA8]. The NTSB adds that the FBI passed on to them only summaries of testimonies whose assertions were useless generalisations [TWA10]. It would seem that these phantom lights imitating a missile fired from a ship or a submarine worry the CIA and by contagion the FBI. Furthermore, the CIA has produced a film in computer-generated images to describe the chronology of the accident while especially emphasising the cause of the witnesses' mistake, and the NTSB reacted to that by producing another appreciably different reconstruction [TWA7]. More incredible still, at the time of the public hearing which took place in the week of the 8th December 1997, and which allowed the NTSB experts to outline the progress of their investigation, any discussion about the visual testimonies was censored at FBI's request! [TWA8].

Another hypothesis suggested by Elaine Scarry, professor at Harvard, appeared in March 1998 in an attempt to explain the accident. This hypothesis, which is based on a study by the US Air Force led in 1988 by Colonel Quisenberry, indicates that electromagnetic conflicts caused by some military equipment sometimes triggered off explosions. For example, at the time of the operations carried out by the Americans against Libya in 1986, 8 planes met serious problems of electromagnetic interference, and one of them even exploded [TWA9]. The article of Elaine Scarry was welcomed by the experts in this field, whereas the NTSB was studying this hypothesis with the assistance of the Joint Spectrum Center and NASA without however reaching a convincing conclusion.

Here we find another possibility of explaining the explosion of the plane precisely when a ball of plasma would have come up to it. One remembers indeed that the local concentrations of positive or negative electric charges in plasma create electric fields as well as induced magnetic fields [PB99 p. 13]. These magnetic fields, possibly pulsed, because they originated from a projection of pulsed plasma, could have induced electric currents in the metal parts of the plane and have thus generated the fateful spark. But microwaves emanating from the plasma could have generated these electric currents as well.

On March 17, 1997 a surprising event occurred pleading in favour of our hypothesis which, we admit it readily, seemed a priori hardly conceivable: at 19:15 on that day, four crews of civil aircraft of the companies Delta Airlines, Northwest Airlines and US Airways observed in the sky of New York a very bright object looking like a missile and its plume of smoke rising up to an altitude above 9,000 metres (30,000 feet), while at 19:17, the nuclear submarine "USS West Virginia" indeed fired a Trident II test missile off Florida, that is to say 1,800 kilometres more to the south. One could then suppose that it was this missile which had been seen by the civil aircraft, without however this phenomenon being explained, before coming back to the usual explanations: meteorite or reflection of the sun, wrongly interpreted by people too much aware of the hypothesis of a missile having shot down the TWA Boeing [TWA4 and TWA5]. This is a situation that is familiar to us on several points:

	Some reliable and qualified pilots observe a light in the sky. This light is officially explained by James Kallstrom, the director of the FBI office in New York, by banal hypotheses: meteorite, reflection... and by disparaging these witnesses for being too "sensitized".
	This light imitates a missile actually invisible to radar, just like the UFOs in 1946 imitated some Soviet rockets.
	At the same time, a missile is really fired 1,800 kilometres to the south, which looks like the usual pre-debunking method when a UFO appears simultaneously with a satellite entering the atmosphere.

Who thus better than the military could know in advance that a US Navy test missile was to be fired off Florida at this precise moment, even 2 minutes later?

It would be difficult to consider as random this double coincidence in space and time when a "missile" is seen on the site of the crash of flight TWA 800 precisely when a real missile is fired by the US Navy and one can wonder what motive is hiding behind this event staging. Did the American military want to demonstrate that the lights seen close to the TWA Boeing on July 17, 1996 could have been only an artefact?

Five months later, on August 9, 1997, the pilot and the co-pilot of flight Swissair 127 observed at an altitude of about 7,000 metres (23,000 feet) off Long Island a luminous object which brushed past their aircraft less than 100 metres away at high speed and without noise. Two other planes flying in the vicinity didn’t notice anything. We see again some familiar elements:

	Two pilots observe a light dashing towards their aircraft. The investigation of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) concludes that they observed a weather balloon, which is reminiscent of the usual debunking aimed at ridiculing the witnesses. In return, the pilot will comment: "[this is a] ridiculous statement from the FAA".
	Once again, this light imitates a missile invisible to radar.
	The appearance is visible only to those for whom it is intended and it disappears at once.

