New TWA Flight 800 film coming out

[bknight]

While searching for rebuttals to mikegriffith1 I read where TWA 800 was the first internet conspiracy theory. Now I didn't research that statement, but it did seem realistic, maybe that is why it spread so rapidly. The general distrust of the "government" and its agencies wash hitting full stride by then. The internet is a platform where any idiot can preach his/her own story about current events even if it is parroting someone else's.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

I think the only large transport plane, or "heavy" shot down by a Stinger was a Soviet Antonov. But they hit it on takeoff (at Kabul, I think) which is at a higher altitude than JFK, and is considered a lucky shot.

Two such (confirmed) incidents, actually: one in 1986 and another in 1987, both after taking off from Kabul and both brought down by the FIM-92. However, the airframes in question were far from "heavy" the way we use the term to describe the -74, -77, or the legendary heavy-lift Antonovs. These were the An-12 and An-26 respectively. The An-12 is roughly the same size as—or perhaps a tad smaller than—the familiar American C-130. The An-26 is much smaller. Ironically the small An-26 managed to remain airborne long enough for the crew to bail out. Yet we're supposed to believe one of these blew the nose off a -74!

There are unconfirmed reports of Afghan rebels having shot down other An-26s with the FIM-26.

Quote:

At the altitude TWA-800 was flying when the fuel tank cut loose, had it been a Stinger-type warhead, the plane would have been able to turn around, dump fuel, and land.

The FIM-92 has a 2 kg warhead. It will fit easily in the glove compartment of your car while still leaving room for your sunglasses a dozens of unpaid parking tickets. To the seeker, the 747 looks like two separate targets. The missile will seek one wing or the other—not the fuselage—and honestly not do much damage. The biggest danger is that the frags will perforate the wing tanks and you'll have enough leakage that the engine exhaust will ignite it and pose additional difficulty for an emergency landing and evacuation. You'll lose one engine, maybe two. If it's a lucky hit, you may have degraded hydraulic performance. But I would fully expect the airplane to remain flyable and to make an emergency landing at JFK airport.

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And Mike knows this, that's why he pushes the Navy SAM theory for the larger warhead.

He's cherry-picking the conspiracy theories. He's giving us long, mindless dumps from Donaldson, ignoring the "detail" that Donaldson concluded that at least one and probably two FIM-92 missiles were used. Donaldson's claim that there were secret dredging operations to recover the warhead fragments is especially hilarious. The chances of finding—on the ocean floor—the fragments of a 6 kg warhead that exploded at at altitude of 8,000 m are about the same as me farting hard enough to propel myself into orbit. Donaldson's claims are rejected on their merits, but the conspiracy rhetoric is still that he was a maverick expert—and a leader of a group of experts—being sidelined and suppressed by the Powers That Be.

Mike has the cart so far ahead of the horse that they're not even in the same time zone. He's telling us we have to accept the expertise of Donaldson et al. and that what they've written should therefore be taken as gospel truth. Donaldson had a guy who flew the same plane once, a building fire inspector, and so forth. As if Vern Grose knows anything about missiles! But we can tell by reading what they wrote that these guys either have no relevant expertise or they have some other motive not to tell the truth. Donaldson, for example, dealt only with accidental crashes of small military airframes. It's not too hard to see that this is mostly Reed Irvine's anti-Clinton dog-and-pony show.

As far as Stalcup goes, I can talk more about him but I won't in this post. He simply had no relevant training or experience, and seems to be playing up the public misperception that a PhD in physics means you're an all-around genius. What matters right now is that both Stalcup and Donaldson cannot be right. This matters. The notion that we have to pay attention to them because both have managed to poke holes in the convention narrative is armchair nonsense. Neither has managed to provide a plausible alternative, their theories are expressly incompatible with each other, and both are patently wrong.

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And yes, you're right about Navy crews talking.

I know from experience. In the late 1980s I was stationed in Sicily, during our lukewarm war with Libya. One evening a pre-Aegis Navy CG pulled into port. I took a few officers and non-coms into town to show them the better bars—not the swill they serve down by the port. How long do you think it took me to get enough wink-wink-nudge-nudge details of their classified mission to figure out why they needed to be in port for replenishment and why we wouldn't be seeing certain elements of the Libyan navy anymore unless we rented scuba gear?

The notion that a Navy ship fired an SM-2 and accidentally hit a civilian airliner, and that not one single sailor on that vessel has spoken up about boggles the imagination. Not even Irvine wheeling Moorer out of cold storage could figure it out. A former head of the JSC can't leverage his connections to uncover the most heinous alleged buddy-spike event ever?

[KDLarsen]

Just as a matter of comparison, the warhead on the 9М38 SAM that took out Malaysia Airlines flight 17 clocks in at around 70 kg.

And the SA-14 Gremlin that hit a DHL A300 over Baghdad, which managed to return and land somewhat safely (all things considered), clocked in at just over 1 kg.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by KDLarsen

Just as a matter of comparison, the warhead on the 9М38 SAM that took out Malaysia Airlines flight 17 clocks in at around 70 kg.

Back in my days working on air-intercept missiles, the active-duty folks I worked with had a saying: "Don't **** with the Buk." Plus, the frags on the 9M38 are, at the piecewise perspective, considerably larger than in the FIM-92 or similar devices. It's the difference between someone throwing a handful of sand in your face and a handful of gravel.

In terms of the candidate missile alone, Donaldson and ARAP are simply not making credible statements no matter how much missile background some of the members seem to have claimed. (Most had no actual experience with air intercept missiles, including Donaldson.) Stalcup at least cites a missile with the capacity to take out a large airframe in the manner we observe in the TWA 800 breakup and crash. Now all he has to do is tell us the name of the ship that fired it. Frantically waving his hands and saying, "Waaaah, the government is obviously hiding stuff from me!" doesn't cut it.

[sackett]

At ConspiraWorld, the first and still greatest invisible theme park, a CT is persuasive in inverse proportion to its supporting evidence.

Thus the complete absence of any facts is always CONCLUSIVE PROOF! that somebody's covering up.

Arrest my case. I mean, I rest my ah **** it in a bucket. mikegriffith1 & me, we know the true truth.

[JayUtah]

The notion that the conventional narrative has to be squeaky-clean is an effort to shift the burden of proof. Stalcup acts like he's the first person in the history of the universe ever to prevail in a dispute over the responsiveness of a document in a FOIA request or a subpoena duces tecum. Any time you touch on military or intelligence matters, the people answering will err on the side of nondisclosure, often inappropriately. This time he managed to convince a judge that documents pertaining to a fully authorized and properly conducted live-fire test in May 1996 were somehow responsive to a subpoena for documents pertaining to a speculated test in July. The information he got is utterly unrelated to TWA 800. But now that he can justifiably say, "See, the government is trying to hide things from us!" he will convince gullible people that he really is chasing something other than badly-analyzed radar blips. In my opinion, the government had every reason not to want to disclose details of the May test, because it provides information about tactics and readiness and how those are evaluated.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

The notion that the conventional narrative has to be squeaky-clean is an effort to shift the burden of proof. Stalcup acts like he's the first person in the history of the universe ever to prevail in a dispute over the responsiveness of a document in a FOIA request or a subpoena duces tecum. Any time you touch on military or intelligence matters, the people answering will err on the side of nondisclosure, often inappropriately. This time he managed to convince a judge that documents pertaining to a fully authorized and properly conducted live-fire test in May 1996 were somehow responsive to a subpoena for documents pertaining to a speculated test in July. The information he got is utterly unrelated to TWA 800. But now that he can justifiably say, "See, the government is trying to hide things from us!" he will convince gullible people that he really is chasing something other than badly-analyzed radar blips. In my opinion, the government had every reason not to want to disclose details of the May test, because it provides information about tactics and readiness and how those are evaluated.

I've been trying for 22 years to get information on flights or sorties from the USAF for Operation Just Cause, 1989. Specifically the flights from Howard AFB to Rio Hato on 20 December, 1989 since I need to know when the first relief elements arrived. The last time was about three years ago, and they're still telling me this is classified, even though I've talked to at least five guys who are on that first plane, and have a ballpark number for their time of arrival.

On flip-side, I have a Joules report from SOUTHCOM for all of 7thSFG's movements from 19 December, 1989 through 21 February, 1990. So the guys doing actual secret stuff have their info publically available, but the USAF does not.

The US Government is fun.

[mikegriffith1]

Originally Posted by bknight

While searching for rebuttals to mikegriffith1 I read where TWA 800 was the first internet conspiracy theory. Now I didn't research that statement, but it did seem realistic, maybe that is why it spread so rapidly.

Where in the world did you read that? Critical/skeptical views (what you would reflexively label as "conspiracy theories") about the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and about the federal raid on the Weaver home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, were widely discussed on the Internet years before TWA 800 occurred.

Quote:

The general distrust of the "government" and its agencies was hitting full stride by then.

LOL! You must be kidding. Holy cow. If you're under 25, please forgive most of my sarcasm and disbelief.

"General distrust of the government and its agencies" began on a massive scale after the JFK assassination, long before there was an Internet, when a government commission produced a laughable report on the event in the mid-1960s. For decades, opinion polls showed that 65-80% of the public did not believe the government's lone-gunman explanation. To this day, surveys show that a majority of those polled still reject the lone-assassin theory.

"General distrust of the government and its agencies" received another big boost with the Watergate scandal and with the revelations about CIA assassination plots (i.e., conspiracies) against foreign leaders disclosed by Senate investigations in the mid-1970s.

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that two gunmen fired at JFK, that one of the gunmen fired from the grassy knoll, that an acoustical analysis of a police recording made in Dealey Plaza during the shooting showed that at least four shots were fired, that Ruby had help getting into the Dallas police department's basement to shoot Oswald, that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City, and that the Warren Commission failed to follow up on leads that pointed toward a plot. Recently, Dr. Josiah Thompson had the police recording re-analyzed by acoustical experts at the scientific firm of BBN in Massachusetts, and the BBN analysis confirmed the original analysis done for the House Select Committee in 1979. Dr. Thompson discusses the BBN analysis in detail in his 2021 book Last Second in Dallas.

Quote:

The general distrust of the "government" and its agencies wash hitting full stride by then. The internet is a platform where any idiot can preach his/her own story about current events even if it is parroting someone else's.

I know you folks like to tell yourselves that anyone who happens to decline to drink every glass of government Kool-Aid that is offered to us must have a "general distrust of the government" and must be "ideologically driven to accept conspiracy theories," but such posturing only reveals your own lack of objectivity and lack of critical thinking.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that every government explanation of an event is Kool-Aid. Most are not, but some are.

For you folks, it seems to be an all-or-nothing paradigm: either you accept whatever the government tells you about any and all incidents or you're a "conspiracy theorist" who "harbors a paranoid view of the government." Intelligent people know that is nonsense.

Now, just FYI, if you care to know, people who reject the NTSB's purely theoretical "probable cause" finding come from all across the political spectrum. Some are very liberal. Some are very conservative. And some, such as myself, are somewhere in between. Many of them are very pro-government and pro-military. A number of them are military veterans, some of whom were very high ranking while on active duty. And all of them are educated, successful people.

Originally Posted by MBDK

Once again, curiosity peaked in me to examine a bit of your "evidence", so I looked at the first thing you referenced. What struck me was the paper's section No. 9. This makes the conclusion that no witness observed the actual explosion, nor did they see any additional object near the aircraft around the time of the accident.

When you understand the background to this clearly errant conclusion, you can understand how it was reached.

The IAMAW team had several angry and threatening confrontations with the FBI during the investigation (see p. 3). The IAMAW, based on its disturbing dealings with the FBI, mistakenly but somewhat understandably rejected the FBI witness interviews. The IAMAW team decided they did not trust the FBI accounts of the interviews: “The method of the investigation as it pertains to the witness statements is suspect and highly unreliable” (p. 7, section Number 9, from the same paragraph that you paraphrased).

