Plane Sight Unseen: The Odyssey of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370

When I arrived at the office this morning, I was approached by many people asking about my opinions on the missing Malaysian plane. I am sure that many of the people asking were expecting me to come up with some sort of strange explanation for the plane vanishing along with the 227 passengers on board.

I tell them that perhaps I have a possible explanation; however it may not be as strange as one might think and if we rethink the entire scenario without giving into the easy “no brainer” notion of terrorists or the outrageous notion of time rifts, we may be able to figure out how a plane just vanishes without a trace.

I said, for the record, that whatever I said about this mysterious event is all speculation at this point and that any moment my speculations could be dismissed as nonsense.

At first in order to be a bit outrageous, I shared a story I remembered about an attack on a military plane in 1939.

Charles Berlitz, who wrote a book called “Dragon’s Triangle“, gives a terrifying account of a predatory attack from the air upon human beings. Berlitz claims that researcher Robert Gardner had documented the attack of an aircraft in 1939. A military transport plane took off from the San Diego Naval Air Station. As it moved over the Pacific Ocean it transmitted a frantic SOS call. The plane then fell deathly silent. The plane managed to get back to San Diego where it landed safely.

Ground personnel scrambled to get to the aircraft and eventually boarded it. They noticed that the exterior of the craft was badly damaged and torn open in places.

When they finally got inside they were horrified to discover that out of the 13 men on board 12 were dead. The co-pilot was alive but died before he had a chance to tell the story about what attacked the plane. All the bodies of the crew had massive, gaping wounds.

The pilot and copilot had emptied their guns at something that frightened them. The incident was classified until 1954.

Now that the vanishing of the Malaysian plane has made headlines, I have heard all sorts of crazy ideas as to what has happened and I find the most annoying explanation is terrorism.

ABC News in America is reporting “CIA Chief: Not Ruling Out Terrorism in Malaysia Airlines Tragedy“, meanwhile the Australian ABC says, “Interpol all but rules out terrorism in MH 370 disappearance“.

In fact, the American media seem to be grasping at the terror straws or yet another reason to declare an act of war and I shake my head wondering why this has to be the first assumption rather than looking in directions that are perhaps a bit outside the box.

I am not assuming aliens – but anyone can do better than the default explanation of terrorism.

When I first heard about the disappearance of MH Flight 370, there were two things that came to my mind. The first thing was that I remembered that the first real mysterious plane disaster I had to cover for Ground Zero was TWA Flight 800. The second thing I thought about was a phone call a received two nights before on my radio show when I talked about near-earth objects and possible hazardous space rocks coming into our atmosphere.

Tyler, a commercial Jet pilot from Illinois, called the program and said that while he has never heard of a meteor hitting and damaging an aircraft, he had at least two experiences in his seven year career where he has had close calls with fireballs coming within miles of his aircraft. He also pointed out that over the past few decades air travel has increased drastically, meaning there are now more planes in the skies at all times of the day.

There has also been an increase of bright and exploding meteors being sited all over the world.

Last week, we had at least two huge space rocks pass close to the earth and bringing with them smaller rocks that wind up falling to earth and burning up and exploding as they hurl towards our planet.

Very little coverage was given to reports of many exploding space rocks that rained down over Canada, California, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, and an 800-pound rock that exploded on impact when it hit the moon.

It is with the circumstantial evidence I wish to theorize that while the mainstream media, mostly American, is chasing a terrorist angle my angle is leaning towards that possibility that the Malaysian flight could have been hit by a space rock or space debris.

Now I know that statistically the odds seem astronomical, like 1 in 10 million, but it most certainly is a solid explanation that does not tread into outrageous explanations that deal in time warps or aliens.

In 1996, when I was reporting both for CNN and for Ground Zero, I was given the opportunity to speak with the NTSB regarding the TWA Flight 800 case. The spokesperson that I had a chance to speak with told me that the cause of the crash of the aircraft was actually an act of God.

When I probed deeper into the act of god hypothesis he had indicated to me that NASA had been involved with the investigation because of reports that a fireball had been sighted near the craft before it crashed, this fireball later evolved into a rocket or an RPG weapon that may have been fired by terrorists.

It was also discussed that the plane had gone down near the Montauk facility and that adjacent to the base was Brookhaven National Laboratory, which conducts experiments with ion colliders and particle accelerators. At the time the lab had acknowledged the presence of radioactive plutonium particles in the nearby Peconic River. They also were conducting experiments with the collider at the time and there were theories that something had opened up and swallowed the craft thrusting it into a different dimension.

Similar theories are swirling about Flight 370, however those theories are being labeled conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, after weighing all the mysteries of Flight 800 and the odds then of a space debris or meteor strike being highly improbable, it was proposed that a space rock the size of a thumbnail could enter the atmosphere at three times the speed of a bullet, and with an explosion and impact could pulverize a commercial jet aircraft. It could even destroy the black boxes.

It would happen so quickly that there would not be enough time to radio in to report the incident.