But why would the American military want to show "fake missiles" off Long Island when that risks lending support to the missile thesis for the crash of flight TWA 800? Before continuing, it seems useful to reformulate step by step the framework of our reasoning:

July 17, 1996, about a hundred witnesses see one or more lights rising from the surface of the ocean towards the TWA Boeing just before its explosion. These lights cannot be one or more missiles since no trace of explosive or of impact on the fuselage (although that point is contested) is found. The CIA, and then the FBI, however, try to dismiss these testimonies.
The explosion of the plane is undoubtedly correlated in time and space with the arrival of these lights, which cannot be a mere coincidence.
The double coincidence in time and space on March 17, 1997, when a "missile" is seen on the site of the crash of flight TWA 800 at the precise moment when another missile is fired by the US Navy, 1,800 kilometres more to the south, as well as the observation of a "fake missile" by flight Swissair 127 on August 9, 1997 could confirm that the military is at the origin of these lights which would have been produced following the usual process. It would thus be a ball of luminous plasma.
At the time of the accident, a US Navy plane was flying close to the TWA Boeing and could be the source of the firing of the plasma ball.
To cause the explosion, the ball of plasma may have come into contact with kerosene vapour escaping from the air outlets of the tanks, or the resulting electromagnetic fields may have induced an electric current in the metal parts of the plane and caused a spark.

However, since then, the events of September 11, 2001 have come to demonstrate in a dramatic way the determination and the destructive potential of the Islamic extremists, which gave more credibility to the thesis of the terrorist missile in the flight TWA 800 affair. One remembers that the United States had supported the Afghans in their fight against the Soviets in providing them at that time with Stinger missiles. Now, according to certain military experts, these portable missiles, some of which are not accounted for, are able to shoot down a plane at an altitude up to 4,500 metres (15,000 feet) even if this is the limit of their range. One thus understands the desire of the American military to show easily questionable "fake missiles" off Long Island in order to discredit testimonies of observation of real missiles on this seemingly risky site. In addition to those of July 17, 1996 for flight TWA 800, a certain number of these testimonies can indeed be listed, in particular those of November 17, 1995 reported by flights Lufthansa 405 and British Airways 226, and that of November 16, 1996 reported by flight Pakistan International Airlines 712, the observed trajectory rising this time rather higher (about 4,800 metres or 16,000 feet) than would normally correspond to that of a Stinger missile.

Since the crash of flight TWA 800, two other similar dramas have occurred in the same area, which tends to show that it is a local problem that affects the aircraft. Flight Swissair 111 and flight EgyptAir 990 also crashed into the sea soon after their takeoff from New York, respectively on September 2, 1998 and on October 31, 1999, leaving no survivors. In the issues of September and October 2000 of the "New York Review of Books", Elaine Scarry goes into the thesis of an electromagnetic interference of military origin at the root of these crashes. She notes several similarities between the accidents of flight TWA 800 and flight Swissair 111:

Departure from the same airport (JFK).

	Take-off on the same day of the week at the same time: one Wednesday at 20:19. A very unlikely coincidence.
	Same route used to by-pass the surrounding military zones at a time of large-scale training involving US Navy ships and P3-Orion planes.

First radio failure roughly at the same place, a dozen minutes after takeoff.

The exact cause of the accident remains unknown after several years of investigation but it is supposed to be of electrical origin (the cockpit of Swissair’s McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 caught fire).

The investigation shows "anomalies": the interruption of communications for 13 minutes between the air controllers and the Swissair flight soon after takeoff is minimised in front of the press, whereas it is a major problem, in order to make people believe that this crash only concerns Canada since the plane crashed off Halifax in Nova Scotia.

With regard to flight EgyptAir 990, Elaine Scarry notes:

	Departure from the same airport.
	Route crossing the surrounding military zones in the absence of official training (the plane crashed in the military zone W-105).
	The exact cause of the accident still remains unknown but it could be of an electrical origin (the plane would have plunged towards the sea following a dysfunction of the elevator).
	In front of the press, which widely echoes it, the investigation unduly supports the thesis of a hypothetical suicidal intention by the co-pilot, who is said to have voluntarily thrown his plane into the sea (sic), a way of placing the responsibility for the accident onto Egypt.