This conclusion was unfortunate and hasty, since third-party interviews with many of the witnesses showed that the FBI 302 records of their initial interviews were mostly accurate or entirely accurate, especially the ones that included diagrams provided by the witnesses.

Now, even the NTSB admitted that the witnesses who said they saw the plane and/or the explosion were physically able to see those things, that they were not too far away to see them, etc. We also know from the witness accounts that they accurately described what happened to the plane, e.g., Lisa Perry's detailed description in which she described seeing the nose separate from the rest of the plane even before the NTSB or the FBI knew this had happened.

The IAMAW team did no analysis of the witness interviews, nor did they interview any of the witnesses themselves, nor did they do any sight tests to determine if the witnesses were in position to see what they reported seeing.

The IAMAW team did, however, do a very good analysis of the damage to the airplane, and their background and expertise put them in an excellent position to do such an analysis.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

To this day, surveys show that a majority of those polled still reject the lone-assassin theory.

Armchair nonsense, and also irrelevant. We have a thread for JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

Quote:

...your own lack of objectivity and lack of critical thinking.

Pure rhetoric. You don't like critical thinking applied to your own claims, so you pivot to personal attacks. You've confused deep or critical thinking with the need to reject a conventional narrative first. You're happy to think critically about the mainstream narrative, but utterly impervious to the same standard applied to your own claims.

Despite all your posturing, you still can't name the ship. You tell us that the "details" of the missile theory don't interest you. Well, they interest me because I see how the details you can't explain make the missile theory far less credible than the center wing tank theory.

Quote:

For you folks, it seems to be an all-or-nothing paradigm: either you accept whatever the government tells you about any and all incidents or you're a "conspiracy theorist" who "harbors a paranoid view of the government." Intelligent people know that is nonsense.

Straw man. You say we should reject the conventional narrative because it's too full of holes. But then you tell us we need to seriously entertain certain specific alternative narratives, no matter how full of holes they might be. Trying to generalize that to say we would reject any alternative narrative simply because its alternative, regardless of its merits, is wishful accusation. Just because your theory sucks doesn't mean someone somewhere can't come up with one that more parsimoniously explains more observations than the prevailing narrative.

Quote:

And all of them are educated, successful people.

Oh, knock it off. You have no idea who any of those people are. It took you two rounds of postings before you could even get Vern Grose's name right.

Even now when I ask you were Tom Stalcup learned, as a graduate student, the fine specialized art of interpreting ATC radar logs, you run off on an irrelevant rant about how some MIT professor who you also know nothing about must have endorsed him many years later. You tell me Stalcup is still publishing, but you seem unaware that there is another Thomas Stalcup who is also a physicist who is the one actively publishing. Your Stalcup hasn't published in the field in many years. You tell me he founded his own technology company, which he did. It has zilch to do with aerospace, according to the description he gives. And I can't seem to find any presence for this business. If you actually knew anything about my field, you'd realize that "Started his own company" is code for "Is unhirable in the field."

You idolize these crackpots only because they're telling you what you want to believe, not because they have anything correct or insightful to say, and because it makes you feel smart to buck the norm. It still boggles my mind how you, a lay person, are arrogantly trying to tell me how the industry works where I've spent a number of decades as a licensed professional practitioner.

Quote:

When you understand the background...

And immediately back to the frantic nit-picking.

[sackett]

"Wishful accusation" is a good phrase. It describes something that's common as hell nowadays, and yet I don't think I've heard it before.

There's a thread on forum coinages.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Where in the world did you read that? Critical/skeptical views (what you would reflexively label as "conspiracy theories") about the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and about the federal raid on the Weaver home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, were widely discussed on the Internet years before TWA 800 occurred.

Wow, you just keep being wrong. The right-wing psychos who got butt-hurt over Waco and Ruby Ridge wouldn't have been on the internet until 1997, more likely 1999. You could have said it was discussed on right-wing radio and short-wave radio talk shows, which is the correct answer, but no, you doubled down events that happened in 1992 and 1993 respectively at a time when most internet access was at a public library due to the cost of PCs.

Quote:

General distrust of the government and its agencies" began on a massive scale after the JFK assassination, long before there was an Internet, when a government commission produced a laughable report on the event in the mid-1960s. For decades, opinion polls showed that 65-80% of the public did not believe the government's lone-gunman explanation. To this day, surveys show that a majority of those polled still reject the lone-assassin theory.

This topic has its own thread, which speaks to your ability to concentrate. But since you addressed it, allow me to point out that polls are not indicative of anything. Most Americans are not familiar with the facts of the assassination, and like you, are ignorant. They reject the lone assassin theory based on social pressure to do so, not on educated judgement.

Quote:

"General distrust of the government and its agencies" received another big boost with the Watergate scandal and with the revelations about CIA assassination plots (i.e., conspiracies) against foreign leaders disclosed by Senate investigations in the mid-1970s.

Which most Americans had figured out long before Church's BS witch hunt.

Quote:

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that two gunmen fired at JFK, that one of the gunmen fired from the grassy knoll, that an acoustical analysis of a police recording made in Dealey Plaza during the shooting showed that at least four shots were fired, that Ruby had help getting into the Dallas police department's basement to shoot Oswald, that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City, and that the Warren Commission failed to follow up on leads that pointed toward a plot. Recently, Dr. Josiah Thompson had the police recording re-analyzed by acoustical experts at the scientific firm of BBN in Massachusetts, and the BBN analysis confirmed the original analysis done for the House Select Committee in 1979. Dr. Thompson discusses the BBN analysis in detail in his 2021 book Last Second in Dallas.

Dr. Thompson is full of crap. And you can't pick and choose which government commission you're going to believe. And the HSCA was wrong. It was just Oswald.

Quote:

I know you folks like to tell yourselves that anyone who happens to decline to drink every glass of government Kool-Aid that is offered to us must have a "general distrust of the government" and must be "ideologically driven to accept conspiracy theories," but such posturing only reveals your own lack of objectivity and lack of critical thinking.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that every government explanation of an event is Kool-Aid. Most are not, but some are.

For you folks, it seems to be an all-or-nothing paradigm: either you accept whatever the government tells you about any and all incidents or you're a "conspiracy theorist" who "harbors a paranoid view of the government." Intelligent people know that is nonsense.

It's not drinking Kool-Aid to demand documented facts. You have provided nothing but links to CTists who are lacking evidence.

Quote:

Now, just FYI, if you care to know, people who reject the NTSB's purely theoretical "probable cause" finding come from all across the political spectrum. Some are very liberal. Some are very conservative. And some, such as myself, are somewhere in between. Many of them are very pro-government and pro-military. A number of them are military veterans, some of whom were very high ranking while on active duty. And all of them are educated, successful people.

And?

We just spent 21 years in Afghanistan because a bunch guys with stars on their uniforms thought they were experts in nation building and COIN.

The missile theory is stupid. It attracts the anti-Clinton right light drunken moths. If they faked the evidence, why leave the fuselage in the NTSB hangar for 20 years to let trainees crawl all over it? Why didn't they destroy it the day the report was published. How do you not understand this fact alone rules out conspiracy, and missiles, and bombs?

Quote:

The IAMAW team had several angry and threatening confrontations with the FBI during the investigation (see p. 3). The IAMAW, based on its disturbing dealings with the FBI, mistakenly but somewhat understandably rejected the FBI witness interviews. The IAMAW team decided they did not trust the FBI accounts of the interviews: “The method of the investigation as it pertains to the witness statements is suspect and highly unreliable” (p. 7, section Number 9, from the same paragraph that you paraphrased).

And? The FBI doesn't speak Airplane. The FBI was there because TWA-800 exploded, and they had to assume it was a bomb until all the evidence was in. The IAMAW agreed the center fuel tank exploded, just on the cause, which was to be expected as nobody who works with planes want to think they've been putting people's lives in danger by overlooking wiring issues.

Quote:

The IAMAW team did no analysis of the witness interviews, nor did they interview any of the witnesses themselves, nor did they do any sight tests to determine if the witnesses were in position to see what they reported seeing.

Because that's not their job.

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The IAMAW team did, however, do a very good analysis of the damage to the airplane, and their background and expertise put them in an excellent position to do such an analysis

Which found the cause of the crash was the center fuel tank exploding. Thanks for playing.

[bknight]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Where in the world did you read that? Critical/skeptical views (what you would reflexively label as "conspiracy theories") about the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and about the federal raid on the Weaver home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, were widely discussed on the Internet years before TWA 800 occurred.
Snip for brevity of BS.

Your reading skills/comprehension are lacking a bit. I indicated a site I visited pronounced the TWA 800 was the first INTERNET conspiracy, not the very first conspiracy. Where did I read it? I didn't book mark the page but you might search for it yourself and read what I saw. Don't yell at me I'm the messenger, not the publisher. If you have issue with the comment go to the web page and then email your interpretation of their statement. I must warn you that the website is NOT a CT site, so you may be boggled by the information presented.

Axxman300 and JayUtah have done a far better job of destroying your comments.

[jadebox]

I think Mike is confusing computer Bulletin Board Systems for the internet. I am pretty sure that BBSs were instrumental in spreading conspiracy theories starting in the mid-1980s.

[bknight]

Originally Posted by jadebox

I think Mike is confusing computer Bulletin Board Systems for the internet. I am pretty sure that BBSs were instrumental in spreading conspiracy theories starting in the mid-1980s.

Possibly, but I did another search this morning and the first hit was
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...es/7830073002/
The comment:

Quote:

Shane Miller, a professor at Saint John’s University in Minnesota who researched the conspiracy theories surrounding the crash, said the Flight 800 conspirators used the web in novel ways.
“It was really the first conspiracy of the internet age,” Miller said. “It was the first to be picked up and widely circulated online.”

So, this is where I saw it, now complain to Professor Miller or to USA Today.

[W.D.Clinger]

Originally Posted by jadebox

I think Mike is confusing computer Bulletin Board Systems for the internet. I am pretty sure that BBSs were instrumental in spreading conspiracy theories starting in the mid-1980s.

I've been using the Internet and its predecessors since 1975. By 1984, I was using Usenet.

A lot of people say "Internet" when what they really mean is the World-Wide Web (WWW), which became available to the public at large in late 1991.

ETA: Netscape was founded in 1994.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger

I've been using the Internet and its predecessors since 1975. By 1984, I was using Usenet.

A lot of people say "Internet" when what they really mean is the World-Wide Web (WWW), which became available to the public at large in late 1991.

ETA: Netscape was founded in 1994.

And between 1984 and 1994 the internet was occupied by computer hobbyists, government employees, and university students. My (rich) friends all got Macs for Christmas in 1984. On those rare occasions they went online it was to download a game, and they'd do that after midnight because the process tried up the phone line for a couple of hours. Until the very late 1990s going online was an ordeal because the rest of the family couldn't dial out, and DSL lines were just starting to be available.

Now I feel ancient.

[smartcooky]

Almost 2500 posts, but the facts don't change.

TWA 800 broke up in flight because the main fuel tank exploded, blowing out the bottom of the aircraft, causing cracks to spread around the fuselage, and resulting in the entire front section of the plane being severed.

No bombs
No missiles
No mid-air collisions

THE END

[smartcooky]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

You idolize these crackpots only because they're telling you what you want to believe, not because they have anything correct or insightful to say, and because it makes you feel smart to buck the norm. It still boggles my mind how you, a lay person, are arrogantly trying to tell me how the industry works where I've spent a number of decades as a licensed professional practitioner

Because, as a certain person once said... "you can Google for information, but you can't Google for experience"

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

[A]llow me to point out that polls are not indicative of anything. Most Americans are not familiar with the facts of the assassination, and like you, are ignorant. They reject the lone assassin theory based on social pressure to do so, not on educated judgement.

