TWA800

TWA 800 Crash Update
By: The Valley Advocate, 02-03-1998

... in December, the National Transportation Safety Board released thousands of pages of data, charts, findings, figures and facts on the investigation of the July 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. ...to several seasoned military crash experts, these numbers [in the released TWA 800 data] didn't speak; they sang.

"I'm looking at the hard physical evidence," Commander William S. Donaldson, a retired Navy aviator and air crash investigator, told the Advocate. "The government is saying one thing, and the evidence is saying another. ... All the physical evidence fits perfectly with an explosion outside of the airplane."

 

Donaldson's credentials are as impeccable as his research is outstanding: About Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joining the missile-theory camp, the Valley Advocate article reports that: Donaldson is attracting allies in high places elsewhere within the Beltway as well. Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended a Jan. 8 press conference in Washington at which Donaldson announced his findings. Moorer said he found Donaldson's report very persuasive.

 

"Commander Donaldson is a very experienced aviator and very experienced in the process of investigating accidents. He's a highly credible source," Moorer told the Advocate. Moorer found Donaldson's discussion of eyewitness testimony especially compelling. "You can't just brush it off by saying there was no missile, be- cause so many people saw it from beginning to end. "We should seriously consider a formal congres- sional investigation," Moorer added, echoing his previous calls for independent and critical scrutiny of the crash in which, as Moorer told the Detroit News, "all evidence would point to a missile."

 

The Valley Advocate article also covers Commander Donaldson's extensive analysis of eyewitness accounts, which includes a carefully conducted triangulation of the accounts. Important to note is the fact that my own witness triangulation, which I first published last June 14th, based upon my own witness interviews and police reports concluded, just as Donaldson's independent triangulation later found, that the launch site for the most widely seen missile was about 3 miles off shore.

 

... Donaldson interviewed 96 people who saw the crash from the ground. All 96, scattered along 11 miles of shoreline, reported seeing a streak of light rise from the surface of the water and merge with the plane before the plane exploded. The FBI and NTSB have countered that the witnesses saw either burning jet fuel falling from the airplane or they saw the 747, decapitated by a fuel tank explosion, climbing several thousand feet before exploding a final time and falling into the ocean. Additionally, using Global Positioning System satellite technology, Donaldson triangulated the locations of the eyewitnesses and the trajectories of the streaks they reported. The data, he said, suggests that they all saw the same "streak of light" emerge from the water.

 

"These people are stretched out along 11 mines of coastline, and they're all pointing to the same place," Donaldson said. "Now, you get 11 miles of coast and dozens of people who have never met before all pointing to the same place. What's the chance of that being coincidence?" To Donaldson's surprise, federal investigators have not done such an analysis. "The NTSB literally did not consider the eyewitness testimony," he said. "They were operating under the premise that the FBI was already considering that." And the FBI, he added, has never addressed the eyewitness data as anything more than a series of anomalies. The bureau did not, so far as Donaldson has ever seen, even do his simple triangulation experiment. Instead, as he put it, "The FBI has thrown a cloak over that kind of eyewitness."

 

Referring to the CIA's video that proclaimed - flying in the face ofphysics - that after loosing its nose section TWA 800 shot upwards like a rocket leading witnesses to believe that they saw a rocket, the Valley Advocate article continues: The CIA's "contract cartoon" is the ultimate in irresponsibility, Donaldson said: It shows just how far some in the government's investigation will go to mislead the public. "It was entertaining but like most cartoons grossly abused universal laws of nature," he wrote to [FBI Director] Freeh. "In my view, the 'Alice in Wonderland' public positions the FBI has taken in this incident have now crossed over from being merely illogical or incompetent to the appearance of obstruction of justice," he added, saying that he had "seen better police work in Pink Panther movies." Donaldson said he finds too much suspicious behavior in the government's investigation to simply write its failure off to bureaucratic ineptitude. "I can't believe anybody can be this incompetent," he said. "I suspect it's a cover-up, yes."