The accumulation of these air disasters, to which we must now add that of flight American Airlines 587, which crashed in New York on November 12, 2001, shortly after the attack of September 11, favours today the thesis of a terrorist attack for these 4 not truly clarified accidents, be it by the firing of missiles, the explosion of a bomb or following a sabotage. And it is easily understood why the American government would wish to dissimulate, whenever possible, a terrorist origin which would underline its incompetence and the revelation of which could involve disastrous economic and political repercussions.

To conclude, one can legitimately wonder who would wish that the true cause of the explosion of the TWA Boeing be revealed:

	Public opinion and the press: yes as a whole.
	Families of the victims and their lawyers: yes for the pursuit of the truth, no because the compensation would be very much smaller than if Boeing or TWA were convicted.
	TWA, Boeing and their insurers: yes to be proven innocent and not to have to pay compensation to the victims and, for Boeing, not to have to modify its aircraft
	The military, the CIA, the FBI, the NTSB, the FAA: no for reasons of State.

It should be noted that since the beginning of the Eighties Long Island has been the place of significant UFO activity, thousands of appearances having been reported as well as circular marks on the ground, animal mutilations, "extraterrestrial abductions" and the worrying overflight of military Bell UH-1H or Sikorsky helicopters. On September 28, 1989 particularly, a complex staging attested to by many eyewitnesses had simulated the interception of a UFO by helicopters of the US Air Force near the place where the TWA Boeing would explode in 1996. This UFO had been allegedly "shot down" by a weapon developed by SDI research (Strategic Defence Initiative). According to testimonies of military origin, as anonymous as extremely suspect, the UFO was recovered in order to use its technology. We spare the usual details of this kind of disinformation: underground bases for the storage of the wrecked UFOs where military engineers study them while being enthused by their antigravitational technology, broken secret pact with the malicious "small Greys", many American soldiers killed during the "fight", recovered extraterrestrial corpses, etc [cf UM96]. As we can see, in such a context it was not unreasonable to consider that it was indeed a "UFO" that had been seen on July 17, 1996.

One is even tempted to make the connection between the crash of flight TWA 800 and the arrest one month before of John Ford, founder of the Long Island UFO Network, who kept on accusing the police of the county of having hushed up several UFO crashes in Long Island, including the one of 1989 that we have just mentioned. John Ford, who was being phone-tapped and was under surveillance by an under cover informant, was arrested for having intended to murder several local political leaders by introducing radium into their car, their food and their toothpaste (!), a subject about which he had just laughed loudly with the informant (he also promised to kill "that [expletive] president Clinton" but this charge was not kept against him!). The police force did find radium in the back of his pick-up truck parked at the front of his house. He was immediately imprisoned, not being able to pay the astronomical amount of 500,000 dollars required for his release. The local press largely echoed this affair, a true set-up supported by James Catterson, the District Attorney of Suffolk. Radium produces a slow irradiation of the body before it can cause a cancer and it is likely that John Ford would have had to contaminate many tubes of toothpaste during nearly 40 years before succeeding. He however is facing a minimum of 25 years of imprisonment, which does not enable him to appreciate the joke [cf MUJ96, MUJ97 and LDLN No. 342 p. 44, No. 343 p. 44 and No. 344 p. 44].

These grotesque grounds for charge are thus immediately reminiscent of the debunking technique: nobody can believe this absurd intention of murder, which implies that John Ford is a victim of a plot to silence him and thus he is right when he says that UFOs crashed at Long Island and that the police covered up the crashes. Thus the extraterrestrials do exist, they fly over Long Island, and they are bad pilots (!). To extrapolate a little, one can today deduce that it is a flying saucer which collided with flight TWA 800, and that has done the trick: a certain part of public opinion understands thus why the CIA wanted to hush up the testimonies about the luminous UFO or UFOs heading towards the plane, since they can't afford to officially admit the existence of extraterrestrials for fear of panicking the population. We recall that on October 10, 1938, Orson Welles, then aged 23, had caused a panic in the United States after he announced a Martian invasion on the radio. This event is used as an argument by the ufologists in favour of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) to justify the fact that governments cannot officially acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrials.

More prosaically, according to some, John Ford is said to have accumulated compromising evidence against one of the political leaders whose intended murder he has been charged with. The latter is then said to have organised Ford's arrest in order to silence him.