This is what I mean about armchair nonsense. If someone is trying to frame the discussion to talk about what people believe versus what is true, then the discussion is not about finding out the truth. It's then about trying to convince people to believe you. Conspiracism is more about eroding faith in the conventional narrative than about substituting something better for it. It's about prolonging the debate, not resolving anything. It's about keeping the conspiracy theorist relevant. Toward that end, citing polls to insinuate there must be some substance to these alternative theories is nonsensical.

But if the discussion is about people's distrust of authority, then polls can be evidence of that distrust. Not evidence of the proffered reasons for the distrust, but evidence of distrust per se. Our system of government is premised on distrusting those in authority, and to provide ways to hold them and each other accountable. So at first blush, any statement of distrust seems virtuous and at least plausible on its face. It's only when you see enough of the conspiracy-theory world that you realize that misguided people—and in some cases, straight-up dishonest people—have weaponized distrust toward their own ends. Often those ends are simply attention; the people fomenting distrust according to flimsy arguments and evidence simply want their fifteen minutes of fame. Sometimes they approach it as a quick way to make a buck. But now we see the Big Lie: people willing to invent reasons to distrust those presently in power so that they can seize that power for themselves.

Reed Irvine was perfectly willing to assemble a team of people who probably, at some level, felt they were doing good and weaponize them against the liberal administration. Tom Stalcup is certainly willing to cling to the limelight by thinking he somehow knows anything about missiles, the military, or radar. They're all groping for hearts and minds, or wallets, but with slightly different intent. That said, in none of the cases I mentioned is that intent a genuine desire to hold powerful interests to account according to the facts. How do we know this? Because, as you say :—

Quote:

The missile theory is stupid.

Whether we're talking about a flying hand grenade like the FIM-92 or an SM-2 with no evident means of deployment, all the missile theories fail on their merits. The notion that otherwise well-informed people will still prop them up is where we see that distrust is being sown among gullible people for ignoble reasons.

The notion that a majority of people don't believe in the lone-gunman narrative for JFK's assassination is not evidence that the narrative isn't plausible according to the facts. Instead it's evidence for how easily people can be led around by the nose, how effectively the ingrained distrust can be distorted, and how insidiously the notion of critical thinking can be co-opted to push narratives that simply can't pass critical muster.

That Irvine can thrust a bunch of retirees back into the limelight only shows that some people value their own relevancy more than truth. Conspiracy theorists play on trust: we must distrust the established authority, they say, and rely instead on this other authority that they claim is more trustworthy. But we can judge the claims on their merits. Poorly-supported claims don't suddenly become trustworthy just because "Dr." Grose attests to them. Instead, subscription to obviously wrong claims evinces their less-than-honest motives—if that's what you're looking to discover. The bottom line, in any case, is that the theory remains more poorly supported by fact than the conventional narrative, and no amount of chest-thumping compensates for that.

Originally Posted by bknight

...now complain to Professor Miller or to USA Today.

To be fair, I think your offhand comment got far more attention than you meant for it, or than it deserved. It seems Mike is looking for any way to distract from his inability to get down and dirty with the actual technical evidence and the actual backgrounds of his witnesses when he has to face actual experts. He seems content to regurgitate Donaldson and to rail against the supposed ignorance and bias of his critics instead. What the first "Internet conspiracy theory" might have been seems to be a largely irrelevant point that he nevertheless thinks he can win on.

But to be fair to him, he's right that Waco and other were being discussed online prior to TWA 800. What constituted "online" back then is up for debate. I don't disagree with Miller, because I don't know what factors he's considering. Was TWA 800 the first conspiracy theory that sprang up first on the Internet? Maybe. Was it a bellwether shift in how conspiracy theories are proposed and promoted? Maybe. But during the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, all the conspiracy theories that had existed before then were being debated on what little Internet there was.

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger

I've been using the Internet and its predecessors since 1975. By 1984, I was using Usenet.

Same here. Most of us who spent a fair amount of time in tech or academia had access to the Internet. In the late 1980s USENET had just as lively a debate back then over the same kinds of things we're debating here now on this forum.

[bknight]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

To be fair, I think your offhand comment got far more attention than you meant for it, or than it deserved. It seems Mike is looking for any way to distract from his inability to get down and dirty with the actual technical evidence and the actual backgrounds of his witnesses when he has to face actual experts. He seems content to regurgitate Donaldson and to rail against the supposed ignorance and bias of his critics instead. What the first "Internet conspiracy theory" might have been seems to be a largely irrelevant point that he nevertheless thinks he can win on.

But to be fair to him, he's right that Waco and other were being discussed online prior to TWA 800. What constituted "online" back then is up for debate. I don't disagree with Miller, because I don't know what factors he's considering. Was TWA 800 the first conspiracy theory that sprang up first on the Internet? Maybe. Was it a bellwether shift in how conspiracy theories are proposed and promoted? Maybe. But during the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, all the conspiracy theories that had existed before then were being debated on what little Internet there was.

My comment was offhand, and I didn't mean it to distract from the discussion, but when he came out attacking what I read, that was uncalled for and I reacted, perhaps a little childish reaction. But the facts as almost everyone in this thread don't back up a bomb, missile or terrorists, and yet mike seams lost in his own CT envelop. all he has been able to produce are parroting comments from his CT sources proclaiming there are holes in the narrative and refusing to understand that his narrative has holes also.

[MBDK]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

When you understand the background to this clearly errant conclusion, you can understand how it was reached

So, continued cherry-picking it is, then, as your "understand the background" argument is just more of the same. Not surprising to me, and certainly not to all those more dedicated to countering your Texas Sharpshooter's technique.

[mikegriffith1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

Are you ever going to come down from Mt. Olympus and grace us with your vast knowledge regarding the EMRTC test?

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

I pointed out that you left out a vital physical principle in your analysis, one that a qualified engineer can see immediately. And no, I'm not going to spoon-feed it to you. You figure it out.

Seriously? This is more ducking and dodging. You won’t say what principle I’ve supposedly omitted or how my analysis allegedly omits it. This is like a teenager saying, “You’re wrong because you’ve missed a point, but I won’t tell you what that point is or how you’ve missed it! You’re just wrong, wrong, wrong!”

If you are half the scientist you keep claiming to be, and if I am half as wrong as you keep claiming I am, you should have no trouble explaining why my analysis is invalid and why the EMRTC test does in fact support the NTSB theory. Just in case you decide to actually deal with the points I make in my article on the EMRTC test, here’s the link to the article:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18Sw...fXlm6n7Vc/view

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jay Utah:

The "ARAP report" is nothing more than a document authored sua sponte by W. Donaldson (not R. Donaldson, the webmaster and wayward affiant).

This is erroneous. I thought you said you had read the ARAP report? Four of the sections in the report were written by former airline pilot and crash investigator Howard Mann. Three of the sections in the report were written by Dr. Michael Hull, who holds a Ph.D. in electrochemistry and a B.S. in chemistry. Paul Angelides, one of the TWA 800 eyewitnesses, authored a statement for the report (Exhibit 30).

I would again note that former NTSB member Dr. Vernon Grose was impressed enough with the ARAP report that after he heard Commander Donaldson and others at the ARAP press briefing on the report, he said he no longer accepted the NTSB version of the crash:

Dr. Grose told reporters when he left the briefing by Donaldson and others that it had changed his mind. He said he had been misled by the NTSB and he could no longer defend their explanation of the cause of the crash. He made his next TV appearance that night with Bill Donaldson, this time criticizing the NTSB, not defending it (https://twa800.com/news/irvine-7-23-98.htm).

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

Donaldson performed zero actual investigation himself. . . .

What??? You either don’t know what you’re talking about or you're deliberately misrepresenting Commander Donaldson’s investigative effort.

In a previous reply, you claimed that you have watched all the critical TWA 800 documentaries and have read the Sanders and Cashill books and the ARAP report, etc. If so, then you should know that Donaldson most certainly did “perform an investigation himself.”

Donaldson conducted videotaped fuel-explosiveness tests. He interviewed many of the eyewitnesses. He interviewed one of the Navy divers who helped recover wreckage. He conducted a live temperature reading on the center wing tank of a 747 at JFK Airport after the plane had arrived from Athens, Greece (as did TWA 800 on the day of the crash). And he consulted with numerous experts in relevant fields.

I should add that Commander Donaldson was not only a Navy pilot who logged hundreds of hours of flight time, but he also served as a Safety Officer, received training in aircraft crash investigation, and investigated numerous crashes, including one that involved a plane that was accidentally shot down by a missile.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

If you are half the scientist you keep claiming to be, and if I am half as wrong as you keep claiming I am, you should have no trouble explaining why my analysis is invalid...

If you were actually interested in producing a useful report, you'd take the trouble to learn the relevant sciences and skills. You figured out how you got the fuel flash point wrong, after you reluctantly accepted our correction. Keep going. Demonstrate that you really are interested in the sciences involved and not just in trying to look smart by bucking the norm.

Quote:

This is erroneous.

In transmitting the letter to Congress (unsolicited), Donaldson took credit for the whole report. I know that other sections were written by others on his team, but he considered it his work.

Quote:

I would again note that former NTSB member Dr. Vernon Grose was impressed enough...

You have no idea who this person is.

Yes, I promised you earlier that we could talk about Dr. Grose—or, “Dr. Gross,” as you repeatedly misspelled his name when you first brought him up. How well do you vet your sources? And you’re still only half right: the “Dr.” part isn’t accurate either. Vern Grose insists on being called “Doctor” even though his doctorate is only honorary. And this was the case even when he was at the NTSB, which is crawling with actual PhDs who don’t use the title. So as we unravel the value of Grose’s endorsement of the TWA 800 conspiracy theory, let’s keep in mind how pretentious he is.

When I say someone is a crackpot, that doesn’t mean they can’t do good work when they stay in their lane. Yes, Vern Grose pioneered the systemic approach to safety back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He’s a “safety engineer,” but he practices paper engineering. He has no degree in engineering and has never been licensed. He runs things. He sits on boards. He supervises. We all used his system-based methods, which largely worked until they were superseded in the 2000s. Grose's one material contribution to engineering was all back when the early space program spent lots of cash on inventing new ways of managing large, complicated projects.

But if you’re asking him to look at airliner wreckage and tell us what made it fall apart, that’s completely outside his expertise. The engineering world knows Vern Grose, which is why it’s funny that you claim to know all about all this but habitually misspelled his name. That’s like claiming to be competent in political science while writing about “Ronald Raygun” and “Bill Clanton.” We know him, but we know him as what you could call “a character.” What you sound like is someone borrowing a conspiracy theory to make himself look smart without realizing just how easily real experts can see through it.

Grose made it to the NTSB not as a technical contributor but as a political appointee. He sat on the literal board, not in labs. He was making phone calls and holding policy meetings, not sifting through wreckage putting little flags next to body parts. And he wasn’t well-liked. The Senate rejected his nomination, which is why Reagan had to get him on the board on a recess appointment. And while he was there, he annoyed his colleagues first by insisting on the title everyone knew was a lie, and then by holding Christian prayer meetings in his office for his staff every day. So when Irvine and others laud “Dr. Grose” as a former NTSB member, they’re talking about a tempestuous two years that happened a decade before TWA 800 hit the water, and had nothing to do with actually being any sort of a scientist.

Grose then went into politics and media full time. That’s not dishonorable, but it relegates one to the role of Talking Head. People certainly asked him questions on the air about airliners and missiles, but that doesn’t mean he actually knew what he was talking about. All he had to do was come up with a 10-second sound bite, and he could maintain the illusion of erudition. He was never trained in any of those sciences, and his brief stint as a political wonk at NTSB wouldn’t have given him the equivalent. All his industry experience since the 1970s has been sitting on boards of this or being chairman of that or president of this other thing. He never got his hands dirty in the actual engineering of anything.

Consequently Grose’s change of heart regarding TWA 800 coincided therefore not with a sudden scientific or engineering realization, but with Reed Irvine’s decision to blame the investigation missteps on the Clinton Administration for political purposes. Grose has been mostly beholden to Republican political interests.