Now understand that Flight MH 370 has a few peculiarities that are not being reported that need to be.

The black boxes on the aircraft are not emitting a signal. Investigators are not able to find the boxes at all. An absence of signal means an absence of black box. They are designed to withstand powerful explosions. However could it withstand a pulverizing hit from space debris or even a near earth object that is white hot and traveling thousands of miles per hour?

If anyone has seen the movie ‘Gravity’ then they know how very small rocks are enough to riddle a space station like a house of matches. The black boxes have either vanished into thin air, are malfunctioning or have been obliterated. Most airplane parts are buoyant and should be seen floating in the water so far there have been no buoyant parts which once again points to possible pulverizing of the aircraft at this time.

If Flight 370 was brought down by a terrorist explosion, where is the debris? So far there is no debris floating on the ocean, not even seat cushions. The fact that debris has not yet been spotted only ads to the mystery of how Flight 370 seems to have vanished or was pulverized by something that no one expected.

If a missile was fired at it, there would be missile and plane debris. Also, the flash and the missile would produce large radar signals that can be tracked. The plane did not divert its flight plan nor did radar pick up any missile signatures. The plane literally vanished. If it were hijacked, that too would have been seen on radar as the plane would not have vanished.

I distinctly remember that in 1988, Pan Am 103 was brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland. While the official story is that Libyan terrorists brought down the plane, there was speculation in the beginning that a Russian satellite came down over Britain and that a piece of it ruptured he fuselage of the doomed flight. This was reported by John Hall that claimed that he saw fireballs come down over Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. He said that he saw what appeared to be UFOs flying in formation. He later realized that it was not a UFO but space debris and worried that it would hit any planes in the area.

In August of 2013, it was reported by aircraft pilots that an asteroid exploded over the Cayman Islands and that the falling space rocks came close to hitting aircraft. Later it was reported that the debris reported did not belong to an asteroid, but to a spent Russian rocket. Pilots and witnesses in Honduras say that there was debris and fire balls raining down for 10 seconds and it did pose a threat to aircraft.

Historically and statistically, when I did the report on Flight 800 and the meteor possibility, the NTSB told me the chances of a direct hit by a meteor was 1 in 10 million. Now I am thinking that there seems to be a looming possibility that the odds have changed a bit with the increasing fireball sightings, sweeper effects and space debris that may re enter from the detritusphere. Plus, we need to also take into account the increase in planes in the air because of the proliferation of more planes and commercial air travel.

If you are to look at a space map, it is important to track space debris especially with the space stations above us, and the shuttle also needed to be extra aware of pieces of metal the size of a small screw. Moving through space it could literally cut the shuttle up like paper mache.

In August 2013, the Cayman Compass reported in their article, ‘Aircraft Face Hazard From Space Debris’:

“Estimates are that 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 2 inches orbit the earth, as well as 300,000 pieces smaller than 0.4 inches, including dust from rocket motors, surface-degradation products such as paint flakes and even coolant released by nuclear-powered satellites. The impacts of these particles are similar to sandblasting.

While most debris incinerates in the atmosphere, larger objects can reach the ground. The original Skylab station entered the earth’s atmosphere in 1979, trailing debris across the Indian Ocean and Southern Australia; a Navstar rocket crashed in Saudi Arabia in 2001 after a “catastrophic orbital decay”, while the Columbia Space Shuttle in 2003 shed debris across a swathe of the southern US, ending in Florida.

A US Federal Aviation Administration study after the shuttle accident determined the probability of an impact between Columbia debris and commercial aircraft in the vicinity was at least one in a thousand, and the chance of an impact with a general aviation aircraft was at least one in a hundred.

In March 2007, the pilot of a LAN Chile flight to New Zealand, carrying 270 passengers, notified Auckland air traffic controllers after seeing flaming wreckage from a Russian satellite five miles from his plane. He reported hearing the sonic boom as it passed.

Sightings of fireballs, space debris and UFO’s by pilots are becoming very common.
With more than 1,000 operating satellites and more than 13,000 objects in low earth orbit, the problem appears to be growing. More than 38 large debris objects have re-entered the atmosphere since the 
beginning of 2012.

Washington’s Federal Aviation Administration, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation and the US Department of Defence have developed aircraft vulnerability models, concluding that a fragment as small as 300 grams would prove “catastrophic” to aircraft, particularly if penetrating the fuselage or fuel tank.”

Recently many aircraft have been diverted away from volcanic activity because of the high probability of razor sharp volcanic debris bringing down a craft or compromising its construction.

Bernard Lovell, an English radio astronomer and physicist, commented before he died in 2012 that the increase of fireballs and space debris would be responsible for World War III. I can only conclude that what he meant was that if any air disaster were to occur where a plane is inexplicably blown from the air or disappears, the first thought would be that it was hit by an aggressive enemy or terrorist triggering an act of war.

The way we are quick to find a terrorist behind anything makes it more probable that the end conclusion could be a devastating one for the world.