You alluded to a pile of affidavits from what you deemed highly competent authorities. Did you even read the one from Grose? To put it mildly—it’s bizarre. Normally an affidavit swears to something the affiant personally witnessed and whose testimony of it under oath will constitute important evidence of then thing asserted. Instead, Grose merely swears to the truth of a transcript of an interview he had with someone when he was a correspondent for CNN, something that can be established factually without anyone needing to swear to it. And the question was about the propriety of the decision made over whether the FBI or the NTSB should have jurisdiction.

Ironically that’s probably the only question Grose was actually competent to answer, having worked on the political side of transportation safety. But we really do call into question the alleged value of these affidavits. Affidavits have absolutely no value as scientific evidence, and surprisingly little value as legal evidence. And Grose’s affidavit is simply moot. It establishes exactly nothing, both because all he’s swearing to is an opinion he had rendered previously, and one that could have been easily established as evidence via other means. It’s almost as if Irvine and Donaldson are piling up affidavits in order to impress gullible lay people, rather than to provide actionable evidence.

But we have to get back to the prayer meetings because they’re not just an amusing side quest. Vern Grose is a young-Earth Creationist. Big deal; a lot of people who work with and for me in a scientific capacity have religious views that I don’t share. But they don’t bring them to work, and they don’t imply that their scientific work with my company amounts to an endorsement of their religious beliefs. They’re smarter and more honest than that.

Vern hasn’t been quite so restrained. Waving a cryptic letter from Wernher von Braun, he was heavily involved in trying to get Creationism taught in California schools. Von Braun played his own religious cards pretty close to his chest. My dad was an academic at the same university as Wernher’s daughter, but I never got up the courage to ask her at parties about her father’s actual religious beliefs. But the dubious use of Wernher’s statement as political leverage pales in comparison to what was being written about Grose in the relevant scientific journals at the time. Grose had absolutely no education in biological or evolutionary sciences, and the letters to the editors of those publications minced no words in reminding the world of that in responding to his ignorant criticism of their field.

The real danger here is Vern Grose’s obvious willingness to speak with undeserved authority on subjects well outside his expertise so long as it gets him attention and serves his own personal or political purposes. So is he a crackpot? Yes, pretty much. Does his endorsement of Donaldson’s errant claims give them any kind of scientific credibility? Not at all.

Do you actually vet your sources? Probably not. I'm reminded of how you confidently asserted that my friend Jonathan Frakes didn't believe the Moon landings were real.

Quote:

If so, then you should know that Donaldson most certainly did “perform an investigation himself.”

No, he did not attempt to investigate the cause of the accident himself. His conclusion that one or two FIM-92 missiles brought down the plane was not based on any scientifically-valid protocol. He conducted numerous empirical exercises, but obviously aimed only at casting doubt upon the mainstream narrative. He went into his exercise beginning with the belief that the NSTB and others were wrong, and everything he did empirically was aimed at supporting that predetermined belief.

Most notably, he did absolutely nothing to test his own conclusion empirically, that a pair of FIM-92 missiles brought down the flight. What he did was not an investigation. It was a song and dance made to impress lay people.

Quote:

I should add that Commander Donaldson was not only a Navy pilot who logged hundreds of hours of flight time, but he also served as a Safety Officer, received training in aircraft crash investigation, and investigated numerous crashes, including one that involved a plane that was accidentally shot down by a missile.

And I've designed and built those missiles, attended live-fire exercises of them, conducted damage assessments under the supervision of both Navy and Air Force radar experts, have plenty of flight training and experience myself (including flying the full-cockpit Boeing 747 simulators used to qualify pilots), and have participated in investigations of air accidents, including the large-airframe experience Donaldson doesn't have. Further, I'm licensed as an engineer (Donaldson was not) and have considerable design and evaluation experience in large airframes, particularly those made by Boeing (which Donaldson did not have).

Yet somehow you need us to believe he and his small group of long-disengaged retirees, led by a right-wing media mogul, are the ones we should listen to; and if I find their work non-credible, I'm somehow uninformed, biased, and wrong.

Face it: you're not qualified to determine whether the report by Donaldson et al. is actually based on sound science and reaches defensible conclusions, or follows industry standards and best practices. And when I point Donaldson's specific errors, you're silent. You prefer the belief that the field rejects Donaldson because of bias or prejudice, not because it's pseudo-science. So you continue to parrot their rhetoric and the appeal-to-authority of inflated, irrelevant resumes from a group that hasn't had even a semblance of credibility for more than a decade now—a group partly formed and largely funded by a noted right-wing media figure for obviously political purposes. Your mistake is in believing that no one can tell what a sad, sorry bluff this is.

[LondonJohn]

Good grief! I didn't realise that there was still any uniformed and ill-educated conspiracy theorising about this incident!

Anyone who knows & understands a) anything about the evidence in this case, and b) something more than a minimal understanding of the relevant science and aviation principles related to this incident, knows & understands that the aircraft was brought down by a short circuit in faulty frayed wiring in the main fuel tank, which contained the right mixture of fuel vapour and oxygen to cause a powerful explosion when the wires shorted.

End of.

[mikegriffith1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garrison:

Honestly bad wiring causing a fuel tank explosion seems pretty straightforward as an explanation after you've watched a few seasons of Air Crash Investigation. I mean an elevator jams because someone forgot to put a cotter pin back, a plane slams into the ground after running out of fuel because a mechanic leaves the pressurization switch set to manual, etc.

The NTSB theory is not at all straightforward, and it involves far more than just bad wiring. Let’s start with the fact that there has never been a case where any kind of Boeing plane crashed because of the “probable cause” theorized by the NTSB. Never. Not once.

Let’s also remember that there is not one shred of physical evidence, not even a tiny piece, that proves that a short circuit occurred outside the center fuel tank, that a spark from this alleged short circuit then entered the tank via FQIS wiring, and that this supposed spark ignited vapors in the tank and blew it up. After spending millions of dollars on several sophisticated tests, the NTSB was finally forced to admit that they could not identify the ignition source of the alleged short circuit. We are talking about only a theory, and nothing more, though you’d never guess that to read many of the replies in this thread.

Here is why the IAMAW and Boeing experts rejected the NTSB’s short-circuit-spark theory:

There was only one plausible way for energy from a short circuit to have entered the center wing tank: through the fuel quantity indicating system (FQIS). And here we encounter the first major problem with the theory: FAA regulations required that aircraft fuel tanks be devoid of any ignition sources, and the FQIS was the only system that had any electrical wiring running inside the center wing tank. However, the FQIS wiring did not carry more than 0.02 millijoules (mJ) of energy, less than 10% of the energy needed to ignite the alleged fuel-air mixture. Ouch.

Thus, the alleged short-circuit spark would have had to use the FQIS wiring only as a conduit after supposedly originating outside the fuel tank. This is why the NTSB was forced to theorize that the short circuit occurred outside the tank.

It gets worse. A NASA study found that even in a worst-case scenario, no electromagnetic source on board the plane could have induced more than 0.125 mJ of energy into the wiring either. PEDs would have produced even less energy—the NTSB discovered this when they applied the strongest commercially available transmitter directly to some FQIS wiring and could not transfer enough energy to create a spark. Static electricity would have been even weaker: the NTSB tested a clamp inside the tank because it was judged to be the most vulnerable object in the tank, but the clamp did not accumulate enough static electricity to discharge more than 0.0095 mJ of energy into the fuel.

It gets even worse. The NTSB was therefore left with only one scenario that would theoretically allow enough energy to enter the center wing tank: a short circuit occurring between a faulty FQIS wire and a stronger wire outside the tank, and then this supposed energy leaving the outside wiring and entering the FQIS wiring. This is fairy tale material.

There was surge protection at one end of the wiring going to the FQIS probe, and at the other end there was a substantial air gap between the electrodes, a gap that in Boeing tests prevented 3,000 volts from creating a spark.

The NTSB was aware of this inconvenient fact, and so they theorized, without a shred of supporting evidence, that there were large deposits built up on the electrodes and that the supposed spark traveled across these deposits. However, among all the FQIS parts that were recovered, not one of the probes showed any significant deposits. Moreover, even if the probes did have deposits on them, in order for high voltage from a 120-volt line to enter an FQIS wire, the wire would have had to be damaged enough to allow a spark to escape, an extremely unlikely scenario given the fact that this wiring was protected by a varnish-impregnated nylon sheath.

As mentioned, there was no evidence that any short circuit occurred, which is why the NTSB could not identify the ignition source. Furthermore, when the FQIS gauge was reconstructed, it was in perfect working condition. This is one reason that Boeing engineers concluded that no short circuit of any kind occurred in the FQIS system.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garrison:

Frankly unless the people pushing this CT can provide the name of the ship and an affidavit from the crew saying 'yes we fired a missile' I'll accept Boeing built a plane with bad wiring and their luck ran out on TWA-800.

Then you might as well believe in the Tooth Fairy. Obviously, I can’t name the ship or produce an affidavit from the crew, assuming it was a Navy ship that fired the missiles. This is not surprising, given the fact that information on all the Navy ships that were in the vicinity remains classified to this day, and given the fact that—the day after a California newspaper published the damning lab results from the Sanders piece of seat foam from the plane—Bill Clinton signed an executive order that removed whistle-blower protection for all military and civilian personnel involved with Navy special operations. (Gee, why do you suppose Clinton did that the day after a newspaper published evidence that TWA 800 was brought down by a manmade explosion? Just a remarkable coincidence, I’m sure.)

But, I can provide considerable evidence that TWA 800 was brought down by at least one high-velocity explosion outside the aircraft, such as the following:

-- the inward-penetrating holes in the fuselage
-- the holes in a wing leading edge rib
-- the substantial damage done to that wing leading edge rib
-- the large section of the center wing tank floor that was blown inward/upward
-- the huge inwardly blown hole on left side of the fuselage
-- the three inwardly blown nose landing gear doors
-- the severe damage done to the nose landing gear
-- the random and irregular wounds to the passengers
-- the random and irregular damage done to the seats
-- the radar data’s refutation of the zoom climb
-- the dozens of EGIS explosive-residue detections
-- the three explosive-residue detections that the NTSB was willing to acknowledge
-- the results of the lab test done on the Sanders piece of seat foam (the test found high concentrations of components used in explosives)
-- the 100-plus eyewitnesses who saw an object streaking upward toward TWA 800 before it exploded.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

The NTSB theory is not at all straightforward...

Back to the gallop.

Quote:

Obviously, I can’t name the ship or produce an affidavit from the crew, assuming it was a Navy ship that fired the missiles. This is not surprising, given the fact that information on all the Navy ships that were in the vicinity remains classified to this day...

Excuses, excuses. Donaldson speculatively identifies a missile that can't possibly inflict the observed damage, because he has limited experience with missiles and large airframes. Incompatibly, Stalcup speculates a missile that requires nontrivial infrastructure, from a point of view of no prior understanding of the Navy or military operations. That theory rests on highly improbable premises for which you have no evidence. You spent paragraphs meticulously trying to spell out holes in the conventional narrative, then hand-wave away the giant holes in your own. That's unparsimonious.

Quote:

...Clinton...

I wondered how long it would take you to acknowledge the obvious political motives behind ARAP's and Cashill's work.

Quote:

But, I can provide considerable evidence...

Well, no, you actually can't. What you're providing is a parroting of long-debunked claims from other people you've never met, speaking in a field you aren't qualified in (nor they, in many cases), funded and organized by a right-wing media personality. Yet somehow these are the only people you say got it right. You can't even reconcile that Stalcup and ARAP refute each other. You effortlessly shift from one to the other with no interest in what actually happened.

[sackett]

"...with no interest in what actually happened." B'golly, that pinpoints a central feature of the conspiratoid mentality. The CTers get their fun & enjoyment out of elaborating ugly fantasies, and can revisit them endlessly without tiring because nothing is required to be proved.

I want to draw an analogy between CTism and -- what? Something to do with teenage guys and Playboy.

[mikegriffith1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jadebox:

Again, those descriptions do not describe what a missile would have looked like. A missile, if visible at all, would have just looked like a moving dot to witnesses.

And, again, you are simply wrong. I would point out, again, that in the NTSB's own missile visibility test, all of the witnesses were able to see either the missiles themselves or their flame/exhaust, even the witnesses who were 12 miles away. This is important because only shoulder-fired missiles were fired in NTSB test. Larger anti-air missiles, such as the SM-2, would have been even easier to see.

The refutation of the fraudulent zoom climb was so crucial because that mythical climb was the only explanation the NTSB could produce to try to explain the eyewitness accounts of an object streaking upward toward the airliner before it exploded. Now that we know the zoom climb never happened, the eyewitness accounts are even more compelling.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

Eagar commented only on the difference between a deflagration and a detonation. He also wrote an affadavit for Stalcup's previous court case. Again it discusses only that difference.

Oh, come on. Clearly, Dr. Eagar agreed with the skeptics of the NTSB theory, or else he would not have provided an affidavit for Dr. Stalcup's court case, nor would he have invited Stalcup to give a presentation on TWA 800 to one of his classes.

Furthermore, if you really are a physicist, you surely know why it is important that Eagar explained the difference between a deflagration and a detonation. If you've done half the reading you claim you've done, you know this is a vital issue, because the NTSB theory posits only a deflagration, i.e., a low-order/low-velocity explosion, as the initiating event.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

All that simply takes Stalcup's interpretation of the radar data at face value. Neither Stalcup nor Eagar has experience in the interpretation of radar data, nor did the students.

And I say you don't know what you're talking about. How about that? This is another instance that casts doubt on your claim that you've read and viewed all the critical sources that I've cited. Did you simply forget about the fact that we know from FOIA-released CIA documents that CIA analysts admitted in internal memos that the radar data did not support the zoom climb? (Yet, we still have people defending the zoom climb in recent posts in this thread.)

Thus, Dr. Stalcup is correct in noting that the radar data refute the zoom climb. He is right, and you are wrong. Could this be at least partly because he has spent years analyzing the radar data?

Did you also forget about the fact that we know from a released FBI report, obtained by journalist Robert Davey, that FBI radar consultant Mike O'Rourke noted that the radar data showed that debris "kicked out to the right," just as Dr. Stalcup has noted?

You continue to make claims that indicate you have not read and viewed nearly as many critical sources as you claim you have. I recall that you recently made the bogus claim that Commander Donaldson did not do an investigation of the crash, when in fact he spent years investigating the crash. Anyone who has done any serious research in skeptical sources knows this.

You also said that the ARAP report was written exclusively by Commander Donaldson, when in fact 10 sections of the report, totaling 27 of the report's 127 pages, were written by other people, one of whom was a former pilot and crash investigator and another of whom was an experienced research scientist with a Ph.D. in electrochemistry. One wonders how you could not know this if you had actually read the report.

By the way, just FYI, Commander Donaldson, in addition to being a pilot and a crash investigator in the Navy, was also a qualified CV air traffic controller and a graduate of the Naval Post Graduate School in aviation safety.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

That damage [to the nose landing gear] could not have been done by a low-order explosion of the center fuel tank nor by the force of the impact on the ocean.

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

The mainstream narrative does not claim this causation for the damage observed on the nose landing gear.

Really? You sure about that? The NTSB Structures Group report (which is presumably part of your "mainstream narrative") not only says the damage to the nose landing gear was impact damage but even claims that the damage was less severe than that of the wing and body landing gear:

6.0 Landing Gear and Landing Gear Door Assemblies
6.1 General Description

The nose gear suffered the least amount of impact damage as compared to the wing gears and body gears. . . .

The nose gear assembly (LG1) separated from the fuselage and suffered impact damage. (Structures Group Chairman's Factual Report of Investigation, NTSB Exhibit 7a, 2/20/1997, p. 38)

Wow, were those guys looking at the same nose landing gear that the other investigators described as “blasted” and “smashed”? Somebody was either legally blind or lying. If you are a physicist, you know that the terminal velocity of the landing gear falling from 14,000 feet would have been no more than 140 mph, and that impacting water at the speed could not have caused severe structural damage to that landing gear.

There is a third possibility: the Structures Group chairman's report may have been heavily edited in the same way that the Airplane Interior Documentation Group chairman's report (i.e., Hank Hughes’ report) was heavily edited without his knowledge or consent. As you should know, over 300 pages were removed from Hank Hughes’ report, including some 200 pages of photographic evidence, without his knowledge or consent (Affidavit of Henry F. Hughes, pp. 15-16).

And there is a fourth possibility: One could make the argument that the wording is not necessarily describing the cause of the severe structural damage but is only describing the damage done by impact on water. In other words, the author avoided discussing the substantial structural damage but purposely or accidentally left the impression that all damage was impact damage by only describing impact damage.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

Your source reports conclusory statements from people who assumed there was a bomb on board, which conflicts with the narrative of an air-intercept missile.

The people who made those "conclusory statements" were participants in the NTSB investigation. They were investigators working in the Calverton hangar.

And, no, the investigators' conclusion does not necessarily conflict with the missile scenario. The investigators saw that the nose landing gear was obviously subjected to a fierce blast wave, but they assumed the blast wave came from a bomb in the cargo hold. However, a proximity-fused missile exploding near the nose landing gear would have likewise generated a powerful blast wave that could have caused the severe structural damage done to the landing gear.

This article by Michael Rivero includes a photo and two diagrams of the nose landing gear. Anyone can look at the photo and see that the landing gear suffered considerable structural damage. No wonder the investigators who spoke with journalists about it described the landing gear as “blasted” and “smashed” and as having suffered “serious concussive damage”:

https://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCH...H/TWA/twa.html

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Oh, come on. Clearly, Dr. Eagar agreed with the skeptics of the NTSB theory, or else...

No, you don't get to put thoughts and motives into Eagar's head.

Quote:

Furthermore, if you really are a physicist...

I'm an engineer. Engineers are licensed and tested for their understanding of these matters. Physicists are not.

Quote:

...you surely know why it is important that Eagar explained the difference between a deflagration and a detonation.

I'm certain I don't know Eagar's motives, and I'm certain you don't either. Stalcup's claim that a detonation must have been involved is based entirely on his graduate-student interpretation of radar data. Neither Stalcup nor Eagar is an expert in radar tracking. Eagar evidently took Stalcup's interpretation at face value. There is no rational reason to have done so.

Quote:

Could this be at least partly because he has spent years analyzing the radar data?

No, it cannot be. This is because he drew those conclusions back when he was a graduate student, before he had even obtained his degree in physics. I keep asking you how Stalcup as a graduate student obtained the skills necessary to interpret ATC radar. You don't have an answer. That he has clung to the story he concocted back when he was a student for decades now does not suddenly retrospectively grant him the skill.

Quote:

...that FBI radar consultant Mike O'Rourke noted that the radar data showed that debris "kicked out to the right," just as Dr. Stalcup has noted?

But stops short of confirming Stalcup's claims about the velocity. This is because the coherence of individual debris elements cannot be determined from the tracks alone. You need techniques such as range gating.

Quote:

You also said that the ARAP report was written exclusively by Commander Donaldson...

Asked and answered, with respect to authorship. You are simply parroting claims regarding Donaldson et al. made by them, and done so at the behest of a media personality obviously looking to make a political statement. You clearly don't understand what you are reading, and you clearly have made absolutely no critical study of their claims. You're not qualified to do so, and you're clearly not motivated to do so.

Quote:

I recall that you recently made the bogus claim that Commander Donaldson did not do an investigation of the crash, when in fact he spent years investigating the crash.

Asked and answered. Donaldson, funded by right-wing media, spent years attempting to poke enough holes in the official story that it would look politically bad enough. All his pseudoscience was directed at that. An investigation involves testing one's own hypothesis, which Donaldson did not do with any degree of scientific rigor. He expected it to stand implicitly after the official narrative had been rejected by other criteria.

Quote:

By the way, just FYI, Commander Donaldson, in addition to being a pilot and a crash investigator in the Navy, was also a qualified CV air traffic controller and a graduate of the Naval Post Graduate School in aviation safety.

But he was not an engineer, and it is unclear what role he played in the investigations he said he took part in. I pointed out a number of errors in just one section in Donaldson's report. His claims and conclusions are naive and incompetent, but it takes an expert to see this. You're not an expert, and you don't see them. Instead, rejection of Donaldson's claims can be spun as ignorance on the part of laymen and bias on the part of experts. But in fact they fail on their merits.

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If you are a physicist, you know that the terminal velocity of the landing gear falling from 14,000 feet would have been no more than 140 mph...

Terminal velocity is irrelevant. I explained several posts ago what the likely cause of the damage was.

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There is a third possibility...

Yes, handwaving speculation appealing to a conspiracy.

Once again, all you've done is place implicit faith in people you really know nothing about except for the claims they've made about themselves. And all you're doing now is ignorantly repeating their claims and begging us to take them as legitimate expert opinions.

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However, a proximity-fused missile exploding near the nose landing gear would have likewise generated a powerful blast wave that could have caused the severe structural damage done to the landing gear.

Haha, no. You have no clue what you're talking about, especially if you're sticking with Donaldson's claims that two FIM-92s were the ordnance involved. A 3 kg warhead doesn't have the slightest chance of inflicting that degree of damage on a Boeing 747 landing gear assembly. I have literal hands-on experience with these structures and these munitions. You don't, and neither did Donaldson.

[bknight]

I'm curious where the FDR and CVR are carried on this/all(?) 747s?

[mikegriffith1]

Let’s discuss another item of evidence of a missile hit. I included this in my list of evidence a few days ago but gave no details about it.

A wing leading edge rib, which was composed of tough structural aluminum, showed signs of having been next to a high-velocity explosion. The part suffered substantial structural damage and had inward penetrating holes in it. During the NTSB investigation, ALPA crash investigator James Speer discussed this part with Dr. Merritt Birky, the head of the Fire and Explosions Group in the investigation. Birky dismissed the structural damage and holes as hydraulic damage from impact with the ocean water. Speer told him he knew this was wrong:

So we walked over and looked at that part and I asked him what he thought, and he asked me what I thought, and I said it looked to me like a high-velocity explosion. And he says, “Well, I have considered everything and I have decided that this happened by hydraulic action on impact with the water.”

I looked him right in the eye and I said, “Well BS.” And I said, “You know as well as I that terminal velocity of these things falling to the atmosphere near sea level, falling at terminal velocity is about 120 to 140 miles an hour, and at that kind of velocity does not do this kind of damage to structural aluminum”. . . .

And I said “there’s a piece of stringer attached to this.” And I said, “since when have you seen hydraulic action on impact with water cause sooting through the hole?” And with that, he turned on his heels and stomped off. (Affidavit of James Speer, p. 2)

Those who have watched Birky’s stumbling answers in the Borjesson-Stalcup TWA 800 documentary will not be surprised to learn that when Speer and Birky were discussing this piece of wreckage during the NTSB investigation, Birky “didn’t even know the different blast-front velocities between fuel-air and high explosions” (p. 3). Speer continues by explaining that only a high-order explosion could have caused the holes in the part, and that a low-order explosion, such as a fuel-air explosion, could not have caused those holes:

That is very important in determining which type of explosion was involved because they produce very different damage patterns. The holes piercing the part in question were definitely from the high-velocity blast front of a high explosion, as opposed to a low order fuel-air explosion.

I even went to the JFK hangar on Sunday, after Boeing identified the part as a wing leading edge rib, and had a TWA mechanic lower the leading edge slats so I could photograph the large cavity in the leading edge. I did this to help people in ALPA and the NTSB understand that the holes piercing the part had to have been caused by a directed jet of high velocity gas from a high explosion as opposed to a low velocity fuel-air explosion that simply would have rolled around the ribs. (Affidavit of James Speer, p. 3)

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Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

Obviously, I can’t name the ship or produce an affidavit from the crew, assuming it was a Navy ship that fired the missiles. This is not surprising, given the fact that information on all the Navy ships that were in the vicinity remains classified to this day...

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

Excuses, excuses.

You again show yourself to be unserious. How are we supposed to identify the ship, assuming it was a naval ship, if the government won’t release the identity of the ships that were in the vicinity at the time? Without this information, how could anyone “name the ship”? This is a factual reason, not an excuse.

You and others keep assuming that everyone on board a missile-capable ship would know if one of the ship’s missiles accidentally shot down an airliner. FYI, only about 10 percent of the personnel on a missile ship have anything to do with the actual firing of missiles. Only about 10 percent of the sailors on a missile ship are even cleared to enter the CIC (Combat Information Center), where missile firings are conducted. Moreover, even most of the people in the CIC would not necessarily know that one of their missiles hit an airliner.

You might want to read up on the case of the USS Vincennes’ accidental shootdown of an Iranian airliner in 1988. The weapons officers initially claimed that the cruiser's Aegis Combat System recorded that the airliner was diving and was IFF squawking on a military frequency. Later investigation, however, proved the opposite, that the airliner was climbing at the time and that its radio transmitter was squawking only on the Mode III civilian frequency. These facts came to light because Iranian and other neighboring nations’ platforms could prove that the airliner was not diving toward the Vincennes and never IFF squawked on a military frequency.

Now, I really don’t like mentioning these facts because I have great love for the U.S. Navy and for the other branches of our military. But, such facts must be considered when assessing the case for an accidental missile shootdown of TWA 800. And, I repeat that I have not taken a firm position on the source of the missiles.

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Originally Posted by JayUtah:

Donaldson speculatively identifies a missile that can't possibly inflict the observed damage, because he has limited experience with missiles and large airframes.

You have no clue, no earthly clue, what you’re talking about.

First of all, if you had actually read the ARAP report, you’d know that Donaldson (the principal author of the report, but by no means the only author) most certainly does identify a missile that can “inflict the observed damage.” Although he initially believed that a MANPAD system (such as the FIM-92 Stinger) could have been used, he later rejected this idea and concluded that the missiles were proximity-fused missiles fired from a full-sized anti-air system. You’d know this if you’d read the ARAP report:

It is this investigator’s opinion that additional fuel did eventually enter the TWA FL800 center wing tank through the CWT left side body wall (RIB) brought about by the same over pressurization that occurred in the entire left wing tank system by a detonation of a full-sized, proximity fused, anti-aircraft warhead. . . .

TWA FL800 was too high (13,800 feet), too fast (380 knots true airspeed), to be hit by these systems. The B747 is also too big and too tough to be brought down by MANPADS. They have minuscule rocket engines (relative to a full-sized anti-aircraft weapon) of short duration burn and very low visibility. . . .

It appears, as in many other aspects of this investigation, the Justice Department, through the FBI, purposely set the burden of proof bar far too high: By specifying you must find proof of a MANPADS engagement, contact explosion, 4,000 ft/sec fragment hits, etc., before you can conclude a missile was the culprit. This completely rules out a finding of a missile attack by a full-sized system. The characteristics of full-sized, proximity fused, blast warheads are entirely different and far more deadly. (ARAP report, pp. 11, 36)

By the way, as Commander Donaldson correctly pointed out, anti-air missiles such as the Iranian AIM 54A can be fired from smaller, faster boats relatively easily. This was entirely feasible in 1996. The ARAP report criticizes Kallstrom for assuming that firing a proximity-fused missile would have required a large ship:

Mr. Kallstrom and the FBI’s position was to totally ignore these large systems based at least publicly on the idea that large weapons would need a warship, its radar, launch rail infrastructure, etc., to launch and guide a powerful weapon.

This is absolutely false; virtually any solid fuel anti-aircraft missile could be launched and successfully guided to TWA FL800 from a boat or small floating container. On 8 January 1998, Admiral Thomas Moorer, who attended the AIM Press Conference about TWA FL800, personally chided a reporter who insisted no one saw a ship, so it couldn’t have been a missile. (ARAP report, p. 71)

And, FYI, Donaldson, after his initial flying days, as do many other Navy officers, got trained in and held other positions. One of those positions was as a surface warfare officer, in which he was trained and worked with surface-to-air missiles, i.e., anti-air missiles.

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Originally Posted by JayUtah:

Incompatibly, Stalcup speculates a missile that requires nontrivial infrastructure, from a point of view of no prior understanding of the Navy or military operations. That theory rests on highly improbable premises for which you have no evidence.

This is just hot air. The only difference between Stalcup and Donaldson’s theories is the platform from which the anti-air missiles were launched. Donaldson believed they were fired from small vessels manned by terrorists, whereas Stalcup believes they were errantly fired from a U.S. Navy ship.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

You spent paragraphs meticulously trying to spell out holes in the conventional narrative, then hand-wave away the giant holes in your own.

Uh-huh. Let me know when you’re ready to document those alleged “giant holes.” And I notice you made no effort to dispute any of the points I made about the far-fetched nature of the NTSB theory. You know full well that the NTSB had to resort to theorizing that the charge from their alleged short circuit entered the FQIS wiring by traveling over large deposits that had supposedly built up on the electrodes, never mind among all the FQIS parts that were recovered, not one of the probes showed any significant deposits.

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Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

...Clinton...

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

I wondered how long it would take you to acknowledge the obvious political motives behind ARAP's and Cashill's work.

Oh my goodness. Only a partisan hack would make such a claim. How about all the skeptics who are not conservatives? You know that Stalcup is certainly no conservative, right? Right?

You know you’re scraping the bottom of the polemical barrel when you have to resort to claiming that ARAP and Cashill rejected the NTSB theory for purely political reasons.

And, just FYI, I happen to hold a moderately favorable view of Bill Clinton. I think he was one of the best presidents we’ve had in the last 60 years. I think that, on balance, he did a good job, regardless of his personal failures.

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Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

But, I can provide considerable evidence...

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayUtah:

Well, no, you actually can't. What you're providing is a parroting of long-debunked claims from other people you've never met, speaking in a field you aren't qualified in (nor they, in many cases), funded and organized by a right-wing media personality. Yet somehow these are the only people you say got it right. You can't even reconcile that Stalcup and ARAP refute each other. You effortlessly shift from one to the other with no interest in what actually happened.

Wrong. As I’ve proved, Stalcup and ARAP do not refute each other—the problem is that you don’t know what they do and don’t believe.

“Long-debunked claims”?! Hogwash. Who has debunked them? Who? You certainly haven’t debunked them, and I have yet to see you cite a reference that does. You’ve done little else but blow a bunch of hot air, issue summary dismissals of contrary evidence, and trumpet your alleged expertise. You declined to address the Boeing report’s arguments against the short-circuit-spark theory. You still haven’t even deigned to explain why my critique of the EMRTC test is wrong or how it allegedly omits a “vital physical principle.” And you came up with all kinds of lame excuses to dismiss Dr. Grose’s rejection of the NTSB theory.

You claimed that Commander Donaldson never did an investigation, and when I called you on this blunder, you doubled-down on it by claiming that his investigation wasn’t really an investigation because he was skeptical of the NTSB theory from the outset! Wow! I bet you wouldn’t apply that vacuous, subjective standard to the NTSB officials who rejected both the missile theory and the bomb theory before most of the wreckage had even been recovered.

You couldn’t just admit that you blundered in claiming that Donaldson did no investigation and be content with saying that you reject the results of his investigation.

You have proved that you are so rabidly biased that you can’t admit anything, no matter what. A 13-17-degree difference in ambient temperature on 7/16/96 and the day of the NTSB flight test was no big deal, according to you. Former NTSB board member Dr. Grose, in spite of all his training and expertise, is not qualified to pass judgment on the NTSB theory, according to you! And on and on we could go.

[bknight]

mikegriffith1 you make the damage by high explosives and yet you don't produce the photographic images only citing CTs reports. Since you have laboriously continued to state such "evidence" why not post the images?

[catsmate]

Originally Posted by bknight

I'm curious where the FDR and CVR are carried on this/all(?) 747s?

Not sure specifically for the B747 but usually near the rear fuselage.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by bknight

mikegriffith1 you make the damage by high explosives and yet you don't produce the photographic images only citing CTs reports. Since you have laboriously continued to state such "evidence" why not post the images?

The wreck sat in an NTSB hangar for 20 years. You'd think someone would have noticed and confirmed. Weird.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Let’s discuss...

You're not "discussing." You're simply regurgitating other people's opinions. What you're trying to pass off as shocking, incontrovertible fact are the judgments of people you don't know anything about. You didn't do any due diligence on them. You're diving now into detail you don't personally understand, not because it actually proves anything in the grander scheme of things, but because you think it makes you look smarter than those "biased" or "ignorant" skeptics. Increasing the amount of garbage you reproduce in this forum doesn't improve its smell.

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Affidavit of James Speer...

Affidavits have zero scientific value, and very little legal value. Yes, I've read them.

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Those who have watched Birky’s stumbling answers in the Borjesson-Stalcup TWA 800 documentary...

"Documentaries" have little value. This is what Stalcup does now for a living. He doesn't introduce himself as a practicing physicist. His pride and joy is that he's now the crusader for TWA 800. He hasn't published in nearly two decades. The "company" he says he owns doesn't seem to actually exist. Stalcup isn't a physicist. He's a showman, and that's what he wants to be. No, I don't trust his unqualified judgment and no, I don't trust the material he keeps putting out in order too keep himself in the spotlight.

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"...caused by a directed jet of high velocity gas from a high explosion..." (Affidavit of James Speer, p. 3)

And this is how we know Speer has no idea how an air-intercept fragmentation warhead works. You don't seem to understand that when people spout howlers like this one, we aren't compelled to respect their judgment.

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How are we supposed to identify the ship, assuming it was a naval ship, if the government won’t release the identity of the ships that were in the vicinity at the time?

Give any excuse you want. The inability to identify and substantiate the existence of the speculated launch platform remains a giant hole in the theory. You don't get to ask the standards be lowered simply because you can't figure out how to get the evidence you need. The conspiracy theorists mercilessly reject any speculation or missing piece in the conventional narrative. Unless you guys want to justify your double standard, you have to accept that the big holes in your theory make it objectively less credible than the conventional narrative, even if the conventional narrative also must make assumptions.

In any case, I and another poster gave you examples of how we were able to discover the details of classified operations. Why has none of these "investigative journalists" managed to do the same? If ARAP included a former JSC chairman as an active, participating member, why wasn't he able to pull strings to get the necessary work done? The answer is that this is all just handwaving. That some people waving their hands used to wear uniforms is immaterial. There are simply no facts to support the claims being made.

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You and others keep assuming that everyone on board a missile-capable ship would know if one of the ship’s missiles accidentally shot down an airliner.

It's absolutely certain that everyone onboard an SM-2 equipped vessel would know that they fired a missile that night off the Eastern seaboard as part of a live-fire exercise. Literally every single crew member.

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FYI, only about 10 percent of the personnel on a missile ship have anything to do with the actual firing of missiles.

Wow, have you actually ever been aboard a U.S. Navy warship during a live-fire exercise, or when any ordnance has been released? Insinuating that a warship could just fire a missile and no one but a few people would know this frankly absurd. And then later when the crew discovers that their meticulously planned and executed live-fire operation coincided with the suspicious loss of an airliner, not one of them asks himself, "Hey, was that us?" Not one of them conscientiously drops an anonymous tip to the Wall Street Journal. Not one of them makes a deathbed confession. Ships can't hide when they enter and leave port. There are ship-watchers just like there are train-spotters. We know what ships are at sea and which ones are in port.

No, this is just bad spy novel stuff.

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You might want to read up on the case of the USS Vincennes’ accidental shootdown of an Iranian airliner in 1988.

Well, since I taught the incident as part of my class—you know, where I actually taught engineering at a major U.S. university—I doubt there's anything you could tell me about it that I don't already know.

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These facts came to light because Iranian and other neighboring nations’ platforms could prove...

Yes, the takeaway is that you can't just make a U.S. Navy warship disappear when it fires a missile off a heavily-populated seaboard, especially when there's monumental political pressure to come clean about shooting down a friendly. The difference between The Iranian airliner incident and your TWA 800 conspiracy theory is that there's credible evidence in one case, and a lot of overheated puffery in the other, promulgated by people who really want a certain story to sound more plausible than it is.

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Now, I really don’t like mentioning these facts because I have great love for the U.S. Navy and for the other branches of our military. But, such facts must be considered when assessing the case for an accidental missile shootdown of TWA 800.

Oh, please. Every conspiracy theorist ever makes a big show of expressing the utmost respect for the people and organizations whose reputations he's ignorantly trashing. Your argument is pretty obvious: The Navy tried to cover up the Iranian airliner incident, so they "must" also be trying to cover up the TWA 800 incident.

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And, I repeat that I have not taken a firm position on the source of the missiles.

No, you haven't. The problem is you think this indecision strengthens your case because you're keeping your mind and options open. In fact it weakens it because you are merely covering up the fact that all your outlying observations and speculations don't actually point to a single, more parsimonious explanation. This is the sort of thing that amuses armchair detectives and provides fodder for "documentaries," but it has absolutely zero value in real-world investigations.

Conspiracy-theory rhetoric, as opposed to sound investigational practice, focuses on showing all the alleged holes and inconsistencies in the mainstream narrative. This implies that there is a minimum standard of completeness and consistency that any theory must attain in order to be considered viable. If the conventional narrative doesn't meet this standard, say the conspiracy theorists, it must be rejected no matter how otherwise simple or explanatory it may be.

But having done this as a separate step, the conspiracy theories then pivot to advancing their own hypotheses, generally focused on explaining some small subset of the outlying or contradictory observations that were the criteria by which the mainstream narrative was dismissed. At best, each hypothesis can explain only a portion of those. And taken as a whole, they are mutually contradictory. Further, when the giant holes in the theory are patched with speculation and handwaving, this is all excused by saying things like, "This is still more plausible than the conventional narrative, which we have already rejected as clearly impossible." The minimum-viability standard from the previous step is entirely forgotten, lest it also reject the conspiracy theory.

None of this even slightly resembles an actual investigation in which the conclusions have actual consequences. If conspiracy theory A explains only a few outliers, but not the big picture, then we reject it properly. If conspiracy theory B explains a different set of outliers, but not the big picture, then we reject it too. If A and B are incompatible, then you're not smarter for saying "I haven't decided whether it's A or B." You're simply running from the fact that both can't be true.

And when it comes to arguing in favor of these conspiracy theories, that indecision gets weaponized into the dishonest tactic you're using here. When some part of Theory A gets debunked, you shift effortlessly to how Theory B fixes it, or speculates differently, or is just the pivot you need in that moment. That doesn't actually contribute to a better understanding of the events in question; it just keeps your head above water in a debate. So when you try so very hard to call us genuine experts "unserious" because we don't celebrate all the undirected ramblings of these wannabe "investigative journalists," it rings rather hollow.

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You have no clue, no earthly clue, what you’re talking about.

Except that I do, because while Stalcup was playing with crystals in a lab in Florida, I was designing and building missile improvements and doing damage assessments on them. In real life, not in armchairs frantically hammering out manifestos and hurling them at Congress.

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...most certainly does identify a missile that can “inflict the observed damage.”

No. Neither a frag or a continuous-rod warhead with even ten times the bursting charge will do that kind of damage either. And yes, I'm more qualified than Donaldson to make that judgment. And more qualified than you to know whether Donaldson is.

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he later rejected this idea and concluded that the missiles were proximity-fused missiles fired from a full-sized anti-air system.

Donaldson's flip-flopping doesn't help him any more than yours helps you. Donaldson had absolutely no experience in investigating large warhead strikes on large airframes and no business setting himself as better than the consensus of actual experts with relevant experience.

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By the way, as Commander Donaldson correctly pointed out, anti-air missiles such as the Iranian AIM 54A can be fired from smaller, faster boats relatively easily. This was entirely feasible in 1996. The ARAP report criticizes Kallstrom for assuming that firing a proximity-fused missile would have required a large ship...

Donaldson gives us no basis to conclude that his judgment on this point is any better informed, and you aren't qualified to assess whether his opinion has a proper foundation.

Sure, the AIM-54A has a large bursting charge compared to the FIM-92. But it has a continuous-rod warhead, which means all the evidence that allegedly points to a fragmentation warhead has to be discarded because it doesn't fit this theory.

Originally Posted by Donaldson

"This is absolutely false; virtually any solid fuel anti-aircraft missile could be launched and successfully guided to TWA FL800 from a boat or small floating container."

No. In 1996, no AIM-54A could have been fired from anything other than the F-14 Tomcat. It's an air-intercept missile and requires considerable support on its launch platform.

How do I know this? In the late 1990s, when I was working on various projects including missile warhead and seeker design, I spent my spare time volunteering at the tiny Oakland airport aerospace museum. When you go there, check out the F-14 in the back of the outdoor display. Back in the 1990s that was a work area, not a display area. I and a bunch of retired Navy techs were stripping that fuselage. Guess how much those guys bent my ear about all these weapons systems when they found out I was an engineer, and that I was working on missiles.

There's a reason these claims sound authoritative yet are vague on the details. It's because the details matter, and the details don't add up to a viable alternative theory. It's why you actually need to name the missile and not say press-conference sound bites like, "You can fire any missile from anywhere."

Sure, it's theoretically possible to strip the entire EWS system out of a Tomcat and put it on a boat. It's theoretically possible to adapt the launch rails and flight software of an AAM to be ground-launched. But where's the evidence that this was done?

The AIM-54A is a standoff weapon. Its value is being able to lock onto a target from far away and launch on it without exposing oneself to counterattack. That's why it has a radar seeker instead of an IR seeker, and why it needs to have an extensive conversation with the F-14s EWS before it can be turned loose to home in on the target by itself with its own active radar system. This doesn't work very well from a boat because the radar has no over-the-horizon capability. That's not a problem on the F-14 because in the air-to-air scenario it's not remarkable to have radar contact with the target from dozens of kilometers away.

And if we accept the conspiracy theory's interpretation of the eyewitness testimony as seeing the plume from a missile, we would have to conclude that this unevidenced Iranian gunboat intended to shoot a standoff weapon at point-blank range, while very near the heavily-defended American coast. Iran ever only had about 300 AIM-54As, and they won't get any more. And without them, the F-14s still in their Air Force would be deprived of their most effective and powerful weapon. At point-blank range, why not an IR-guided missile? Why not a more plentiful one? Why not one with an existing ground-launch capability?

Conversely, if the missile was fired from the limit of the EWS range at sea-surface visibility, the missile plume would have been traveling horizontally, not vertically as you say the witnesses claim. No, the AIM-54A is not a credible candidate.

And are we just going to ignore that the scenario has shifted from an accidental Navy shoot-down to some Iranian belligerent in a tiny boat?

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Admiral Thomas Moorer, who attended the AIM Press Conference about TWA FL800, personally chided a reporter who insisted no one saw a ship, so it couldn’t have been a missile.

I guarantee I know more about how these missiles and their launch systems work than Moorer did. Yes, I can seriously make that claim. Further, we've talked about this press conference before. Accuracy In Media is a right-wing media organization. Reed Irvine is not a credible source. He proclaims himself to be a "watchdog," but his right-wing agenda is clear. He paid for all of Donaldson's work, which unsurprisingly seemed to make the Clinton administration look bad and got us no further toward discovering what actually happened to the airliner.

Irvine literally fetched Moorer from the senior care facility in which he was then living in order to come attend the press conference. And by that time he'd been out of any kind of service for something like 20 years. This is an obvious dog-and-pony show, not a serious investigation. He got the most Naviest guy he could find and fed him a load of malarky and got him to go along with it.

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One of those positions was as a surface warfare officer, in which he was trained and worked with surface-to-air missiles, i.e., anti-air missiles.

And yet he's trying to tell us the AIM-54A would be viable here. You don't seem to understand that you keep putting the cart before the horse. Donaldson tells you he has this or that training and experience. But then he makes statements that clearly undercut that claim. Either he's unqualified and displaying his ignorance, or he once was qualified and is now willing to bend the truth in order to get attention. But because you don't have the qualifications to determine for yourself whether Donaldson's expert opinions and judgment are viable, you simply insist that everyone else be as gullible as you in accepting people's claims and their proffered foundation.

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This is just hot air. The only difference between Stalcup and Donaldson’s theories is the platform from which the anti-air missiles were launched. Donaldson believed they were fired from small vessels manned by terrorists, whereas Stalcup believes they were errantly fired from a U.S. Navy ship.

And you don't see how this makes them completely contradictory?

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And I notice you made no effort to dispute any of the points I made about the far-fetched nature of the NTSB theory.

You're not making the points. You're naively copying what other people have said and insisting that we trust their judgment. It's their judgment that the problems they identify mean the conventional theory is utterly untenable. I've given you the reasons why I don't trust the judgment of your sources.

Second, you aren't qualified to determine whether your sources' judgment on the objective viability of the conventional narrative is justified or acceptable in the industry. I don't accept your judgment on their credibility, and I make no apology for that. You're literally trying to tell me what standards of credibility prevail in my licensed profession, from the position of arrogant ignorance.

Third, I've written extensively already on the double standard used by conspiracy theorists. You can address that, if you want to discuss it. Instead you want to bog down in the individual detail without recognizing the inherent flaw in your approach. The details are merely appendages to the overall error.

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Oh my goodness. Only a partisan hack would make such a claim.

Really? No discernible political motives in any of these conspiracy theories?

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Wrong. As I’ve proved, Stalcup and ARAP do not refute each other—the problem is that you don’t know what they do and don’t believe.

How have you proved any such thing? The site you keep sending us to in order to read all those affidavits firmly claims Donaldson advocated the FIM-92 theory. Yes, he repudiates that in the report, but he doesn't actually name the missile system he thinks was used. You say he tells us that the AIM-54A could have been fired from a small boat. As I've shown, that's absurd. The whole reason he's proposing these improvised, small-scale scenarios is so he doesn't have to explain the absence of a ship.

Stalcup firmly claims the SM-2 was used. The SM-2 requires a ship. Donaldson says it was a small boat and an improvised platform.

Stalcup claims the Navy fired the missile, and that they and their contractors covered up the incident. Donaldson claims terrorists did it.

At best, Donaldson claims the AIM-54A was the weapon, which produces entirely different kinds of damage than the SM-2 or the FIM-92.

But by all means keep telling us that these theories aren't mutually exclusive.

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“Long-debunked claims”?! Hogwash.

Nobody except conspiracy fans have paid the slightest attention to Donaldson and ARAP since they all died. Their findings were never endorsed in the industry. You seem to know this, and prefer to believe this is because the industry is largely biased against them. A more plausible answer is that the claims fail quite overtly on their merits.

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...trumpet your alleged expertise.

I'm demonstrating my expertise, which you seem dead-set on rejecting at all costs. All you can do is copy from others and then stomp and whine when it's not immediately accepted as gospel.

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You declined to address the Boeing report’s arguments against the short-circuit-spark theory.

I addressed that.

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You still haven’t even deigned to explain why my critique of the EMRTC test is wrong or how it allegedly omits a “vital physical principle.”

It's not my job to educate you.

Had you come here saying, "I'm working on this paper, and I need help to make sure it's scientifically accurate," you might have been able to get help. Instead you showed up assuming everyone you'd be talking to could be dismissed either as ignorant or biased, that your findings were correct and complete, and that you could bluster your way past anyone who disagreed. You don't want to find out what happened. You just want people to think you're smart; or, if they don't, that they must be inferior. I already spoon-fed you one correction. Figure the rest out yourself, if you want to be smart. It's the figuring-out that makes you smart, not being given the answers.

Quote:

And you came up with all kinds of lame excuses to dismiss Dr. Grose’s rejection of the NTSB theory.

Vern's well-known and colorful biography is a "lame excuse?"

Face it, you had no clue who this guy was. You're still calling him "doctor" even though the title is completely inappropriate. You desperately need him to still be the heroic expert you thought he was when you were misspelling his name and extolling his virtues as an accident investigator.

You don't vet your sources, and this time throwing your hat in with a notorious crackpot like Vernon Grose has impacted your credibility.

Quote:

You claimed that Commander Donaldson never did an investigation, and when I called you on this blunder, you doubled-down on it by claiming that his investigation wasn’t really an investigation because he was skeptical of the NTSB theory from the outset!

Straw man. It's not an investigation because it took the typical conspiracy theory approach instead of a scientific approach. It applied one standard of proof and one empirical approach to dismiss the conventional narrative, and a completely different standard of proof and practically no empirical methods to support a vaguely-defined alternative narrative. The report clearly began with the intent to cast as much doubt as possible on the conventional narrative, and is rather dishonest in its attempts to do so.

Quote:

Wow! I bet you wouldn’t apply that vacuous standard to the NTSB officials who rejected both the missile theory and the bomb theory before most of the wreckage had even been recovered.

This begs the question that evaluation of the missile theories requires inspecting the wreckage. In any case, as it has been noted, a substantial portion of then wreckage was recovered and subjected to repeated inspection over many years. None of that shifted the consensus markedly toward a missile or bomb theory.

Quote:

You couldn’t just admit that you blundered in claiming that Donaldson did no investigation and be content with saying that you reject the results of his investigation.

No, I stand by my opinion. Donaldson did not conduct an investigation as we use the term in the industry. He conducted a biased, dishonest exercise in an attempt to rebut claims he had evidently decided were false according to other criteria. His work was designed to impress people who would largely not be able to determine its viability for themselves.

Quote:

You have proved that you are so rabidly biased...

Oh, please. You have no clue whether what you're shoveling here has the slightest iota of objective credibility. When I'm giving you the actual reasons for not accepting the judgment of your self-proclaimed experts, that's not bias.

Quote:

...that you can’t admit anything, no matter what.

Straw man. Rejecting your ignorant handwaving and your references to sources you don't know doesn't equate to irretrievable entrenchment. The claims of Donaldson et al. are not credible from the forensic engineering perspective. The claims of Stalcup are not credible from a data acquisition perspective. I can say this having studied enough of them from an expert point of view to make that determination.

If you want to supply an alternative theory that better explains all the evidence with fewer assumptions, I'll be happy to entertain it. What you're trying to foist here instead doesn't cut it. Telling me that I have to accept patently absurd claims in my profession or else I'm "biased" is annoyingly arrogant.

Quote:

A 13-17-degree difference in ambient temperature on 7/16/96 and the day of the NTSB flight test was no big deal, according to you.

I made no such claim. In contrast, you seem to be claiming that this difference had an effect that should have invalidated the test. But you've provided no computation to establish that. You simply beg the question. I might be persuaded by a competent engineering analysis to take another look at the test. I'm vastly unimpressed by people's insistence that I accept their proclamations or face their scorn.

Quote:

Former NTSB board member Dr. Grose, in spite of all his training and expertise, is not qualified to pass judgment on the NTSB theory, according to you!

I've explained at length why Mister Grose's opinion on the NTSB's conclusions regarding TWA 800 does not constitute any sort of credible endorsement of their scientific or technical viability. I've further explained why his pseudoscientific activity elsewhere affects his credibility. Waving your hands vaguely at what you think his "training and expertise" was doesn't make him the person ARAP is trying to convince you he is.

Once again, you don't get to insist who I must consider an expert in my field and why.

Quote:

And on and on we could go.

And I'm sure you'll go on and on, trying desperately to pass off this stuff as valid science. No matter how much you foam and flail, you won't be the smartest guy in the room.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by catsmate

Not sure specifically for the B747 but usually near the rear fuselage.

Correct; in the aft equipment bay in the uppermost, rearmost section of the pressurized cabin.

[bknight]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

The wreck sat in an NTSB hangar for 20 years. You'd think someone would have noticed and confirmed. Weird.

From NTSB final report.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...ts/aar0003.pdf
pages 112-114
From page 112

Quote:

The Safety Board examined the recovered wreckage for evidence that the
airplaneís breakup was initiated by penetration of the CWT by a small, high-velocity
fragment (generated, for example, by explosion of a missile warhead near the airplane or
of a high-energy explosive within the airplane). Members of the Structures Group
identified 196 relatively small holes in the accident airplaneís structure that they
considered to be in an appropriate location and of an appropriate size and shape to have
resulted from such a fragment. These holes were then examined in detail by Safety Board
metallurgists and others to determine if they had characteristics of high-velocity
penetrations.

After a discussion of tests made by Boeing on impact hole of low velocity.(pgs112-113)

Quote:

An initial evaluation showed that many of the holes in the recovered airplane
wreckage were obvious penetrations from the inside of the structure outward, contained
substantial deformation adjacent to them, and generally had some amount of impact
damage associated with them consistent with low-velocity penetration by a structural
member. Other holes were actually tears or penetrations in the structure with minimal
associated missing material. On the basis of these observations, all but 25 of the 196 holes
were determined not to have characteristics of high-velocity penetration. The Safety
Boardís more detailed examinations of the remaining 25 holes revealed that 23 of the
holesóall associated with the WCSódid exhibit characteristics of low-velocity
penetration. These holes exhibited no evidence of splashback, and significant deformation
was observed in the surrounding material.

So this tells me that 2 holes "could" have been created from high impact velocity, bomb or warhead. The other holes were low velocity impact. So, CTs are basing part of their theory on two holes? It seems to me that a preponderance of the holes would be high velocity, if a missile was involved.

[smartcooky]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

<superfluous rubbish snipped>

You and others keep assuming that everyone on board a missile-capable ship would know if one of the ship’s missiles accidentally shot down an airliner. FYI, only about 10 percent of the personnel on a missile ship have anything to do with the actual firing of missiles. Only about 10 percent of the sailors on a missile ship are even cleared to enter the CIC (Combat Information Center), where missile firings are conducted. Moreover, even most of the people in the CIC would not necessarily know that one of their missiles hit an airliner.

Originally Posted by JayUtah

<polite snip>

It's absolutely certain that everyone onboard an SM-2 equipped vessel would know that they fired a missile that night off the Eastern seaboard as part of a live-fire exercise. Literally every single crew member.

Wow, have you actually ever been aboard a U.S. Navy warship during a live-fire exercise, or when any ordnance has been released? Insinuating that a warship could just fire a missile and no one but a few people would know this frankly absurd. And then later when the crew discovers that their meticulously planned and executed live-fire operation coincided with the suspicious loss of an airliner, not one of them asks himself, "Hey, was that us?" Not one of them conscientiously drops an anonymous tip to the Wall Street Journal. Not one of them makes a deathbed confession. Ships can't hide when they enter and leave port. There are ship-watchers just like there are train-spotters. We know what ships are at sea and which ones are in port.

No, this is just bad spy novel stuff.

Well I have been on board a RNZN Frigate during a live firing exercise of its GWS20 Sea Cat surface to air missiles, and what I can tell you is that it would be impossible to NOT know it was happening.

First: Before the exercise starts, there is a briefing for all personnel involved in the exercise - not just the CIC staff and crew, but the medical staff in case there is a mishap, and the armorers, and electrical and mechanical engineering crews in case there are technical issues.

Second: As the live fire exercise is about to be started, a loud klaxon or bell warning for "General Quarters" is sounded. There is literally nowhere on the ship where you could NOT know that the ship was at General Quarters. This is followed by an announcement for all crew members that live missile firing is about to commence. Again, there is no possibility that anyone on the ship, right down to the lowest ranked Ordinary Rating, would not know that, and why, the ship is on General Quarters.

Third: There is nowhere in the superstructure or upper decks of a missile ship that you could not hear the sound of a missile being launched. It is loud and very obvious. I am told that the RIM-66 missiles under discussion are much louder than a Sea Cat at launch.

.
.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by smartcooky

...it would be impossible to NOT know it was happening.

To be fair, Mike doesn't claim the launch was impromptu. Nor does he claim the vast majority of the crew wouldn't be aware that the ship was firing a missile. That would, of course, be absurd. He claims the vast majority of the crew wouldn't know what—if anything—the missile hit, especially if there was a horrible accident such as when USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner. Mike suggests that but for independent observation of that incident, Vincennes and the Navy could have kept it secret indefinitely—and that this is what's being done so far in the case of TWA 800.

I wonder how anyone who knows anything about serving on the crew of a ship could make such a claim. No, I'm not suggesting that those with knowledge of the hypothetical accident would violate orders or security protocol by telling uncleared people what happened. I'm suggesting, among other things, that no semblance of "business as usual" would prevail on board after such a ****-up, and that those who don't know what happened would certainly know that something had happened.

But on the other hand, an order to conceal the accidental downing of a civilian airliner within U.S. territorial borders is patently unlawful. We're supposed to believe that everyone in the chain of command with knowledge of this illegal order is just going to keep following it and risk criminal liability if discovered. If we consider the My Lai Massacre as an example of trying to do just what these conspiracy theorists propose, we note that the outcomes of those charged with a coverup was not entirely satisfactory. But by no means was the whole thing kept so secret that not a whiff of it emerged.

But here nearly 30 years has elapsed without the slightest hint from the alleged inside that anything illegal is being concealed. The concerted efforts of all these allegedly skilled "investigative journalists" has found not a single sailor or aviator who can testify to anything, not even a vague "something weird" happening on the ship. "You ask too much; it's all obviously classified," addresses disclosure through official channels. But here we get absolutely nothing—official or unofficial. My Lai wasn't uncovered by FOIA requests. It was uncovered by people who thought, "No, this is wrong and it's not what I signed up for." But somehow not a single crew member from the USS Benedict Arnold has such a spine.

Sailors aren't stupid. Well, some are. But even in the worst case where some initially oblivious sailor lands in port and hears that a civilian jet airliner crashed on the same day they were conducting a live-fire exercise, in the same waters, and that some investigators suspect it was shot down by an errant air-intercept missile, I don't think his first thought is going to be, "Hi, Honey, I'm home; what's for dinner?" At least one crew member will put two and two together and at least reach out to someone to say something.

It's valid to say, "But this doesn't prove anything." Arguable, but not unreasonable. The question is parsimony. The conspiracy theorists are asking us to weigh two theories: the conventional narrative and their narrative(s). The more massive the coverup they allege in the face of zero favorable evidence for it, the less parsimonious their theory.

[Hellbound]

Originally Posted by bknight

From NTSB final report.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...ts/aar0003.pdf
pages 112-114
From page 112


After a discussion of tests made by Boeing on impact hole of low velocity.(pgs112-113)



So this tells me that 2 holes "could" have been created from high impact velocity, bomb or warhead. The other holes were low velocity impact. So, CTs are basing part of their theory on two holes? It seems to me that a preponderance of the holes would be high velocity, if a missile was involved.

It’s interesting to note the details they mention, too. They find evidence of low velocity by the “significant deformation” around the holes. This is something g a lot of people don’t get: lower velocity explosives tend to push and tear, while high explosives tend to cut. That’s why cratering charges use lower-speed compounds, compared to say a charge intended to cut steel girders.

Also wanted to second Jay’s point about AA missiles. The “hot jet of high explosive gas” is how HEAT warheads work, and those generally require contact with the target and are designed to defeat thick armor. To my knowledge, no modern AA missile is contact fused; all that I’m familiar with are proximity-fused. They don’t make contact with the target, instead they get close, explode, and pepper it with fragments. I’m no expert, mind, but was assigned to an ADA battalion in the US Army for two years. So I do have some idea where from I speak


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